White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during the daily press briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on October 01, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
On Wednesday, President Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, told House Republicans that the administration will start firing federal employees in the next “one to two” days, according to NBC News.
Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that layoffs are “imminent.”
“The president has directed his Cabinet, and the Office of Management and Budget is working with agencies across the board to identify where cuts can be made,” Leavitt told reporters. “And we believe that layoffs are imminent.”
Prior to the shutdown, Vought issued a memo that threatened mass firings, writing that federal agencies would be directed to consider “reduction in force” notices for all employees in defunded programs, projects or activities not deemed “consistent with the President’s priorities.”
Russell Vought. (Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
At a White House event on Tuesday, Trump framed the shutdown as an opportunity to “get rid of a lot of things we didn’t want,” adding that “they’d be Democrat things.”
“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Trump said. “When you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected. And they’re Democrats, they’re going to be Democrats.”
Critics have accused the Trump administration of using the shutdown as a pretext for cuts it wanted to make anyway. “A shutdown provides no new legal authority to engage in mass layoffs, nor does it provide any sound management or policy reason to do so,” the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argued in a memo.
On Tuesday, two labor unions representing federal workers sued the administration over its mass layoff threats. The lawsuit accused the White House of “the cynical use of federal employees as a pawn in Congressional deliberations,” noting that under current law, “all employees who are not paid during a shutdown — whether furloughed or excepted — must receive back pay for that time period once funding is reinstated.”
In response, Republicans have argued that the White House can fire whoever it wants during a shutdown.
“It provides an opportunity,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN on Wednesday. “[Democratic Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer has provided the Trump White House with an opportunity to downsize the government on priorities and policies and personnel that they deem to be nonessential. … [Schumer] is giving the authority to the executive. That’s how the system works.”
