Soon after Kathleen Matthews jumped into a crowded Democratic congressional primary in Maryland in 2016, she received an unsolicited check. It was from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s political group, weighing in early on Matthews’ behalf.

Gillibrand’s support for hundreds of female candidates around the country has been a hallmark of her political rise. Now, more than any candidate for president ever has, she’s putting gender at the heart of her pitch to voters — a strategy that could bolster her cause with a sizable slice of the Democratic base and help her stand out in a sprawling primary. But she begins the campaign behind several other prominent women — and men — seeking the same bloc of support, and she will face strong pressure to construct a winning coalition including all stripes of voters.

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“Gillibrand is running more clearly than any other candidate to the women’s base,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “The risk of that strategy is that it has to be more than identity politics to win the presidency. Developing that bloc will be key for her to be competitive in the primary, but she’ll have to also go beyond that before long.”

It’s a strategy in line with the moment and Gillibrand’s history: Female voters and a record number of female candidates just powered the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018, fueled by intense opposition to President Donald Trump. But she’s already experienced first-hand a polarizing reaction to her advocacy for women in the Senate, garnering passionate praise and long-lasting criticism when she called for former Sen. Al Franken’s (D-Minn.) resignation in 2017, following allegations of sexual misconduct, and said that former President Bill Clinton should have resigned after having an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Matthews, who lost her 2016 primary and served as chairwoman of the Maryland Democratic Party in 2018, said Gillibrand’s activism has given her a powerful starting point.

“Most elected officials are reluctant to support candidates in a contested primary, but Kirsten is not afraid to stick her neck out,” Matthews said. “She’s built a network of women across the country who’ve run for office — winners and losers — who are inspired by her commitment and loyal to her.”

Gillibrand touted positions broadly popular in the Democratic Party in her announcement on CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Tuesday night, calling health care a right, not a privilege, and pledging to take on “the corruption and greed in Washington” and “the special interests that write legislation in the dead of night.”

But her opening pitch was biographical: “I’m going to run for president of the United States because as a young mom, I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own,” Gillibrand said.

“Gillibrand has made a career out of advocating for women — sexual assault in the military, equal pay, calling for Franken to resign — so it’s all authentic to her, and I think that will resonate with voters,” said Patti Solis Doyle, a Democratic strategist who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “2018 showed us that women are pissed off and they’re fired up, and that’s a powerful base that Gillibrand can tap into.”

Gillibrand starts at the back of the pack in early polls, and she will face competition from other candidates for support among Democratic women. “There are a lot of candidates who can make a credible pitch” to female voters, said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who served as the executive director of the New York State Democratic Party. “I think her strength will be among suburban, white women.”

Indeed, three other high-profile female senators — Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, California Sen. Kamala Harris and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar — could feature in the 2020 Democratic primaries, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced a campaign last weekend. They can all argue that a woman must be on the Democratic ticket.

And women, like any other big voting group, are “not a monolith,” said former Democratic Rep. Donna Edwards. “All of these potential female presidential candidates are going to have to figure out how to appeal to women with their message.”

Edwards, however, noted that she’s another example of Gillibrand’s commitment to women in politics at the expense of the Democratic establishment. Gillibrand was the only sitting senator to endorse Edwards when she ran for Senate in Maryland in 2016, ultimately losing a primary to now-Sen. Chris Van Hollen. Gillibrand has similarly weighed into other crowded primaries to boost women candidates through her leadership PAC, Off the Sidelines.

It wasn’t the first time Gillibrand stuck her neck out in the Senate. Gillibrand fought to reform how the Pentagon and universities handle sexual assault, and she became the first senator to call for Franken’s resignation — a move that alienated some Democrats, particularly in the donor community. Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Democratic fundraiser and co-founder of Esprit and North Face clothing brands, told POLITICO that the episode “stained [Gillibrand’s] reputation as a fair player.”

“The Franken thing is going to be a real challenge for Gillibrand,” said Edwards, who hasn’t decided who she will support in the 2020 primary. “It’s not a hurdle she can’t jump over, but she’s going to have to explain it.”

Gillibrand has pushed back against critics, writing on Twitter: “Silencing women for the powerful, or for your friends, or for convenience, is neither acceptable nor just.”

So far, it hasn’t hurt Gillibrand’s fundraising or electoral performance in New York. Gillibrand was one of only three Democratic senators who outperformed the aggregate Democratic House vote in their state in 2018, and she raised more than $27 million during the last election cycle. Much of that campaign cash went toward finding and activating younger supporters online, making Gillibrand less reliant than before on major donors.

Gillibrand’s own political start also serves as a powerful rebuke to Trump, said Democratic operatives. In 2006, Gillibrand defeated three-term GOP Rep. John Sweeney, who was also accused of domestic abuse in a police report. Sweeney’s ex-wife later told the Albany Times-Union that she was “coerced” into making a statement rebutting the report.

“She defeated a guy who was a domestic abuser in a race that nobody thought that she could win,” said Doug Forand, a New York-based Democratic consultant. “That narrative speaks well for someone who wants to take on another alleged abuser of women.”

Gillibrand’s path through the primaries could follow the track many 2018 candidates she supported to took Congress last fall — telling compelling personal stories and largely ignoring Trump on the campaign trail.

“My takeaway from the campaign trail is that there’s a whole lot of women and men who want to see women get elected,” said Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), a first-time candidate in 2018 who received an endorsement from Off the Sidelines. “That momentum for women, overall, is going to continue because this is the new normal.”

Thousands of aircraft safety inspectors and hundreds of food, drug and medical inspectors are heading back to work without pay — and so will tens of thousands of Internal Revenue Service employees if the government shutdown is still in place when tax season begins Jan. 28.

In addition, the Interior Department is bringing back dozens of furloughed employees to work on selling oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico — key to President Donald Trump’s priority of promoting U.S. fossil fuel production.

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Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency has recalled dozens of employees, according to its revised shutdown plan, days after Senate Democrats questioned how the shuttered EPA could justify making workers prepare acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler for his confirmation hearing Wednesday. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development said it is bringing back an undefined number of “additional intermittent employees as needed.”

The recalls come as federal agencies cope with the 25-day-long impasse by expanding the types of duties they consider essential, including tasks that have fueled public relations nightmares for agencies in charge of health and safety.

Details on some recalls were hard to come by Tuesday — because agencies had furloughed most of their spokespeople. But these are among the agencies adding to their rosters of on-duty workers even as the shutdown shows no signs of ending:

Federal Aviation Administration

More than 3,600 additional FAA employees are back at work compared with when the shutdown started in December, according to an updated Department of Transportation document published Tuesday. The move comes after union leaders complained that furloughs of aviation inspectors and technicians had left the airlines “self-regulating,” a trend they said would eventually compromise public safety.

“We are recalling inspectors and engineers to perform duties to ensure continuous operational safety of the entire national airspace,” an FAA spokesperson said Tuesday. “We proactively conduct risk assessment, and we have determined that after three weeks it is appropriate to recall inspectors and engineers.”

Michael Gonzales, a vice president with the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said around 1,500 inspectors have been brought back to work effective Tuesday.

DOT has also recalled more than 100 workers at the U.S. Maritime Administration and made slight adjustments to the counts of furloughed employees at other subagencies, according to the updated document.

Internal Revenue Service

The IRS said Tuesday that it expects to have 46,052 employees on the job — more than half its workforce — if the shutdown stretches into tax-filing season in late January. That would be a huge jump from its initial shutdown plan, which kept only 9,946 workers on the job.

The IRS’s revised shutdown plan said it will continue to process taxpayer refunds because that money is drawn from a “permanent, indefinite refund appropriation” it can tap despite the shutdown. The White House budget office announced last week that the IRS would issue tax refunds despite the shutdown, in a reversal of previous policy.

But many other functions will be shuttered or curtailed, the IRS warned. It will not conduct audits, and collection activities will be generally limited to those that are automated. The agency said it will have some people who can answer phone calls with questions, though the public should be prepared for longer wait times.

People who send snail mail to the agency should expect lengthy delays, the IRS said. The agency’s walk-in “taxpayer assistance centers” will be closed.

“While the government is closed, people with appointments related to examinations (audits), collection, appeals or taxpayer advocate cases should assume their meetings are cancelled,” the agency said.

Food and Drug Administration

The FDA, which has furloughed about 40 percent of its staff, said Tuesday that it’s bringing 400 more people back to work. The “vast majority are inspectors and others are to support inspectors,” agency Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Twitter, which was serving as a quasi-official medium for many of the agency’s shutdown announcements.

“About 150 of 400 are focused on food inspections, rest are focused on other aspects of mission including medical devices (about 100 staff), drugs (about 70 staff) and biologics (90 staff),” Gottlieb added.

Under the agency’s initial shutdown plan, most routine food safety inspections were halted, while unpaid workers were still carrying out tasks such as active investigations of foodborne illness outbreaks.

Gottlieb had said last week that FDA planned to restart food safety inspections at facilities that handle riskier products like fresh-cut produce and seafood. Even when fully funded, however, FDA is not inspecting such facilities very frequently.

Interior Department

Interior’s new plan said it would designate dozens of employees as exempted from the furlough if the lapse in appropriations continued past Tuesday. The recalled employees include those working on offshore oil and gas lease sales, including one planned for March.

“Failure to hold these sales would have a negative impact to the Treasury and negatively impact investment in the U.S. Offshore Gulf of Mexico,” the bureau said. Its original contingency plan released in December did not include recalls of furloughed employees to help prepare the lease sale documents.

Interior has already said its Bureau of Land Management would continue processing onshore drilling applications during the shutdown.

The department’s plans to continue with onshore oil permitting had already drawn fire from Democrats who said the administration is overly focused on drilling over other types of government services, such as health care for American Indian tribes.

“Of all the things that have hit the public lands, of all the things that have hit Indian country because of the shutdown, that whole permitting process continues,” House Natural Resources Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told POLITICO.

Environmental Protection Agency

An updated version of EPA’s shutdown plan shows it now considers 28 employees “necessary to the discharge of the President’s constitutional duties and powers,” up from 12 in the plan’s December iteration. The agency also increased the number of people considered “necessary to perform activities necessarily implied by law” from zero to 12.

EPA also increased the number of workers “necessary to protect life and property” from 794 to 845. That category includes employees such as security guards, emergency response personnel and scientists keeping crucial experiments running.

The total number of EPA workers still on the job, including 53 embedded Public Health Service officers, is now 944, or 6.8 percent of its total workforce.

The agency previously said it had “excepted a limited number of employees” who are authorized to help Wheeler prepare for his confirmation hearing, which the Senate is holding Wednesday despite being unable to find a way to reopen the government. Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee cried foul last week about that use of agency resources.

“It is difficult to understand how preparing you for next week’s confirmation hearing credibly falls within any of the categories listed in EPA’s Contingency plan, particularly the category of employee that is ‘necessary to protect life and property,’” Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland wrote in a letter to Wheeler.

The agency defended its actions.

“Participation in and preparation for a confirmation hearing that has been scheduled by Congress is clearly excepted under Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, opinions,” EPA General Counsel Matt Leopold said in a statement last week. “Additionally, the Constitutional appointment power allows for EPA to take the steps necessary to ensure the Acting Administrator is prepared for his hearing.”

Bernie Becker, Eric Wolff, Katy O’Donnell, Helen Bottemiller Evich and Sarah Karlin-Smith contributed to this report.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand launched a presidential exploratory committee Tuesday night, joining the crowded Democratic hunt to win the White House in 2020.

The New York Democrat, a longtime advocate for women in politics and a leader in the #MeToo movement supporting survivors of sexual assault, announced her decision to run for president on CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” saying she will “fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own.”

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Gillibrand’s first week in the campaign will include a debut visit to Iowa, the first caucus state. On Friday, Gillibrand will hold an event in Sioux City, followed by stops in Ames, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids throughout the weekend.

Gillibrand, 52, has joined an expansive field that could see dozens of Democratic presidential hopefuls — including several other high-profile women — aiming to defeat President Donald Trump. Elizabeth Warren, Gillibrand’s Senate colleague, launched an exploratory committee at the end of 2018, while former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro became the latest Democrat to join the fray on Saturday, when he announced his campaign in San Antonio.

Last week, Gillibrand’s tight-knit political operation expanded to include new senior staff hires and designated her campaign manager, Jess Fassler, the senator’s longtime chief of staff. The campaign also signed a lease for a campaign headquarters in Troy, N.Y., a suburb of Albany where Gillibrand’s family lives. The exploratory committee launch gives Gillibrand the opportunity to hire more staff and begin fundraising expressly for a 2020 run.

Gillibrand just won reelection to the Senate in 2018, and she finished that campaign with $10.5 million in her federal campaign account — a hefty nest egg to kick-start a presidential run, trailing only Warren among the half-dozen senators in who could seek Democratic nomination. Gillibrand’s campaign spent the last two years building an online army capable of financing a presidential run, spending heavily with a digital fundraising firm in 2017 and 2018 and gathering donations from hundreds of thousands of donors nationwide as her profile rose in opposition to Trump.

No senator voted against as many Cabinet nominees as Gillibrand in the early months of the Trump administration, winning her praise from the rising “resistance” movement opposing the president. After she called for Trump’s resignation in December 2017, Trump targeted her with a sexually suggestive tweet, saying that Gillibrand “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them).”

Trump’s post drew swift backlash. Gillibrand tweeted back: “You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak out about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office.”

On Colbert’s show, Gillibrand said she would restore “the integrity and the compassion of this country” in office and called for health care to be treated as “a right, and not a privilege.” She said better public schools and job training is essential for anyone to “earn their way into the middle class.”

“But you are never going to accomplish any of these things if you are not going to take on the systems of power that make all of that impossible,” Gillibrand said. “It’s taking on institutional racism, it’s taking on the corruption and greed in Washington, [it’s] taking on the special interests that write legislation in the dead of night.”

Gillibrand, who was appointed to the Senate in 2009 to replace former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and has since won two full terms, has also been the face of the #MeToo movement in Congress. One of her signature legislative efforts sought to reform how the military handles cases of sexual harassment and assault, though it fell short after failing to break a Senate filibuster in March 2014. Gillibrand has also shared stories of her own experiences with harassment — recounting in her memoir that a fellow senator once squeezed her waist and told her, “I like my girls chubby.”

Significantly, Gillibrand also stepped forward to call out bad behavior among prominent members of her own party.

In 2017, Gillibrand was the first Democratic senator to call for the resignation of her former colleague Al Franken (D-Minn.), after multiple women accused him of harassment and misconduct. Gillibrand also told The New York Times it would have been “appropriate” for former President Bill Clinton to resign following revelations of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Gillibrand’s comments won her favor from some, but also drew criticism from high-profile Democrats who said they would no longer financially support the New York Democrat.

Gillibrand pushed back, writing on Twitter that “silencing women for the powerful, or for your friends, or for convenience, is neither acceptable nor just.” She told MSNBC that the “tolerance that we had 25 years ago, what was allowed 25 years ago, will not be tolerated today, is not allowed today.”

“She had the guts to take on the military. She had the guts to take on her own party,” said John Zogby, a New York-based pollster who worked for one of Gillibrand’s primary opponents in 2006. “She’s in some hot water with the establishment over it, but I can’t think of a better time in history to be at odds with the establishment. I think it helps her.”

Gillibrand’s commitment to the feminist cause — which included founding a leadership PAC called “Off The Sidelines” to support other women running for office — may be a boon for her in a crowded primary with few breakaway issues.

“It’s a natural strategy for Gillibrand to build off of the momentum of 2018, and she has a long history of advocating for women that she can authentically point to,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “But a lot of candidates will try to do this.”

But as Gillibrand competes with other candidates to appeal to female voters, she’ll also have to defend her own political transformation — from a conservative Blue Dog Democrat in the House to the Senate’s most-vocal anti-Trump member.

In 2006, Gillibrand, then a corporate attorney and first-time political candidate, defeated GOP Rep. John Sweeney in a Democratic wave to represent a predominantly white, working-class district that stretched from Albany to the Adirondacks in upstate New York. At the time, Gillibrand touted an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association and opposed amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

But after her appointment to the Senate in 2009, she drifted leftward on gun control and immigration. Gillibrand has since said she was “embarrassed” by her former positions on gun control. By 2018, she called for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, a proposal popular with progressive activists.

“I came from a district that was 98 percent white,” Gillibrand told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview last year. “I just didn’t take the time to understand why these issues mattered because it wasn’t right in front of me, and that was my fault.”

The president’s pick to replace Jeff Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department has known and admired the president’s bête noir, Robert Mueller, for 30 years — and somehow President Donald Trump seems fine with that.

The relationship, which Barr described in public at his Tuesday Senate confirmation hearing, is both a source of reassurance to Democrats worried about Barr’s attitude toward Mueller’s probe, as well as a reminder of the incestuously small size of Washington’s legal and law enforcement worlds.

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Why it isn’t more troubling to president Trump, whom Barr said is aware of the relationship, remains a mystery.

Barr and Mueller first crossed paths at the Justice Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. But the relationship goes farther: Their wives are close friends who attend bible study together, and Mueller attended the weddings for two of Barr’s daughters.

“They have a high level of respect for each other,” said Paul McNulty, a former senior DOJ official who led the department’s policy and communications shop while Barr was attorney general and Mueller served as the head of its criminal division. “They have maintained a good friendship ever since.”

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Barr praised Mueller’s “distinguished record of public service” and said that his probe is proper and should be allowed to conclude without interference. That’s a sharp contrast from the acting attorney general Barr would replace, Matthew Whitaker, who has called Mueller’s appointment “ridiculous and “a little fishy,” among other things.

Barr said that Trump knows about his friendship with Mueller, explaining on Tuesday that the topic came up during a June 2017 meeting he had with Trump at the White House to discuss the possibility that he might serve as Trump’s personal lawyer in the Russia investigation.

Trump directly asked Barr how well he knew Mueller, and Barr said he replied that the two families “were good friends and would be good friends when this was all over and so forth, and he was interested in that.”

Barr said Trump also asked him what he thought about the special counsel’s “integrity and so forth and so on.”

“I said Bob is a straight shooter and should be dealt with as such,” Barr said he replied, adding that he told the president he also wasn’t interested in working as his personal attorney and “never heard from him again” until the opening for the attorney general post came up again late last year.

The Barr-Mueller connection is all the more striking given Trump’s repeated complaints about the special counsel’s relationship with former FBI Director James Comey. Conservatives have long cited the bond between Mueller and Comey — whose firing by Trump prompted the special counsel’s appointment — as evidence that Mueller is hopelessly conflicted. Trump has piled on in Twitter missives and media interviews, calling the two men “best friends” working in tandem to tar his presidency.

“I could give you 100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other,” the president told The Daily Caller last September.

Mueller and Comey are former Justice Department colleagues, but sources close to both men, and Comey himself, have insisted the president has exaggerated their bonds.

“I admire the heck out of the man, but I don’t know his phone number, I’ve never been to his house, I don’t know his children’s names,” Comey told Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) last month during a joint House hearing with the former FBI director. “I think I had a meal once alone with him in a restaurant. … We’re not friends in any social sense,” Comey added.

For their part, Trump and Barr do not appear to have very deep ties. While Barr donated $2,700 to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he initially gave $55,000 to a political action committee supporting Jeb Bush’s primary effort.

Barr told senators he “did not pursue this position” of attorney general under Trump, and the 68-year old lawyer initially resisted the Republican president’s overtures to again serve as attorney general.

Trump has only mentioned Barr once on Twitter, on the day he announced the nomination. Nor did he hold a White House event to announce Barr’s nomination.

If confirmed, Barr will supervise Mueller’s now 20-month old probe into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, from the special counsel’s budget to subpoenas and criminal indictments.

It won’t be the first time Barr has been Mueller’s boss.

During the George W. Bush administration, the two men often worked directly together on sensitive issues.

At the department’s 1991 press conference rolling out its annual budget request, for example, then-deputy attorney general Barr was joined by Mueller, then the assistant attorney general leading the criminal division, to answer reporters’ questions about the Bush administration’s spending plans to combat white collar crime, combat defense procurement fraud and child pornography.

Later that year, during Barr’s confirmation hearing to serve as Bush’s attorney general, Barr noted that he was overseeing Mueller in a wide-ranging federal investigation into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a politically connected Luxembourg-based bank that would later plead guilty to running a wide-scale money laundering scheme.

They also appeared together at a press conference announcing the indictment of two Libyan officials who were charged with bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

And just ahead of the 1992 presidential election, Barr and Mueller pushed back against House Democratic demands seeking the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s dealings with Iraq before the Gulf War. “No amount of hysterical rhetoric or political cheap shots can substitute for evidence that warrants triggering the statute,” Mueller told the congressional panel during a highly-charged hearing, according to a CNN report from the time.

Former Bush DOJ official George Terwilliger III, who sat behind Barr at Tuesday’s Senate confirmation session, told POLITICO in an email that the two men still share a “great mutual professional respect.

”In the sense that anytime you work extensively with professional colleagues, especially on matters of some moment, who become friends when there is such mutual respect, I would describe them as friends,” he said.

Michael Zeldin, a former Mueller aide at DOJ, said the Mueller-Barr relationship would help give the two men confidence in each other’s judgment and analysis.

But he doubted that either would make decisions based on those ties. “You just don’t see that at this level of the Justice Department,” he said.

During Barr’s hearing, senators from both parties pressed the attorney general nominee on whether he’d give Mueller the funding he needs to finish his investigation and see to it that a final recounting of the special counsel’s work gets made public. On both fronts, Barr said yes. He also said he would reject any presidential order that he fire Mueller.

Senators on the judiciary panel also pressed Barr for more details about the famously tight-lipped Mueller. Would Barr describe the special counsel as a fair-minded person, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham asked?

“Absolutely,” Barr replied.

Graham followed up by asking Barr if he expected Mueller to be fair to Trump and the country? “Yes,” said the nominee.

Invoking one of Trump’s favorite epithets about the Russia probe, the South Carolina senator asked Barr whether he believes Mueller “would be involved in a witch hunt against anybody.”

“I don’t believe Mr. Mueller would be involved in a witch hunt,” he replied.