Throughout the government shutdown, President Trump and his top aides have repeatedly threatened to conduct another round of mass federal layoffs, insisting at times that they may have to shed workers to keep essential services from closing down.
But the firings now under consideration may be unlawful or unnecessary, according to a wide range of budget experts, legal scholars and union officials. They say that the White House is only looking to exploit the fiscal stalemate to further its political agenda, shrink the government and punish Democrats.
At the heart of the matter is a familiar question in Mr. Trump’s second term: To what extent may he reconfigure the sprawling federal bureaucracy without a clear directive from Congress?
Mr. Trump has already dismissed thousands of civil servants as part of this disruptive reorganization, spurring a wide range of legal challenges from workers who say the president’s actions exceed his authority under law.
Now, Mr. Trump has eyed even deeper cuts during the shutdown, a fiscal crisis in which millions of government employees are already on furlough or forced to report for duty without pay. The White House has claimed that the firings would be both necessary and warranted, and that the lapse in funding allows the president to target programs that no longer have money to operate.
“If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial. And a lot of those jobs will never come back,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday, as he appeared to threaten for the first time that those who keep their jobs — but have been furloughed — may not receive back pay.
Unions representing federal workers contend that many of Mr. Trump’s threats are illegal. They preemptively sued the administration over its pursuit of mass layoffs last week, arguing that the White House could not legally carry out the dismissals at a moment when the government is only supposed to operate essential services.
“It’s clearly unlawful,” said Rushab Sanghvi, the general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the unions that have sued. Mr. Sanghvi said he could not think of any other time when a president had pursued layoffs during a shutdown, or tried to justify deep cuts based on a temporary funding lapse.
Budget experts said that the White House had incorrectly presented layoffs as a fiscal necessity, something no other president in the modern era has done. Not even during the longest federal stoppage on record — a five-week closure in Mr. Trump’s first term — did the government shed workers so that it could finance the few operations that are allowed to continue.
“They don’t have to lay them off to do that,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the American Action Forum, a conservative group.
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor have officials in recent days explained why they need to cut workers or what programs would be sustained by mass firings.
The looming threats to the federal work force fit an emerging pattern under Mr. Trump, who has sought to use the government shutdown to pressure or punish his political foes.
Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly rejected Republicans’ demands for a short-term spending deal, as they seek an extension of a set of expiring subsidies that help Americans pay for health insurance, which could total $350 billion. That has enraged Mr. Trump, who has responded with a series of punitive measures.
Seven days into the closure, the Trump administration has moved to strip billions of dollars from Democratic-led cities and states, while the president has delighted publicly at times in the “unprecedented opportunity” to cut what he has described as “Democrat agencies.”
The White House also signaled this week could also try to deny automatic back pay to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who are currently furloughed. Such a move, communicated in a draft memo, appeared in conflict with a law that Mr. Trump had signed in 2019, aiming to spare civil servants from experiencing undue hardships during periods of partisan gridlock.
“I would say it depends on who you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday when asked about the threat. He later described the opportunity to cut government as one “handed to us on a silver platter.”
The White House first telegraphed its pursuit of mass federal layoffs in late September, days before federal funding officially lapsed. In a memo, the White House budget office, which is led by Russell T. Vought, told agencies to use the closure as an “opportunity to consider reduction in force” notices, a reference to the formal process by which the government lays off its employees.
The White House instructed agencies to focus any proposed staff cuts on positions for which appropriations had run out of money or had no alternative funding source, and had been deemed to be “not consistent” with the president’s political agenda. By the Trump administration’s legal reasoning, these programs without funding during a shutdown are “no longer statutorily required to be carried out.”
The White House memo spurred an immediate outcry from unions representing federal workers, who have fought Mr. Trump in court over his many attempts to fire civil servants in droves. This time, the unions rebuffed what they saw as a campaign to use federal workers as a bargaining chip that would force Democrats to the negotiating table.
In their lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, labor officials said the Trump administration had taken the “legally unsupported position” that a shutdown allows them to terminate staff simply because Congress has not yet appropriated money yet for their agencies.
Mr. Sanghvi said the layoffs would undermine a wide array of programs enacted by Congress. He offered the example of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, one of the many agencies whose operations are broadly halted. Even though funding has lapsed, he said, “HUD still exists” and there’s still “a statute that creates” the agency and requires that it offer vital housing services.
Union leaders also took particular exception to a little-noticed decision by the White House that allowed officials who are plotting the layoffs to continue working through the shutdown, even while most other government programs are halted. Typically, it is only the most vital employees — like air baggage inspectors and federal prison officers — that are treated as exempt from a government closure.
“They’ve added insult to injury by ordering employees to engage in this inessential activity,” said Norman Eisen, a former federal ethics official in the Obama administration who is representing unions in the lawsuit. “It is just like so many other Trump administration initiatives, wholly untethered from the Constitution and laws.”
The legal onslaught has not deterred the Trump administration. Since the shutdown began, Mr. Vought has told congressional Republicans that firings are imminent. Mr. Trump has wagered that the cuts could target “a lot” of workers, and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, more specifically has estimated that the firings might range into the “thousands.”
In doing so, Mr. Trump and his top aides have reframed their planned layoffs at times as an unavoidable fiscal dilemma. On the first day of the closure, Vice President JD Vance specifically warned that layoffs might be required “to keep the American people’s essential services continuing to run.”
Many budget experts across the political spectrum later questioned that rationale.
Under the Antideficiency Act, the U.S. government generally cannot spend money if Congress has not appropriated it. But the law contains exceptions for the provision of emergency and lifesaving services, which can generally continue without interruption even during a lengthy closure.
“There is no legal basis to suggest that fully funding the military and other essential services requires eliminating jobs in other departments during a shutdown,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “They are not related.”
“Eventually, the government shutdown will end,” added Ms. Riedl, and it is likely that any deal would fund the government at a level “sufficient to employ everyone” who is already in the federal work force.