With only five days remaining to fund the government, the White House’s threat to conduct mass federal firings was a bid to maximize the pain of a possible shutdown and pressure Democrats into caving and accepting a short-term deal.
But beyond the political gamesmanship, it was also the latest step by the Trump administration to pursue deep cuts to federal programs and personnel, which conservative Republicans have long targeted out of a belief that government is too large and does too much.
The move underscored the intransigence gripping the two parties as they barrel, with no negotiations underway, toward a highly disruptive shutdown on Oct. 1 driven by opposing political incentives and policy motivations.
Democrats on Thursday condemned the threat by Mr. Trump and his top aides to fire droves of federal employees during a federal closure, and said they would not be cowed into dropping their demands for health care spending concessions because of it.
“We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader.
Hours later, Mr. Trump, who has declined to negotiate with Democrats he has accused of being not “realistic” in their demands, said a lapse in funding would be their fault.
“This is all caused by the Democrats,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
The White House began its campaign of fiscal brinkmanship earlier in the week, after Mr. Trump set, then abruptly canceled, a meeting with Democratic leaders to discuss the terms of a spending deal. The president instead attacked Democrats for blocking a Republican-written plan to fund the government into November, which they rejected because it failed to meet their demand for rollbacks of looming health care cuts.
By late Wednesday, the White House sought to ratchet up the stakes, issuing a memo to federal agencies that instructed them to prepare for mass firings in the event that the government runs out of funding on Sept. 30, the close of the fiscal year. The president’s aides also suggested that they could restrict agencies from moving around funds to preserve some of their operations during a shutdown.
The ultimatum raised the odds that the government could grind to a screeching halt next Wednesday, leaving millions of federal workers out of work or reporting for duty without pay. In a shutdown, the consequences can be wide-ranging — closing parks and museums, snarling air travel, halting food safety inspections and preventing businesses from obtaining permits and loans.
The disruptions can harm the economy as well as families and businesses, which is why presidents often seek to ease some of the pain from funding lapses. Even Mr. Trump has previously sought to cushion the blow, allowing agencies to move around funds during a five-week shutdown, the longest ever, that occurred in his first term.
But Mr. Trump has approached the latest fiscal showdown as a potential political advantage, an opening that might allow Republicans to further whittle down the size and reach of government. In his second term, the president has spared no effort to slash spending, even sometimes without the express approval of Congress, and fire thousands of federal employees.
By Thursday, it was not yet clear whether the White House would make good on its threat to begin another round of mass layoffs. In the memo, the budget office only instructed agencies to prepare reduction-in-force notices, the official federal process for firings, if Congress cannot reach a spending deal by the end of Sept. 30. The directive appeared to leave unresolved whether the Trump administration could proceed with some staffing cuts later in the year, even once funding resumes.
The memo drew pushback from one Republican on Capitol Hill, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee.
“We must pass a clean, short-term continuing resolution to prevent a harmful government shutdown and allow Congress time to complete the annual funding bills,” Ms. Collins said in a statement. “Federal employees dedicate themselves to serving the public, and they should not be treated as pawns amid a needlessly partisan impasse.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Many agencies have been trying to hire back employees who were previously laid off or fired under Mr. Trump, or who resigned under pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency. In other cases, fired workers have challenged the legality of their dismissals. Union officials sharply attacked the Trump administration on Thursday for even considering such firings near the eve of a shutdown.
“Federal employees are not bargaining chips,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement. “They are veterans, caregivers, law enforcement officers and neighbors who serve their country and fellow Americans every day. They deserve stability and respect, not pink slips and political games.”
But if the White House memo was aimed at wearing down the resolve of Democrats, there was little sign that it had changed their calculus.
“President Trump will try to abuse a shutdown — just like he’s trampled our laws for months — but that doesn’t mean he gets whatever he wants as a result,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said. “This is nothing new: Donald Trump has spent the better part of a year chaotically and indiscriminately firing — and then rehiring — essential government workers.”
Democrats have said they would not allow any stopgap spending legislation to move forward unless it also includes more than $1 trillion to continue Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire in December, and reverses cuts to Medicaid and other health programs that Republicans made over the summer.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, called the White House memo “an attempt at intimidation.”
“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one — not to govern, but to scare,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”
In March, Mr. Schumer and a group of Senate Democrats voted to allow Republicans’ temporary funding legislation to advance, in part because they argued that a shutdown would give Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, even more power to decide what money to spend and which parts of the federal bureaucracy to starve.
Mr. Vought has long sought to shrink the federal government, and has led the Trump administration’s efforts to usurp Congress’s power of the purse.
Democrats have made an entirely different calculation in the current funding dispute. They have noted that Mr. Trump continued his assault on the federal bureaucracy even after they agreed to fund the government in the spring. And they have argued that with unpopular Medicaid cuts in place and the Obamacare subsidies slated to expire, they have a mandate to demand concessions from the G.O.P., which they believe will pay a political price for refusing to agree to them.
If the subsidies expire on Dec. 31 as scheduled under current law, around four million people are projected to lose coverage starting next year, and premiums would increase for around 20 million more. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 10 million more Americans would become uninsured over the next decade as a result of the Medicaid and other health cuts included in Mr. Trump’s tax cut law.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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