US President Donald Trump said he was making good on threats to fire thousands of federal workers amid a government shutdown now in its 10th day, as his administration made job cuts across departments, including the US Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of the Treasury and the Department of Commerce.
“It’ll be a lot, and we’ll announce the numbers over the next couple of days, but it’ll be a lot of people,” Trump told reporters on Friday in the Oval Office.
The administration plans to slash at least 4,100 workers from the government during the shutdown, according to newly filed court documents.
Photo: EPA
Trump said that many of the affected employees worked for programs that were “Democrat-oriented” or were “people that the Democrats wanted,” without providing additional detail.
The firings are the first large-scale ouster of federal employees during a funding lapse in modern history, going beyond the furloughs that have characterized past temporary shutdowns.
More cuts are under consideration, the government said in the filing, a move that ups the stakes in a multi-week standoff with Democrats over federal funding and health-care subsidies.
Labor unions representing hundreds of thousands of federal workers on Friday asked a judge to halt the mass firings.
The emergency request to a federal judge in San Francisco seeks to bar the Office of Management and Budget from ordering officials to carry out the firings and block agencies from issuing reduction-in-force notices before the judge holds a hearing this week.
The judge did not immediately rule, but moved the hearing up by a day to Wednesday.
White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought first announced the cuts with a terse social media post on Friday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune sought to lay blame for the layoffs at Democrats’ feet.
“To their credit, the White House has now for 10 days laid off doing anything in hopes that enough Senate Democrats would come to their senses and do the right thing and fund the government,” Thune said on Friday before the layoffs were announced.
Democrats say that spending money to conduct layoffs during a shutdown is illegal.
US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sought to cast the firings as an affront against US workers that sows “deliberate chaos.”
“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said in a Friday statement. “They don’t have to do it; they want to.”
More than two-thirds of civilian federal employees have remained on the job during the shutdown — either as essential workers or in roles that receive longer-term funding — with the rest being sent home. The vast majority of federal employees go without pay.
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