The government shutdown is taking a heavy toll on federal workers, with 4,000 receiving layoff notices as President Trump ratchets up pressure on Democrats to sign off on the Republican spending plan.
Amid the turmoil, Mr. Trump has reassured military personnel that they will continue to be paid even though their civilian counterparts won’t.
“I will not allow the Democrats to hold our Military, and the entire Security of our Nation, HOSTAGE, with their dangerous Government Shutdown,” Mr. Trump said Saturday on social media.
Vice President J.D. Vance said Sunday that the resistance from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and his party forced the administration to make difficult decisions. Chief among them were shifting money to safeguard food assistance programs for low-income women and children and ensuring continued support for military personnel.
“Unfortunately, what that does mean is that some federal bureaucrats are going to have to get laid off,” Mr. Vance said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “This is not a situation that we’re excited about.”
The administration also suspended billions of dollars in infrastructure projects in New York and Chicago and canceled billions of dollars in clean energy projects in 16 states.
SEE ALSO: Republicans, Democrats spar over shutdown, as workers face layoffs and missed paychecks
The layoffs began Friday at the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury.
The number of employees who received termination notices ranged from 176 at the Homeland Security Department to nearly 1,450 at the Treasury Department, according to a labor union lawsuit against the Office of Management and Budget challenging the layoffs.
Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon blamed the layoffs on the “Democrat-led government shutdown” but said trimming the bureaucracy was warranted, regardless.
“HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy, growing its budget by 38% and its workforce by 17%. All HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions,” he said in a statement. “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”
Other departments made similar statements.
A memo from OMB ahead of the shutdown directed agencies to look for reductions in force. It said agencies should look at employees in programs, projects or activities whose discretionary funding lapsed on Oct. 1, the beginning of the fiscal year, that lack available alternative funding sources and are “not consistent with the president’s priorities.”
Roughly 750,000 nonessential federal employees were furloughed when funding lapsed on Oct. 1.
The government shutdown is heading toward its third week with no end in sight.
Senate Democrats have been filibustering a House-passed temporary spending bill to fund the government through Nov. 21, giving Congress time to work on long-term spending bills to cover the remainder of the fiscal year.
The Democrats are demanding negotiations about adding $1.5 trillion to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies and other programs. They warn that health care costs will skyrocket without action.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, accused Democrats on Sunday of using health care as a smokescreen to deflect blame for the impasse.
“They’re trying their best to distract the American people from the simple fact that they’ve chosen a partisan fight so that they can prove to their Marxist base rising in the Democrat Party that they’re willing to fight Trump and Republicans,” Mr. Johnson said on “Fox News Sunday.”
On the same show, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had a different take. The New York Democrat said his party is taking a principled stand to confront soaring health care costs. He said Republicans have consistently ignored the issue.
“My friends on the other side of the aisle, they seem to believe that health care is an extraneous issue. We don’t believe it’s an extraneous issue. It’s a central issue,” Mr. Jeffries said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Schumer said the Trump administration is “callously choosing to hurt people” with federal layoffs.
Some Republicans also came out against the firings.
Sen. Susan M. Collins, Maine Republican, said she “strongly” opposes “arbitrary layoffs” but pinned the blame on Mr. Schumer.
“Regardless of whether federal employees have been working without pay or have been furloughed, their work is incredibly important to serving the public,” she said.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, called the layoffs “poorly timed and yet another example of this administration’s punitive actions toward the federal workforce.”
“The termination of federal employees in a shutdown will further hurt hard-working Americans who have dedicated their lives to public service and jeopardize agency missions once we finally reopen the government,” she wrote on X.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked this month why the layoffs would be necessary when they haven’t been in previous shutdowns, including the 35-day shutdown in Mr. Trump’s first term. She said the president is focused on reducing the nation’s debt.
“We are $37 trillion in debt, and the federal government is currently shut down. There is no more money coming into the federal government’s coffers,” she said. “And as you’ve also seen since the beginning in January, this administration is focusing on waste, fraud and abuse, and so Democrats have given this administration an unenviable choice to have to take a look at the balance sheet and identify where these cuts and layoffs can be made.”
Labor unions decried the layoffs.
“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 Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union, representing more than 800,000 federal and D.C. government employees.
AFGE and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees filed a lawsuit late last month in San Francisco challenging the threatened layoffs.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.