WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House Budget Office said Friday that it has begun mass layoffs of federal workers to put more pressure on Democratic lawmakers amid the ongoing government shutdown.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on the social media site
A Budget Office spokesman said the cuts were “significant” but did not provide further details.
The Ministry of Education is among the authorities affected by novel layoffs, a spokesman for the ministry said on Friday, without giving further details. When Trump took office in January, the department had about 4,100 employees, but mass layoffs in the first months of the Republican administration have seen its workforce cut nearly in half. At the beginning of the closure, around 2,500 employees were employed.
Federal health workers were also laid off Friday, but a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman did not say how many or which agencies were hardest hit. And an American Federation of Government Employees official, who is suing the Trump administration over the layoffs, said in a court filing Friday that the Treasury Department is expected to issue layoff notices to 1,300 employees.
There were also indications of layoffs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which leads federal efforts to reduce risk to the nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure, according to a person familiar with the actions who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak about them.
The White House announced it would continue aggressive layoff tactics just before the government shutdown began Oct. 1 and called on all federal agencies to submit their workforce reduction plans to the budget office for review. It says troop reduction plans could apply to federal programs whose funding would expire in the event of a government shutdown, would otherwise be unfunded and would be “not consistent with the president’s priorities.”
This goes far beyond what typically happens during a government shutdown, which is that federal employees are furloughed but return to work after the government shutdown ends.
Democrats have tried to call the administration’s bluff by arguing the layoffs could be illegal and appeared emboldened by the fact that the White House had not yet carried out the layoffs.
But President Donald Trump said earlier this week that he would soon have more information about how many federal jobs would be eliminated.
“I can tell you in four or five days if this continues,” he said in the Oval Office on Tuesday as he met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. “If this continues it will be significant and many of these jobs will never come back.”
AFGE, a union for federal employees, asked a federal judge on Friday for an injunction to stop the layoffs, calling the action an abuse of power aimed at punishing workers and putting pressure on Congress.
“It is a disgrace that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally lay off thousands of workers who provide vital services to communities across the country,” American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley said in a statement.
Meanwhile, silence reigned in the halls of the Capitol on Friday, the 10th day of the shutdown, as both the House and Senate were absent from Washington and both sides engaged in a protracted battle over the shutdown. Senate Republicans have repeatedly tried to persuade Democratic holdouts to vote for a stopgap bill to reopen the government, but Democrats refused, insisting on a firm commitment to expanding health care benefits.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have suggested that Vought’s threats of mass layoffs have not helped bipartisan talks on the funding crisis.
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 any new, special authority” to fire workers.
“This is nothing new and no one should be intimidated by these crooks,” she added.
The Senate’s top Democrat, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, said the blame for the layoffs lay with Trump.
“Let’s be honest: Nobody is forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said. “They don’t have to do it, they want to. They recklessly choose to hurt people – the workers who protect our land, control our food and respond when disasters strike. This is intentional chaos.”
Still, there was no sign that Senate Democratic and Republican leaders were even discussing a path to resolving the impasse. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continued to try to remove centrist Democrats who might be willing to cross party lines as the shutdown dragged on.
“It’s time for them to get some backbone,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said during a news conference.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the federal service, says more than 200,000 civil servants have left because of previous layoffs, retirements and deferred offers of resignation since this administration began in January.
“These unnecessary and misguided troop reductions will further weaken our federal government, stripping away its critical expertise and impairing its ability to effectively serve the public,” said the organization’s President and CEO Max Stier.
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AP Education Writer Collin Binkley and AP Writers Kevin Freking and Mike Stobbe contributed to this report.
