Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Wednesday that more than 10,000 federal workers could be fired during the government shutdown.
“We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding,” Vought said on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which was broadcasting from the White House. “We’re going to keep those RIFs rolling throughout the shutdown, because we think it’s important to stay on offense for the American taxpayer,” he added, referring to reductions in force, the bureaucratic term for layoffs.
Asked for an estimate of total layoffs, Vought said, “I think we’ll probably end up being north of 10,000.”
Vought also discussed some of the programs that could be killed off, including green energy initiatives within the Department of Energy, environmental justice efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency, and a minority development agency within the Commerce Department. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency currently led by Vought — is also being targeted for closure within the next two or three months.
The White House said it sent about 4,200 RIF notices last Friday.
Judge halts layoffs: Soon after Vought spoke, a federal judge in the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from laying off government workers during the shutdown. The ruling came in response to a lawsuit from two unions representing federal workers seeking to prevent the Trump administration from carrying through on its planned staffing cuts.
“The activities that are being undertaken here are contrary to the laws,” U.S. District Court Judge Susan Yvonne Illston said at a hearing, per NBC News. “You can’t do this in a nation of laws. And we have laws here, and the things that are being articulated here are not within the law.”
The judge said she thinks the plaintiffs can show that the Trump administration’s actions are illegal, "arbitrary and capricious.” The Trump administration has "taken advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like,” Illston added.
Federal workers as political footballs: House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the layoffs being directed by the White House budget office. He acknowledged that the decisions about cuts are being made through a “partisan lens,” but insisted that Vought and President Donald Trump and doing what they have to, reluctantly, because of the lapse in appropriations.
“They are – what’s the right word? — forlorn about this,” Johnson said. “No one on the Republican side is taking any pleasure in this scenario. Yes, we are always for reducing the size and scope of the government and all of that, but this is not the way to go about it.”
Democrats, meanwhile, continued to blast the administration for the firings, calling them unnecessary.
“Let's be very clear, nobody forced the administration to do these firings,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor, talking about last week’s layoffs. “They did it because they wanted to, period. They did it on their own. This decision, which Trump made, and his administration made and Russell Vought made, was so callous, so unnecessary, so deeply hurtful to hard-working Americans.”