White House signals federal layoffs have begun during shutdown

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TIERNEY L. CROSS / NEW YORK TIMES

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) speaks at a news conference about the ongoing government shutdown as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) looks on in Washington today.

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HAIYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, after a television interview outside the White House on July 7. The White House announced today that it had started to conduct another round of layoffs targeting federal workers, forging ahead with President Trump’s threats to cut agencies and cull the government workforce during the shutdown.

WASHINGTON >> The White House said today that it had started to conduct another round of layoffs targeting federal workers, as President Donald Trump looked to seize on the government shutdown to cut agencies, cull the civil workforce and pressure Democrats into accepting his fiscal demands.

The administration did not immediately specify how many workers and programs would be targeted, or when the affected employees would be losing their jobs. But the announcement prompted widespread confusion and fear at a moment when hundreds of thousands in government are furloughed and still others must report for duty without pay.

Early indications suggested that the layoffs could be significant, affecting a wide range of agencies, including the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Treasury, according to officials there and congressional aides who later learned of the plans.

Unions representing federal workers quickly denounced the attempted firings as illegal, as they blasted the Trump administration for trying to use the government’s workforce as a bargaining chip in a political feud. Even before the White House had announced that it would proceed with cuts, labor officials had sued to block them, and today they urged a federal judge considering the case to intervene swiftly.

“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 Everett Kelley, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the unions suing the administration.

Many Democrats and even one Republican — Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the chamber’s lead appropriator — also condemned the administration for the timing and scope of its attempted firings. In a statement, Collins blamed Democrats for the shutdown but said that terminating federal workers could “cause harm to families in Maine and throughout our country.”

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“Regardless of whether federal employees have been working without pay or have been furloughed, their work is incredibly important to serving the public,” she said.

The White House repeatedly declined to answer questions about its strategy or the scope of the layoffs. Russell Vought, the White House budget director, said only in a social media post that the “RIFs have begun,” referring to the reduction-in-force notices to federal employees about pending dismissals.

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described the cuts as substantial. The president’s aides had previously indicated they could range into the thousands.

By seeking to fire federal workers during a shutdown, Trump risked a costly escalation in a fiscal stalemate that has no end in sight. Rather than negotiate a resolution with Democrats, the president has embraced the government closure as a political advantage, using it as an opportunity to try to rearrange the federal budget without Congress and exact revenge against his political foes.

The administration has canceled or frozen tens of billions of dollars in federal aid that had primarily benefited Democratic-led cities and states. Trump has also threatened to slash what he has described as “Democrat agencies,” reducing spending perhaps on a permanent basis, even though lawmakers have not agreed to any cuts.

“We’ll be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, adding that he would give Democrats a “little taste of their own medicine.”

If the Trump administration proceeds with its plans, a new round of layoffs could further decimate the federal workforce, which is expected to employ 300,000 fewer people by the end of December compared with January, officials have said. The staggering decline is a direct result of Trump, who has presided over an aggressive and legally contested effort to shrink the bureaucracy through firings, layoffs and induced retirements.

Under its published guidelines, the government must give workers 60 days’ notice before a layoff, though this may be reduced to 30 days in certain exceptions.

The White House first telegraphed that it would pursue layoffs during the shutdown before the fiscal stalemate even began. In a memo last month, the president’s budget aides essentially argued that a lapse in funding would mean that the government no longer needed to retain some of its workers.

The Trump administration even appeared to issue guidance that allowed officials producing termination notices to work throughout the federal stoppage, a status typically reserved for the most vital employees, including military service members.

Unions representing federal workers have contested both the rationale for layoffs and the administration’s efforts to carry them out. Today, labor officials told the judge reviewing the case that they believed the cuts could be significant, citing one agency — the Treasury Department — where they believed officials were working to issue 1,300 terminations.

A court previously ordered the Trump administration to respond by today, at which point the government was supposed to offer an explicit accounting of the layoffs it was seeking.

Many Democrats condemned the Trump administration for targeting federal workers while many were out of work or serving without pay. Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, who leads his party on the House Budget Committee, described the layoffs today as an “illegal” attempt by Trump to “seize more power for himself.”

By the afternoon, Democrats and Republicans did not seem anywhere close to a resolution that might reopen the government, with Congress having left Washington for the weekend.

Democrats continue to reject a Republican plan to reopen federal agencies into next month as they seek to extend a set of expiring subsidies that help millions of Americans afford health insurance.

“I think to their credit, the White House has now for 10 days laid off doing anything in hopes that enough Senate Democrats would come to their senses and do the right thing and fund the government,” Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, told reporters today.

But, he added, that could soon change.

“That’s what a shutdown does,” Thune said. “You put the administration and this presidency in a position where you have to make some hard decisions.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company

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