White House budget director Russ Vought on Wednesday estimated that more than 10,000 federal workers would lose their jobs as a result of the ongoing government shutdown.
Vought promised to “keep those RIFs rolling,” referring to reduction-in-force notices agencies sent to fire government employees on Friday.
Shortly after Vought spoke, however, a federal judge in California threw uncertainty into Vought’s pledge by blocking the shutdown layoffs. The Trump administration is all but certain to challenge that ruling.
Around 4,000 federal employees have already been laid off, according to court filings, but the budget chief predicted “we’ll probably end up being north of 10,000.”
“We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy — not just the funding, but the bureaucracy — and we now have an opportunity to do that,” Vought added on The Charlie Kirk Show, speaking in his first live interview since the shutdown began.
Vought projected that the layoffs would hit agencies that do not align with the Trump administration’s priorities, including environmental justice programs at the Department of Energy and EPA, the Minority Business Development Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The comments come a day after President Donald Trump promised he would announce a new list of programs to cut Friday if the shutdown drags on through the end of the week.
“We’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we were opposed to,” Trump said Tuesday. “And they’re never going to come back in many cases.”
