The Trump administration has begun laying off thousands of federal workers in an effort to pressure Democrats amid the ongoing government shutdown down due to the inability of Congress to reach a funding deal.
“The RIFs have begun,” White House Office of Management Director Russell Vought announced in a post on X , referring to an acronym for “reductions in force”.
A spokesman for his office confirmed the cuts had started and were “substantial”. Their size and scope began coming into focus later on Friday, when the administration disclosed seven agencies had started laying off more than 4,000 workers.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to use the shutdown to further his long-held goal of reducing the federal workforce.
On Friday night, a senior administration official told NBC News “those RIFs are a snapshot in time and represent only where things were at the time of the court filing,” suggesting the situation remains fluid.
Reduction-in-force notices are being sent to federal workers across seven departments, with the Treasury Department and Department of Health and Human Services being the hardest hit and accounting for more than half of the total layoffs, according to a new Justice Department filing.
The court filing is in response to a lawsuit over the shutdown layoffs from the American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO.
Other affected agencies include the departments of Homeland Security, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency.
On Friday, notices were issued to an estimated 315 employees at the Commerce Department, 466 at the Education Department, and 187 at the Energy Department.
Roughly 1,100 to 1,200 employees at Health and Human Services were sent notices, in addition to 176 DHS employees and 1,446 workers at the Treasury.
An estimated 20-30 EPA employees were sent general notices Friday saying they may be affected by reductions in force in the future.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an arm of the Commerce Department, also previously sent notices to 126 employees when the government shut down on Oct. 1.
Democrats are pushing back on the layoffs, saying that a shutdown does not require President Donald Trump to fire workers or give him new powers to do so, arguing the White House is being vindictive.
A DHS spokesperson said that the layoffs at the department were occurring within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has been a major target of Trump’s since its then-director affirmed that he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. “During the last administration, CISA was focused on censorship, branding,
and electioneering,” the DHS spokesperson said. “This is part of getting CISA back on mission.”
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the cuts at that department were focused on countering a “bloated bureaucracy” created under the Biden administration, adding: “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”
AFSCME President Lee Saunders said the “mass firings are illegal” and will hurt families, vowing to “pursue every available legal avenue to stop” the administration’s action.
Federal employee unions had already sued the Trump administration over OMB’s threat to trigger mass firings of federal workers before the shutdown even began on Oct. 1. Plaintiffs in that ongoing lawsuit filed a supplementary motion on Friday asking for an immediate temporary restraining order preventing the OMB from ordering agencies to conduct reductions in force. It cited Vought’s post on X declaring that “The RIFs have begun.”
