The Trump Administration Says It Has Begun Mass Firings, Cutting More than 4,100 Jobs

The Trump administration has begun layoffs of federal workers, following through on its threat to conduct mass firings during the government shutdown.

“There will be a lot, and it will be Democrat-oriented, because we figure they started this thing so they should be Democrat-oriented,” President Donald Trump said Friday evening in the Oval Office, confirming that he authorized layoffs 10 days into the shutdown. “It will be a lot of people all because of the Democrats.”

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought announced the firings earlier Friday 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.

The administration was forced in court to provide a fuller account of its plans. In a court filing, administration attorneys said the Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security, and Treasury were impacted.

A total of at least 4,100 employees were laid off. Treasury and HHS saw the largest cuts, with approximately 1,446 and up to 1,200 employees impacted, respectively.

The filing said that 20 to 30 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency received notices of “intent to RIF” informing them that they “may be affected by a RIF in the future,” the attorneys wrote.

These departments and other agencies “are actively considering whether to conduct additional RIFs related to the ongoing lapse in appropriations,” the government said in the filing.

“These are largely people that the Democrats want,” Trump said. “Many of them will be fired.”

The reductions in force were finally announced after more than two weeks of threats from 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. An administration official told NOTUS that RIFs are “being implemented to prevent” further financial harm.

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.”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski also later spoke out against the RIFs. “While few details have been shared about Russell Vought’s latest layoffs, there is no question this is poorly timed and yet another example of this administration’s punitive actions toward the federal workforce,” she said in a Friday night post on X.

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.

In a shift in policy, the Trump administration asked federal workers needed to conduct the RIFs — like those who work in human resources — to work without pay during the shutdown. Staff have been recalled to work on the RIFs at four different agencies so far, according to a declaration in the Trump administration’s Friday filing.

“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.

Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the unions involved in the legal challenge, previously told NOTUS that “there’s no basis” for the White House’s decision to lay federal workers off during a shutdown.

He argued that it did not match previous White House shutdown guidance, which states that “furloughs during a shutdown are what you need to do, not RIFs,” Sanghvi said.

Administration officials did not explain why RIFs during this shutdown were different from the layoffs conducted when the government was fully funded, or why the White House’s recent shutdown guidance differs from previous ones.

They argued in the filing that federal agencies have “authority to engage in RIFs” and quoted from the recent OMB memo, which states that the people getting laid off are in programs impacted by the shutdown, do not have another source of funding, and whose work is “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

The federal government has already lost approximately 300,000 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.