Democratic congressional leaders said they were not cowed by the White House’s threat to carry out another possible round of mass federal firings if the government shuts down next week, indicating that they would not drop their demand that any measure to extend spending also carry concessions from Republicans on health care.
The Office of Management and Budget told federal agencies late Wednesday to use the opportunity of a potential shutdown “to consider Reduction in Force” notices to lay off federal employees. The White House also told agency leaders to focus on eliminating positions where funding had expired, or could not be sourced under other laws, and had been deemed to be “not consistent” with President Trump’s political agenda.
The government is set to shut down on Oct. 1 unless lawmakers are able to break their impasse and reach a deal to keep federal funds flowing. Democrats who have blocked a Republican-written stopgap spending extension have said they will not allow any such legislation to move forward unless it also includes more than $1 trillion to continue Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire in December and reverse cuts to Medicaid and other health programs that Republicans made over the summer.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called the White House memo “an attempt at intimidation.”
“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one — not to govern, but to scare,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”
There was little sign that the memo, which appeared aimed at least in part at maximizing the political pain for Democrats should the government shut down, had changed their calculus.
In a post on social media, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, told Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, to “get lost.”
“We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings,” Mr. Jeffries said.
In March, Mr. Schumer and a group of Senate Democrats voted to allow Republicans’ temporary funding legislation to advance, in part because they argued that a shutdown would give Mr. Vought even more power to decide which money to spend and which parts of the federal bureaucracy to starve. Mr. Vought has long sought to shrink the federal government, and has led the Trump administration’s efforts to usurp Congress’s power of the purse.
Democrats have made an entirely different calculation in the current funding dispute. They note that Mr. Trump continued his assault on the federal bureaucracy even after they agreed to fund the government in the spring. And they argue that with unpopular Medicaid cuts in place and the health care tax credits slated to expire at the end of the year, they have a mandate to demand concessions from the G.O.P.
If the subsidies expire on Dec. 31 as scheduled under current law, around four million people are projected to lose coverage starting next year, and prices would go up for around 20 million more. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 10 million more Americans would become uninsured over the next decade as a result of the Medicaid and other health cuts included in Mr. Trump’s tax cut law.