Trump Administration Launches Fresh Round of Federal Layoffs Amid Shutdown
The Trump Administration on Friday began another round of layoffs targeting federal workers, pressing forward with President Donald Trump’s vow to pare back the federal workforce as the government shutdown entered its tenth day.
“The RIFs have begun,” Russell Vought, the White House budget director, wrote in a post on X, referring to reduction-in-force notices that are sent to federal employees about pending layoffs. An Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official confirmed to TIME that layoff notices were being sent out and described the cuts as “substantial,” though no figures or details about which agencies were affected were provided.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday evening that the firings would be “Democrat-oriented” as he continued to cast blame on Democratic leaders for refusing to budge on their demand for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.
“These are largely people that the Democrats want and many of them will be fired,” Trump said of the layoffs. “It will be a lot.”
The decision marks a dramatic escalation in the standoff between Trump and congressional Democrats as the shutdown is soon expected to enter its second week with no clear path to resolution. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been furloughed or are still reporting for duty without pay amid the standoff. The layoffs are expected to target employees that had been furloughed.
Read more: Smithsonian Museums, National Zoo Set to Close For Remainder of Shutdown
Trump added that his Administration would announce the total number of layoffs “over the next couple days.”
For weeks, Trump, Vought, and other administration officials have warned that the shutdown presented an opportunity to advance its long-running campaign to shrink the federal bureaucracy, despite Trump having already initiated some layoffs earlier this year at agencies including the State Department and the Department of Education.
Vought, a chief architect of the conservative Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, has long argued that many federal agencies are bloated and ideologically opposed to the President’s agenda. The layoffs follow months of significant attrition across the federal government in which hundreds of thousands of employees left their positions through buyouts, early retirements, and deferred resignation programs developed under Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Unions representing federal workers quickly condemned the new layoffs and have already filed lawsuits challenging their legality. The American Federation of Government Employees, which sued over the RIF threat on Sept. 30 in a San Francisco federal court, argued in a statement that reductions in force cannot legally occur during a shutdown, when agencies are barred under the Antideficiency Act from spending money or making new financial commitments. On Friday, AFGE asked a judge to bar OMB from ordering agencies to carry out the layoffs before a scheduled Oct. 16 hearing.
The process is likely to face additional legal hurdles. RIF procedures typically require advance notice, severance funding, and agency-by-agency approval—all of which may be difficult to achieve during a funding lapse.
The notices also generally trigger a 60-day countdown before any terminations can take effect, allowing agencies to potentially revise their plans if Congress reaches a deal to reopen the government.