Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said he expects 10,000 federal workers to be laid off during the government shutdown, noting 4,000 have already been sent reduction-in-force notices since Oct. 1.
Vought said much of the reporting on the layoffs so far has been conducted based on “court snapshots” that have indicated numbers in the 4,000s. He said the number of RIFs will “probably end up being more than 10,000.” Vought reported the RIF numbers in his first interview since the shutdown began on the Charlie Kirk Show.
There have been approximately 4,128 federal employees sent reduction-in-force notices so far during the shutdown, court documents show. RIF notices have been sent to approximately 600 Department of Commerce employees, 466 Education Department employees, 179 Energy Department employees, 28 Environmental Protection Agency employees, 982 Department of Health and Human Services employees, 442 Department of Housing and Urban Development employees, 54 Department of Homeland Security employees, and 1,377 Treasury Department employees, according to OMB senior adviser Stephen Billy.
“We’re going to keep those RIFs rolling throughout the shutdown because we think it’s important to stay on offense for the American taxpayer,” Vought said. “We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding, but the bureaucracy, that we now have an opportunity to do that.”
However, Vought made these comments just before U.S. District Judge Susan Yvonne Illston temporarily ordered a halt to federal workforce RIFs during the shutdown. The order in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California came in a court case filed by several unions against the Trump administration over the RIF measures.
The American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO are lead plaintiffs in the shutdown RIFs case. Yesterday evening, HHS admitted as part of the court case that it had wrongfully sent RIF notices to 778 additional HHS employees. Those 778 employees are not counted as part of the 4,128 total figure. Several Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials and scientists were sent RIF notifications as part of the HHS layoffs.
Vought said Wednesday that during the shutdown, OMB employees have had the time to “prioritize the RIFs” as opposed to other daily tasks of the office that occur while the government is fully funded. He also spoke to the indications of the lapse in funding of federal agencies caused by the shutdown.
“So if there’s no funding for these programs, then what would you have us do? Is it not to make an assumption that you don’t intend to fund these in the future?” Vought said.
In her order on Wednesday, Illston, a Clinton appointee, said the Trump administration had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending.”
JUDGE HALTS TRUMP’S FEDERAL WORKER LAYOFFS DURING GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
“It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs, and it has a human cost,” she said. “It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated.”
OMB did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s requests for comment.