After congressional appropriations lapsed and a government shutdown began at midnight on Oct. 1, the Trump administration now warns that further federal employee layoffs are imminent.
It’s unclear which agencies will move forward with potential layoffs, beyond at least one agency — the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — that on Wednesday issued layoff notices. Vice President JD Vance doubled down on the Office of Management and Budget’s last week’s directive to terminate more federal employees in the case of a government shutdown.
“If this thing drags on for another few days, or, God forbid, another few weeks, we are going to have to lay people off,” Vance told reporters during a White House press conference Wednesday afternoon. “We’re going to have to save money in some places so that essential services don’t get turned off in other places.”
OMB Director Russell Vought took a more immediate stance on how quickly he expected RIFs to take place. In a private call with House Republicans on Wednesday, Vought said agency RIFs would begin “in a day or two,” according to reporting from Politico.
The Trump administration’s pursuit of further layoffs illustrates a much more permanent impact on federal employees under the current government shutdown. In past shutdowns, hundreds of thousands of federal employees faced furloughs, but they returned to their positions and were provided with back pay once the shutdown ended.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that approximately 750,000 federal employees will be furloughed in the current shutdown, ultimately costing the government $400 million per day to compensate them.
When asked to clarify the timeline for how soon RIFs would begin, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt implied that they would be coming in a matter of days.
“Two days. Imminent. Very soon. All of those things are very synonymous with one another,” she said.
But the feasibility of actually implementing RIFs in such a short timespan has been called into question by some federal workforce experts. The federal RIF process takes months to complete, since it involves complicated steps of prioritizing employees based on tenure, veterans’ preference, length of service and employee performance. The process can also open agencies to legal issues, since federal employees may challenge RIF actions if they believe there were errors in the implementation.
The vast majority of federal workforce reductions this year have not come from RIFs. Out of the approximately 200,000 federal employees who have left their jobs this year, about 154,000 departures were attributable to employees who opted into the deferred resignation program (DRP).
So far this year, approximately 25,000 federal employees have been removed as part of a RIF, according to information compiled by the Partnership for Public Service. That represents about 13% of the Trump administration’s total federal workforce reductions. It’s also roughly on par with how many employees were removed as part of the mass terminations of probationary employees in February and March.
Some of the largest RIFs this year have occurred at the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Agency for International Development, leading to the loss of roughly 10,000 HHS employees and 8,400 USAID employees.
Still, paired with the larger workforce departures this year through the DRP, Partnership for Public Service President and CEO Max Stier said the current government shutdown has “especially high stakes.”
“The administration has already haphazardly removed tens of thousands of federal employees from the government, causing disruption and long-term harm to vital services that millions of Americans rely on,” Stier said Wednesday. “This shutdown will only compound that problem by generating additional service outages and customer service backlogs.”
Despite the funding lapse shuttering many federal programs, the Office of Personnel Management told agencies that any RIF-related work should be considered “excepted” for the purposes of a government shutdown. Federal employees who are working on implementing any potential RIFs can continue their work throughout the shutdown, OPM clarified in guidance it published over the weekend.
But any RIFs that do take place would still require at 60-day notice period to federal employees who would be removed from their jobs, OPM added. The notice period would make any impacted federal employees eligible for retroactive pay once the shutdown ends, for up to 60 days after receiving a RIF notice, regardless of whether they are furloughed or excepted.
OPM also said furloughed federal employees can still use government equipment for a few limited reasons during the shutdown — including to check if there are updates on their agencies’ RIF plans.
At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, upcoming RIF layoffs are expected to impact employees working in USPTO’s Rocky Mountain Regional Outreach Office in Denver, Colorado. About 1% of USPTO’s workforce received RIF notices Wednesday morning.
It remains uncertain, however, why USPTO is pursuing a RIF in response to OMB’s memo. The agency is fee-funded and remains open during government shutdowns — putting it outside the employee categories that OMB encouraged agencies to target for RIFs. The OMB memo told agencies to consider removing federal employees whose work is furloughed during a shutdown, who don’t have alternative sources of funding and whose program areas are “not consistent with the president’s priorities.”
It’s also unclear whether agencies would continue with any potential RIF plans once the government shutdown ends. In its memo last week, OMB told agencies they do not need to move forward with RIFs once fiscal 2026 spending is enacted. But the Trump administration still encouraged agencies to “revise their RIFs as needed to retain the minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions.”
At the same time, two federal unions are now suing the Trump administration over OMB’s directive for agencies to move forward with shutdown-related RIFs. The unions argue that the actions run counter to federal law, “because carrying out RIFs is plainly not a permitted function that can lawfully continue during a shutdown.”
Attorneys for the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who filed the lawsuit Tuesday, are asking the court to grant a preliminary injunction in their case.
Democrats in Congress are also questioning the legality of pursuing RIFs in a shutdown. Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) argued that there is no legal basis for OMB’s directive to conduct further RIFs. In a statement Wednesday, Walkinshaw alleged that the Trump administration’s actions violate the Antideficiency Act, which bars agencies from obligating or spending funds that Congress hasn’t yet appropriated.
The threat of further RIFs also comes just one day after the 154,000 federal employees who accepted the administration’s DRP offer earlier this year were officially separated from government. Rob Shriver, former acting director of OPM during the Biden administration, said he has spoken with many federal employees who “really struggled” with their decision to opt into the DRP.
“We’ve seen a range of different actions from the administration since then that probably has caused some folks to second guess yourselves,” Shriver, currently managing director of Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong initiative, wrote in a LinkedIn post Tuesday. “We’re here to support all of you — and all of the feds who are still on the job or have been RIF’d or had to leave for other reasons.”
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email drew.friedman@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at drewfriedman.11
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