WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House budget office said Friday that mass firings of federal workers have started in an attempt to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers as the government shutdown continues.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on the social media site X that the “RIFs have begun,” referring to reduction-in-force plans aimed at reducing the size of the federal government.
A spokesperson for the budget office, said the reductions are “substantial” but did not offer more immediate details.
The Education Department is among the agencies hit by new layoffs, a department spokesperson said Friday without providing more details. The department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office in January, but its workforce was nearly halved amid mass layoffs in the Republican administration’s first months. At the start of the shutdown, it had about 2,500 employees.
Federal health workers were also being fired Friday, though a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman did not say how many or which agencies were being hit hardest.
The White House previewed that it would pursue the aggressive layoff tactic shortly before the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, telling all federal agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans to the budget office for its review. It said reduction-in-force could apply for federal programs whose funding would lapse in a government shutdown, are otherwise not funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”
This goes far beyond what usually happens in a government shutdown, which is that federal workers are furloughed but restored to their jobs once the shutdown ends.
Democrats have tried to call the administration’s bluff, arguing the firings could be illegal, and seemed bolstered by the fact that the White House had yet to carry out the firings.
But Trump had said earlier this week that he would soon have more information about how many federal jobs would be eliminated.
“I’ll be able to tell you that in four or five days if this keeps going on,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office as he met with Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister. “If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back.”
A labor union for federal employees asked a federal judge Friday for a restraining order to halt the firings, calling the action an abuse of power designed to punish workers and pressure Congress.
“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, in a statement.
Meanwhile, the halls of the Capitol were quiet on Friday, then 10th day of the shutdown, with both the House and the Senate out of Washington and both sides digging in for a protracted shutdown fight. Senate Republicans have tried repeatedly to cajole Democratic holdouts to vote for a stopgap bill to reopen the government, but Democrats have refused as they hold out for a firm commitment to extend health care benefits.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have suggested that Vought’s threats of mass layoffs have been unhelpful to bipartisan talks on the funding standoff.
The top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said in a statement that the “shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers” to layoff workers.
“This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks,” she added.
Local Democrats have also argued that mass firing federal workers during a government shutdown would be illegal. Rep. James Walkinshaw was elected on Sept. 9 to represent Virginia’s 11th Congressional District, which encompasses much of Fairfax County and is home to an estimated 52,043 federal civilian workers — the sixth most in the country.
“If Russ Vought wants to end Trump’s shutdown, he should ask Speaker Johnson to end the Congressional Republican vacation and show up to negotiate a bipartisan budget. Any large-scale RIFs underway are flatly illegal,” Walkinshaw said in a new statement. “While Trump tries and fails to scare Democrats, millions of Americans are terrified of the health care crisis that Washington Republicans have created.”
Rep. Don Beyer, whose 8th Congressional District includes eastern Fairfax County, called the announced firings “a disaster for Virginia” that will further damage the local and national economy, pledging to “continue doing all I can to support and protect federal workers and contractors in Northern Virginia and across the country.”
An estimated 73,206 federal civilian workers live in Virginia’s 8th District, which also covers Arlington and Alexandria. Only D.C. and Maryland’s 5th District have more non-military federal government employees.
“To those workers, I say again: you deserve so much better than this, and while I know this is yet another dark moment in a dark year, please do not lose hope,” Beyer said. “The country still sees and values your service, and your work is not in vain.”
Still, there was no sign that the top Democratic and Republican Senate leaders were even talking about a way to solve the impasse. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continued to try to peel away centrist Democrats who may be willing to cross party lines as the shutdown pain dragged on.
“It’s time for them to get a backbone,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said during a news conference.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks federal service, says that more than 200,000 civil servants have left since the start of this administration in January due to earlier firings, retirements and deferred resignation offers.
“These unnecessary and misguided reductions in force will further hollow out our federal government, rob it of critical expertise and hobble its capacity to effectively serve the public,” said the organization’s president and CEO, Max Stier.
This story primarily comes from AP reporters Seung Min Kim and Stephen Groves, with FFXnow adding the comments from Reps. James Walkinshaw and Don Beyer. AP Education Writer Collin Binkley and AP writer Mike Stobbe also contributed to this report.
