Firings of federal workers begin as White House seeks to pressure Democrats in government shutdown

A spokesperson for the budget office said the reductions are “substantial” but did not offer more details.

Federal health workers, the Education Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which leads efforts to protect the nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure, were all those reporting immediate hits to their workforces, numbering potentially thousands of employees.

The aggressive move by Trump’s budget office goes far beyond what usually happens in a government shutdown, and escalates an already politically toxic dynamic between the White House and Congress. Talks to end the shutdown are almost nonexistent.

Typically, federal workers are furloughed but restored to their jobs once the shutdown ends, traditionally with back pay. Some 750,000 employees are expected to be furloughed during the shutdown, officials have said.

One leading Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, blasted the administration's action.

“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,” Collins said, the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, who blamed the federal closure on Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Their work is incredibly important to serving the public,” she said in a statement, adding that “arbitrary layoffs” cause harm to families in her state of Maine “and throughout our country.”

The top Senate Democrat, Schumer of New York, said the blame for the layoffs rested with Trump.

“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said. “They don’t have to do it; they want to. They’re callously choosing to hurt people — the workers who protect our country, inspect our food, respond when disasters strike. This is deliberate chaos.”

The White House had previewed that it would pursue the aggressive layoff tactic shortly before the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, telling all federal agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans to the budget office for its review.

It said reduction-in-force plans could apply to federal programs whose funding would lapse in a government shutdown, are otherwise not funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

On Friday, the Education Department was among the agencies hit by new layoffs, a department spokesperson said, without providing more details. The department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office in January, but its workforce was nearly halved amid mass layoffs in the Republican administration’s first months. At the start of the shutdown, it had about 2,500 employees.

Federal health workers were also being fired, though a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman did not say how many or which agencies were being hit hardest.

Notices of firings have also taken place at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which leads federal efforts to reduce risk to the nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure, according to a person familiar with the actions who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss them.

And an official for the American Federation of Government Employees, which is suing the Trump administration over the firings, said in a legal filing Friday that the Treasury Department is set to issue layoff notices to 1,300 employees.

The AFGE, a labor union for federal employees, asked a federal judge for a restraining order to halt the firings, calling the action an abuse of power designed to punish workers and pressure Congress.

“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, in a statement

Democrats have tried to call the administration’s bluff, arguing the firings could be illegal, and seemed bolstered by the fact that the White House had yet to carry out the firings.

But Trump warned earlier this week that he would soon have more information about how many federal jobs would be eliminated.

“If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office as he met with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney.

Meanwhile, the halls of the Capitol were quiet on Friday, the 10th day of the shutdown, with both the House and the Senate out of Washington and both sides digging in for a protracted shutdown fight. Senate Republicans have tried repeatedly to cajole Democratic holdouts to vote for a stopgap bill to reopen the government, but Democrats have refused as they hold out for a firm commitment to extend health care benefits.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have suggested that Vought's threats of mass layoffs have been unhelpful to bipartisan talks on the funding standoff.

And the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said in a statement that the “shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers” to lay off workers.

“This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks,” she added.

Still, there was no sign that the top Democratic and Republican Senate leaders were even talking about a way to solve the impasse. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continued to try to peel away centrist Democrats who may be willing to cross party lines as the shutdown pain dragged on.

“It’s time for them to get a backbone,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said during a news conference.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks federal service, says that more than 200,000 civil servants have left since the start of this administration in January due to earlier firings, retirements and deferred resignation offers.

“These unnecessary and misguided reductions in force will further hollow out our federal government, rob it of critical expertise and hobble its capacity to effectively serve the public,” said the organization’s president and CEO, Max Stier.

AP Education Writer Collin Binkley and AP writers Kevin Freking and Mike Stobbe contributed to this report.