5 Points on the Trump Admin’s Threatened—And Real—Government Shutdown Layoffs

In an effort to try and make good on their threats and to put more pressure on congressional Democrats, Trump administration departments and agencies laid off around 4,000 federal employees at the end of last week. President Donald Trump himself has threatened more layoffs to come. The Office of Management and Budget called it a “substantial” reduction of the federal workforce.

“The RIFs have begun,” OMB Director Russ Vought wrote in a social media post on Friday, immediately prompting a spate of articles speculating about how far the administration would go. 

It now appears that, so far, the actual number of people laid off is minuscule compared to the Department of Government Efficiency-initiated bloodbath that unfolded earlier this year. Nonetheless, the layoffs do appear to target programs that help low-income and marginalized people, perhaps making good on Trump’s threat to go after functions of the federal government he sees as “Democratic.”

“So we’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we wanted to close up or that we never wanted to happen,” Trump said Tuesday. “The Democrats are getting killed, and we’re going to have a list of them on Friday.”

Think of it as a mini DOGEing, baselessly blamed on Dems

Vought and the Department of Government Efficiency have already been cutting jobs and programs across the federal government for months — often flouting the law as they do so.

This time, the newly laid off federal workers are pawns in the Trump White House’s strategy to put pressure on Senate Democrats to vote for a Republican-written bill to fund the government, and to abandon their demands around health care costs and impoundments.

In August, Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the Trump administration expected to reduce the federal workforce by 300,000 people this year. “That’s roughly like 2.4 million to start and ending roughly about 2.1 million,” Kupor told The New York Times.

A political strategy, an attempt to make Dems squirm

Trump officials, in their way, haven’t been particularly shy about letting everyone know that the layoffs — as opposed to the normal furloughing of federal workers that comes along with shutdowns — are a choice.

“OMB is making every preparation to batten down the hatches and ride out the Democrats’ intransigence,” Vought’s OMB wrote on social media on Tuesday. “Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs, and wait.”

Congressional Democrats from Virginia and Maryland — where many federal workers reside — held a press conference outside the OMB the same day denouncing the reductions in force, or RIFs.

“In previous government shutdowns federal workers got furloughed. They did not get fired. Firing and threatening to fire federal employees is part of the Trump administration’s campaign to inflict trauma on our federal workforce,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said during the Tuesday press conference. “‘Trauma’ is not my word, it is the word used by OMB Director Russ Vought about what he wanted to do.” 

“Shame, shame, shame on Russ Vought and Donald Trump,” Van Hollen added. “And when they tell you — when they tell you that the shutdown is making them fire these federal employees, do not believe it for a moment … It is a big, fat lie. It is also illegal. And we will see them in court.”

The administration has been threatening these cuts for weeks

Ahead of the shutdown, the White House, OMB and Vought started openly threatening congressional Democrats that if the government shut down, they would conduct mass layoffs of federal workers, instructing federal agencies to prepare reduction-in-force plans for their respective agencies.

That, of course, was a significant break from how shutdowns have been handled in the past — where most furloughs were temporary and workers were back in their positions when the shutdown ended.

Meanwhile, since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, Trump has been touting possible mass cuts as an “unprecedented opportunity” to eliminate parts of the government and saying that they will cut “Democrat Agencies” on either a “temporary or permanent” basis.

The cuts are to programs that Trump thinks are “Democrat”-coded

In a late Friday court filing, OMB declared that an estimated 4,200 employees across at least seven agencies began receiving RIF notices on Oct. 10. 

Those RIFs included about 1,100 to 1,200 federal workers from the Department of Health and Human Services, 1,446 from the Department of Treasury, 466 from the Department of Education, 422 from Department of Housing & Urban Development, 315 from the Department of Commerce, 187 from the Department of Energy, 176 from the Department of Homeland Security and about 20 to 30 from the Environmental Protection Agency.

More than 1,000 staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is under the HHS, also received layoff notices. But shortly after the layoff notices became public, officials reversed more than half of those, rescinding the notices they sent out earlier. Among those targeted for dismissal and then reinstated were the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, according to the Associated Press.

Although the number of layoffs is small considering the federal government employs more than two million people — not counting military personnel — the RIFs are significant in that they decimate entire programs. Most of the targeted programs are somehow disfavored by Republicans; in many cases they help those who can’t advocate for themselves.

At HUD, those who received RIFs were tasked with investigating claims of discrimination and abuse, conducting inspections on the quality and safety of federally supported housing as well as distributing billions of dollars to fund affordable housing.

At the Department of Education, the RIFs hit offices that give out K-12 grants, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Nearly all workers in the Office of Special Education Programs were laid off.

Is this even legal?

Though the White House, OMB and congressional Republicans have sought to cast the layoffs as a product of the government shutdown — and, thus, Democrats’ fault, in their telling —  the layoffs are both not legally related to the shutdown and not a brand new development. The administration has been cutting jobs and programs across the federal government since Trump took office in January. This is best seen as a continuation of that effort, Democratic senators stressed.

“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers — they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) said in a Friday statement in response to the RIFs. “A shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers to cause more chaos or permanently weaken more basic services for the American people, and the simple fact is this administration has been recklessly firing — and rehiring — essential workers all year. This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks.”

The legality of this latest round of layoffs is still in question. Even before the RIF notices went out on Friday, unions representing federal employees — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) — have already filed a suit to halt the layoffs, claiming that RIFs during a shutdown is unlawful and violates the Anti-Deficiency Act. 

Ultimately, these questions may be decided by the Supreme Court, which has shown an incredible degree of deference to the executive branch this year.