Trump Fires Federal Workers, Escalating US Shutdown Fight (3)

President Donald Trump said he was making good on threats to fire thousands of federal workers amid a government shutdown now in its 10th day, as his administration made job cuts across departments including Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Treasury and Commerce.

“It’ll be a lot, and we’ll announce the numbers over the next couple of days, but it’ll be a lot of people,” Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office.

The administration plans to slash at least 4,100 workers from the government during the shutdown, according to newly filed court documents. Trump said that many of the affected employees worked for programs that were “Democrat-oriented” or were “people that the Democrats wanted,” without providing additional detail.

The firings mark the first large-scale ouster of federal employees during a funding lapse in modern history, going beyond the furloughs that have characterized past temporary shutdowns. More cuts are under consideration, the government said in the filing. The move ups the stakes in a multi-week standoff with Democrats over federal funding and health-care subsidies.

Labor unions representing hundreds of thousands of federal workers asked a judge Friday to immediately halt the mass firings. The emergency request to a federal judge in San Francisco seeks to bar the Office of Management and Budget from ordering officials to carry out the firings and block agencies from issuing reduction-in-force notices before the judge holds a hearing next week.

The judge didn’t immediately rule but did move up the hearing by a day to Oct. 15.

White House Budget Director Russell Vought first announced the cuts with a terse social media post on Friday.

Spokespeople for HHS, DHS, the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development confirmed workers at those agencies are among those affected by the firings. Commerce Department workers were also terminated, according to a US official.

At the Internal Revenue Service, which sits within the Treasury Department, the administration plans to fire about 1,300 workers, people familiar with the situation said Friday. All staffers in Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund were laid off, according to people familiar with the matter.

And the Environmental Protection Agency notified approximately 20 to 30 employees that they may be affected by cuts in the future, though a final decision has not been made, according to the filing.

Russell Vought

Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg

Senate Majority Leader John Thune sought to lay blame for the layoffs at Democrats’ feet.

“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,” Thune said Friday before the layoffs were announced.

In the days before the announcement, some congressional Republicans urged the White House to hold off, saying it dilutes their message that it’s Republicans who are standing up for federal workers.

Susan Collins of Maine, the leader of the Senate’s appropriations panel, became the first Republican to publicly oppose Vought’s moves while still pinning the blame for the shutdown on Democrats.

“Arbitrary layoffs result in a lack of sufficient personnel needed to conduct the mission of the agency and to deliver essential programs, and cause harm to families in Maine and throughout our country,” Collins said in a statement.

Democrats argue that spending money to conduct layoffs in a shutdown is illegal.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sought to cast the firings as an affront against US workers that sows “deliberate chaos.”

“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said in a Friday statement. “They don’t have to do it; they want to.”

More than two-thirds of civilian federal employees have remained on the job this shutdown — either as essential workers or in roles that receive longer-term funding — with the rest being sent home. The vast majority of federal employees go without pay.

Federal Downsizing

The latest move is reminiscent of Elon Musk’s efforts through the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year to slash the federal workforce. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer gutted the federal workforce through voluntary resignations, retirements, and targeted firings of probationary employees.

About 150,000 of the voluntary departures took effect with the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1, but some other staffing reductions have been tied up by court challenges.

Friday’s job eliminations mark the latest effort by Trump to make the shutdown as painful as possible for Democratic constituencies while deeming his own priorities as essential services.

Hours into the shutdown earlier this month, the Trump administration paused $18 billion in infrastructure spending in New York City, $2 billion for Chicago transit and $8 billion for green energy projects in 16 states — all of which voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election.

The White House has previously admitted that the DOGE job cuts presented political risks. Trump has mused that Musk’s efforts weren’t politically popular and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said DOGE got its attempt to cut federal spending “backward” by leading with mass terminations, rather than looking to create efficiencies.

The tactic gives Trump a chance to talk tough to his MAGA base. He has often derided the federal workforce as being stacked with bureaucrats who he says oppose his agenda. But it also leaves less room for Republicans to blame the most enduring consequences of a shutdown on Democrats.

On Capitol Hill, bipartisan talks have continued in fits and starts, with a handful of Democrats crossing party lines to support short-term spending bills. But party leaders remain divided over whether to tie an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies to reopening the government.

Democrats warned that Vought’s actions will make an agreement to end the shutdown even more difficult as they further erode trust. Reversing the cuts and layoffs will themselves become Democratic demands as part of any deal to stop the shutdown.

(Updates with hearing date in fifth and sixth paragraphs.)

--With assistance from Erin Slowey, Chris Cioffi, Katy O’Donnell, Catherine Lucey, Romy Varghese, Elizabeth Wasserman, Emily Flitter, Zoe Tillman, Ellen M. Gilmer, Josh Eidelson, Ian Kullgren and Liam Knox.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Gregory Korte in Washington at gkorte@bloomberg.net;
Lauren Dezenski in Washington at ldezenski@bloomberg.net;
Rachel Cohrs Zhang in Washington at rzhang698@bloomberg.net;
Erik Wasson in Washington at ewasson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sarah Halzack at shalzack@bloomberg.net;
Laura Davison at ldavison4@bloomberg.net

Megan Scully, Derek Wallbank

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