Trump Administration Fires More Than 4,000 Workers Due To Ongoing Government Shutdown

The Trump administration has started terminating thousands of federal employees to exert influence on Democrats during the persistent government shutdown, triggered by Congress’s failure to secure a funding agreement.

“The RIFs have begun,” White House Office of Management Director Russell Vought stated in a post on X, referencing the abbreviation for “reductions in force”.

A spokesperson for his office affirmed that the terminations had commenced and were “substantial”. The magnitude and extent of these cuts became clearer later on Friday when the administration revealed that seven agencies had initiated layoffs affecting over 4,000 employees.

President Donald Trump has consistently vowed to utilize the shutdown to advance his longstanding aim of downsizing the federal workforce.

On Friday evening, a senior administration official informed NBC News “those RIFs are a snapshot in time and represent only where things were at the time of the court filing,” indicating that the situation remains dynamic.

Reduction-in-force notifications are being distributed to federal employees across seven departments, with the Treasury Department and Department of Health and Human Services experiencing the most significant impact, accounting for more than half of the total terminations, as detailed in a recent Justice Department submission.

The court submission responds to a legal challenge regarding the shutdown-related layoffs filed by 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, notifications were sent to approximately 315 staff members at the Commerce Department, 466 at the Education Department, and 187 at the Energy Department.

Approximately 1,100 to 1,200 employees at Health and Human Services received notifications, along with 176 DHS employees and 1,446 workers at the Treasury.

An estimated 20-30 EPA employees received general notifications on Friday indicating they might be affected by future reductions in force.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a division of the Commerce Department, had previously issued notifications to 126 employees when the government shutdown began on Oct. 1.

Democrats are resisting the layoffs, arguing that a shutdown does not mandate President Donald Trump to dismiss workers or grant him new authority to do so, asserting that the White House is acting maliciously.

A DHS spokesperson noted that the layoffs within the department were occurring at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a key focus of Trump’s since its then-director confirmed his loss in 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 explained that the cuts at that department were aimed at addressing a “bloated bureaucracy” established during the Biden administration, stating: “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 declared the “mass firings are illegal” and will harm families, pledging to “pursue every available legal avenue to stop” the administration’s actions.

Federal employee unions had already initiated legal action against the Trump administration over OMB’s threats to implement mass terminations of federal workers before the shutdown started on Oct. 1. The plaintiffs in that ongoing lawsuit filed an additional motion on Friday seeking an immediate temporary restraining order to prevent the OMB from directing agencies to carry out reductions in force. It referenced Vought’s post on X proclaiming that “The RIFs have begun.”

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Nnamdi Okoli