The Trump administration has begun layoffs of federal workers, following through on its threat to conduct mass firings during the government shutdown.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought announced the firings with a one-line post on X: “The RIFs have begun.” An OMB spokesperson confirmed that RIFs had begun, calling them substantial, but they provided no further details.
Vought did not immediately share any details about how many workers were being fired or from what agencies.
The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Education are among those conducting RIFs, agency spokespeople confirmed to NOTUS. A separate administration official said the Commerce Department will also face layoffs.
The Treasury Department is working to issue 1,300 RIF notices across the agency on Friday, the American Federation of Government Employees union said in a court filing Friday.
The DHS firings will affect the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a spokesperson told NOTUS. “During the last administration CISA was focused on censorship, branding and electioneering. This is part of getting CISA back on mission,” the spokesperson said.
The reductions in force were finally announced after more than two weeks of threats from President Donald Trump and Vought, who tried to pressure Democrats into voting for a Republican funding bill by warning that they would slash the federal workforce if the government shut down. Last week, Trump posted an AI-generated video that portrayed Vought as the grim reaper for the federal workforce.
Congressional Democrats argue that conducting mass layoffs during a shutdown is illegal — and that Trump and Vought are simply using the funding fight to enact their long-desired policies. (The latter view isn’t exclusive to Democrats: Sen. Mike Lee wrote that Vought “has been dreaming about” the shutdown “since puberty.”) Two large employee unions have already sued the Trump administration to try to prevent the layoffs from happening.
“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers—they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “A shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers to cause more chaos or permanently weaken more basic services for the American people.”
Trump, administration officials and Republicans have consistently said Democrats are to blame for layoffs.
“This is because of the Democrats,” the administration official told NOTUS on Friday afternoon, adding that the layoffs will involve thousands of federal workers. RIFs are “being implemented to prevent” further financial harm, they official said.
The administration official wouldn’t say whether the layoffs would be reversed, should the government reopen in short order. If Democrats want to prevent additional cuts, they should “vote for the clean CR,” the official said.
“At some point we’re going to start running out of even more money,” the official said.
Not all Republicans are embracing the Trump administration’s talking points. Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, immediately objected to the firings.
“I strongly oppose OMB Director Russ Vought’s attempt to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed due to a completely unnecessary government shutdown caused by Senator Schumer,” she said in a statement. “Regardless of whether federal employees have been working without pay or have been furloughed, their work is incredibly important to serving the public. Arbitrary layoffs result in a lack of sufficient personnel needed to conduct the mission of the agency and to deliver essential programs.”
On Friday, after Vought posted on X, the unions asked in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California for a temporary restraining order to prevent the RIFs from happening. Though a hearing is scheduled for next week, the unions said that they would be available “at any time” for an earlier hearing. The unions also wrote that the Trump administration’s lawyers confirmed that the RIFs would be taking place and that details would be filed in court later Friday.
“The partial government shutdown does not justify these further cuts, and it is wrong to use civil servants as hostages in this ongoing breakdown of our public institutions,” Max Stier, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, said in a statement on Friday.
The federal government has already lost approximately 200,000 workers since Trump took office, with 150,000 of the departures through voluntary resignation programs that agencies conducted to try to shrink the workforce before RIFs took place. The workers who departed through voluntary resignation continued to receive paychecks until last Tuesday, the last day of the government fiscal year.
Both the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services conducted significant RIFs earlier in the year, while many plans for firings at other agencies have been held up in the courts until now.
The Trump administration has said it believes its layoffs will hold out in court.
“Any (reduction in force) that does take place will be one that we know we can win in a court of law,” a senior White House official told NOTUS last week, adding, “We’re no stranger to lawsuits.”
This article has been updated with more detail on the layoffs and additional comments.