Here’s an update on Russ Vought’s “mass layoffs,” following through on the threats he and Trump made in advance of the shutdown. From what I can tell, this seems to be a version of what we described yesterday: a comparatively small number of layoffs aimed mainly at allowing the White House to say it followed through on its threat (call it counter-TACO praxis) and tightly focused on a few agencies or departments President Trump is personally aggrieved at. The most concrete number I’ve seen refers to 4,200 employees across seven departments and agencies. That’s a big deal for the people losing their jobs. It’s also a very small number compared to what we saw in the spring. The New York Post suggests (famous last words, I know) that as many as a third of those layoffs may come from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been a focus of Trump’s anger since 2021 when its then-director Chris Krebs disputed Trump’s claims of cyber-election hacking in the 2020 election. I’ve gotten more concrete reports that at least a quarter of these firings are at the CDC alone, focused on core public health work. STAT News reports that almost the entire staff of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report have been fired. (That is essentially the publication that the CDC uses to communicate the latest information on disease circulation in the country.) Other targeted offices seem tied to clean energy projects and other bêtes noir. As one source put it, these are not ‘reductions in force’. They are ideological firings targeting specific offices and parts of the government Trump has long been mad at.
Meanwhile, the “RIF” notices that are going out suggest that OMB (which actually is statutorily barred from doing RIFs) is reserving the right to change these numbers before they kick in in early December. I’ve seen some people saying that essentially post-dating these layoffs two months into the future shows the White House playing for time. They may be counting on that. But I think 60 days is actually legally required under these RIFs.
My overall read remains that the driver of this announcement and these numbers (which are still vague and only indirectly confirmed) was the need to check the box of “we did so follow through.”
