White House tells agencies to prep mass layoffs for shutdown

Niels Lesniewski, CQ-Roll Call on Sep 25, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s budget office plans to advise federal program managers to fire employees whose paychecks are financed by annual appropriations if a partial government shutdown begins Oct. 1, rather than just furloughing them as is the usual practice.

An Office of Management and Budget memo, obtained Wednesday night ahead of it being sent to agency heads, said they should consider reduction-in-force or “RIF” notices in cases where there’s no other funding mechanism and the activity they work on is “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

Congress has not yet passed a stopgap funding patch to tide agencies over beyond the end of the current fiscal year. The House on Friday passed a “clean” seven-week extension, but Senate Democrats blocked it because it would not, among other things, renew expiring health insurance tax credits and roll back health care cuts enacted in Republicans’ “big, beautiful” budget package this summer.

The memo, which was first reported by Politico, is a clear warning shot to Senate Democrats as that chamber prepares to return to session on Monday, with less than 48 hours before a partial shutdown would begin.

“We remain hopeful that Democrats in Congress will not trigger a shutdown and the steps outlined above will not be necessary,” the White House memo says.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has long advocated for slashing the size of the federal government, and the unusual directive to agencies is a major escalation in the partisan standoff.

The notice points out that the GOP reconciliation package would provide a mandatory cash infusion for Trump priorities, which included over $150 billion for Pentagon military capabilities and more than $170 billion for border security and immigration enforcement.

Outside of those activities and other, more traditional ones funded through mandatory spending like Social Security and Medicare, all bets are off, the OMB memo says.

“Programs that did not benefit from an infusion of mandatory appropriations will bear the brunt of a shutdown,” the directive to agencies says. “With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out.”

Once fiscal 2026 appropriations are enacted, the memo says, agencies “should revise their RIFs as needed to retain the minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, both New York Democrats, over the weekend asked Trump for a meeting to discuss keeping the government open. After initially accepting the invitation, Trump later reversed course and blamed Democrats for steering the country into a shutdown.

“This is an attempt at intimidation. Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one — not to govern, but to scare,” Schumer said in a statement late Wednesday. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government.”