WASHINGTON—Not content with trashing union contracts and firing more than 100,000 federal workers so far, the Trump regime is using the threat of a government shutdown at midnight on Sept. 30 to order agencies to fire even more.
The order comes in a memo by Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director. Vought told all agency and department heads during the week preceding Sept. 26, to prepare to close all but “essential” services should Congress fail to pass a money bill to keep the government going beyond the end of the month.
“Essential” workers, such as air traffic controllers, would have to stay on the job, but wouldn’t be paid. The others would be told to sit at home. And, Vought said, agencies could use the forced downtime as an excuse to impose permanent “reductions in force.”
Reductions in force, or RIFs, is a synonym, or a euphemism, for “firing” without cause.
“Federal employees are not bargaining chips,” retorted Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley. His union represents the vast majority of workers whom Trump is targeting.
“They are veterans, caregivers, law enforcement officers, and neighbors who serve their country and fellow Americans every day,” continued Kelley, himself a veteran. “They deserve stability and respect, not pink slips and political games.”
Not the first one
This RIF is not the first one Vought has carried out, over worker and union protests and lawsuits, at Trump’s behest and to Vought’s own glee. Vought schemed to fire tens of thousands of federal workers even before Trump put him in charge of OMB. He advocated mass firings and outlawing all government worker unions, too, in the federal workers section of Trump’s infamous right-wing platform, Project 2025.
As a result, approximately 175,000 federal workers have been axed so far, and Vought’s OMB terminated—at Trump’s demand—dozens of AFGE contracts covering 1.5 million workers total. That means any of them could be fired at the drop of a hat and for no reason at all.
A shutdown is increasingly likely, even if it’s short. On Sept. 19, the deadlocked GOP-run Senate defeated a supposedly “clean” temporary money bill to keep the government going through Nov. 21. The measure, called a continuing resolution (CR), was sponsored by Congress’s ruling Republicans and backed by Trump.
Then senators defeated a Democratic substitute CR which added back almost a billion dollars in 10 years’ worth of Medicaid cuts which Trump and the GOP had jammed through in his “big beautiful bill” in July.
The Democrats also kept Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies for millions more people. Those subsidies expire at the end of this calendar year. Without them, people would face big insurance premium hikes.
Rather than try to work out the partisan stalemate, lawmakers quit for a week in observance of the Jewish holidays. They plan to return Sept. 29, making passage of a CR before the lights go out at midnight on the 30th unlikely.
Vought, for Trump, seized on that, blaming Democrats for the looming shutdown—because Trump needs at least seven Democratic senators to break ranks and pass a GOP-crafted CR.
Vought ordered agencies “to use this opportunity” of the shutdown “to consider reduction in force for all employees in programs, projects, or activities” that fail any one of three conditions. One is lack of money due to no CR. The second is no available alternative funding source—such as the highway fuel tax or airline ticket taxes.
And the third, and it’s key, is if workers toil on “programs, projects, and activities not consistent with the president’s priorities.” In plain English, unless you do what Trump demands, you’re gone.
Vought wasn’t done. When a shutdown ends, Trump and he demand RIFs continue. Vought told agencies to submit a plan to the OMB saying how they would “retain the minimal number” of workers they need to carry out only basic duties. The rest, Vought declared, would be RIFed.
Vought’s shutdown memo also angered Democratic leaders, whom Trump refuses to meet with. “Listen, Russ, you are a malignant political hack,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., tweeted on X. “We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings. Get lost.”
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