October 10 2025
By Hannah Natanson, Meryl Kornfield, and Jacob Bogage
The Trump administration began laying off federal workers on Friday as the government shutdown stretched into its 10th day, fulfilling threats from President Donald Trump to take advantage of the closure to shave off more parts of the federal workforce he dislikes.
“The RIFs have begun,” White House budget director Russell Vought posted on X on Friday afternoon, using an acronym for reductions in force.
The administration told a federal judge in California on Friday night that seven agencies — Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security, and Treasury — had issued RIF notices to a total of more than 4,100 workers. Lawyers for the government added that the Environmental Protection Agency had also told about 20 to 30 employees that they might be affected by an RIF in the future, and other agencies are “actively considering whether to conduct additional RIFs related to the ongoing lapse in appropriations,” according to the court filing.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that the administration deliberately moved to lay off “people that the Democrats want.”
“It’ll be Democrat-oriented because we figure, you know, they started this thing,” he said. “So they should be Democrat-oriented. It’ll be a lot.”
As the dismissals unfurled Friday, they did appear to mostly target offices that do work typically out of line with Trump administration priorities, including a unit within the Department of Health and Human Services focused on family and community policy and an office focused on fair and equal housing within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to several federal employees familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Also nixed was an Education Department division focused on improving academic achievement for K-12 students, a half-dozen staffers said.
Employees will have at least 30 days, and many will have at least 60 days, before any dismissals take effect, according to federal guidance.
The shutdown layoffs are the culmination of years of groundwork laid by Vought, an architect of the Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term, which outlined a drastically reduced federal bureaucracy. Vought’s office had threatened mass dismissals during the shutdown, perhaps even stretching into the hundreds of thousands, but it also told agencies that layoff plans might need to be revised after the government reopens. Trump told reporters before the shutdown that he might fire “a lot” of people, and once the shutdown began, Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt likewise indicated that cuts were coming.
The size of the federal workforce is unrelated to the government’s ability to pay its bills during a shutdown, though White House officials have falsely suggested otherwise.
The Washington Post previously reported that the dismissals were likely to total fewer than 16,000.
The layoffs run counter to recent internal warnings from senior government officials that such dismissals are legally questionable. In the first days of the shutdown, officials privately counseled agencies against conducting reductions in force while the government lacks funding, because it would probably violate the law, The Post reported this month.
The officials cautioned that the Antideficiency Act forbids the government from obligating or expending any money not appropriated by Congress, which means the government cannot incur new expenses during a shutdown, when funding has lapsed. The RIF process, which is extensive and involves promising severance payments, would probably be prohibited under the act, the officials concluded.
That theory will now almost certainly be put to the test. Even before the layoffs began, they drew a legal challenge from several federal unions. Their lawsuit, brought against the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management on Sept. 30 over threats of dismissals, argued that the administration has no authority or ability to conduct RIFs amid a shutdown, in part citing the Antideficiency Act.
“Nothing in the Antideficiency Act or any other statute authorizes RIFs of employees who work in agencies or programs with a lapse in funding,” the suit argued. “Ignoring binding federal law is arbitrary and capricious.”
A federal judge in the Northern District of California this week ordered the administration to provide by Friday the “status of any currently planned or in progress RIF notices to be issued during/because of the government shutdown, including the earliest date that those RIF notices will go out.”
The government had not provided that information by the time Vought announced the dismissals, but it later furnished it. Shortly after Vought’s social post, the lawyers for the unions requested an immediate halt to any layoffs pending an upcoming hearing. The government said it opposed that motion.
Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, accused Trump of “choosing to inflict more pain on the American people” with the new layoffs.
“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers — they just want to,” Murray said. “This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks.”
Federal employment lawyers said the attempted dismissals are almost certainly illegal, violating rules that guide the process of federal staff cutbacks. Federal regulations say that agencies can dismiss employees for one of several reasons, including a lack of work, a reorganization, or a shortage of funds.
But a shutdown-driven, temporary lapse in funding does not count as a shortage of funds, the lawyers said.
“It’s like trying to call an apple an orange — they’re both fruit, but it’s not the same thing,” said Kevin Owen, a partner at a firm representing federal workers.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, the layoffs are an attempt to rein in the growth of the agency during the Biden administration’s pandemic response, spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
“All HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions,” Nixon said. “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”
This round of layoffs is the latest development in a difficult year for federal workers, who have already seen hundreds of thousands of their co-workers depart through firings, retirement programs, and a deferred resignation offer developed by the Trump administration. The last initiative alone saw 150,000 people leave federal service.
“In a year already filled with cruel and relentless attacks on the federal workforce, this is yet another example of this administration treating us like pawns and further dehumanizing and traumatizing us,” said an EPA worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Education Department employees were told there would be a reduction in force in 60 days, according to one worker, and it wasn’t clear if that meant plans could be reversed once the shutdown ends.
“I feel like they are going to rethink this and call us back in,” the worker said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Despite early promises to fire many federal workers, administration officials had been largely moving away from mass layoffs after thousands took buyout offers and retired. For instance, Veterans Affairs, the second-largest federal agency, canceled an expected 15 percent cut, citing high numbers of voluntary departures. Other agencies, such as the IRS and the General Services Administration, have recently brought back workers who took buyouts or were fired.
And the National Weather Service over the summer won permission to hire for more than 100 positions after cuts left the agency significantly diminished and struggling to keep basic forecasting going, often at the cost of workers’ mental health.
Lisa Rein, Emily Davies, Marianne LeVin, and Natalie Allison contributed to this report.
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