During the first eight months of his second presidency, Donald Trump has tried to hollow out the federal workforce by any means possible, including paying more than 200,000 people not to work, disassembling entire agencies via the Department of Government Efficiency, and fighting in court any effort by employees to hang on to their job. This week, Trump could try his most audacious move yet: using a government shutdown to conduct mass firings.
The congressional impasse over spending may now supercharge Trump’s efforts to slash the civil service—just as the bulk of those being paid not to work lose their job when the fiscal year ends. Should the government shut down tomorrow, it could lead to the dramatic winnowing of its size that conservatives have sought for decades. The complexities of collective-bargaining agreements and civil-service protections, not to mention the real-life impact of eliminating people who provide benefits to the public, have stalled past efforts to shrink the government. Trump has shown no inclination to slow down.
Voluntary-resignation programs were broadly available to most federal workers earlier this year. Now Trump is using the threat of permanent job cuts to specifically target jobs that don’t align with his priorities, aides told us. The president, who in recent weeks has been firing federal prosecutors who don’t bend to his will, has become bolder in his push to reshape the government to suit his preferences. And he’s empowered Russell Vought, the White House budget director who has long been an evangelist of slashing the government, to cut away.
Vought will do “what DOGE couldn’t do,” one senior White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy told us. “He’s wanted to hurt the bureaucracy; he’s wanted to shrink the bureaucracy. This might be his chance.”
Trump’s efforts to cut the workforce have not always gone as expected. Even before the threat of a shutdown, the administration had started spending billions of dollars to pay some employees to not work—an experiment so bizarre and unprecedented that many of the federal workers who received the offer initially thought it was a hoax. The administration’s gambit to entice government workers to leave their job and take an extended paid vacation—with the strong implication that those who declined could later be fired—led to a wave of attrition larger than many officials expected. Some agencies, including the IRS and the Department of Labor, have recently tried to recruit departed employees to return to their old job at the end of their months-long leave, noting that core bureaucratic functions are collapsing after the mass exodus of top talent.
About 275,000 federal workers—more than a tenth of the workforce—will have voluntarily left the civil service by the end of December, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management told us in an email. The official, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to disclose internal data, described the departures as “the largest and most effective workforce-reduction plan in history.” The official did not provide details on how much the government is paying people not to work.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, told us that he spent months trying to quantify the total amount taxpayers have shelled out for what he called the “waste, chaos, confusion, and recklessness” of the downsizing effort. He and other Democrats on a Senate investigative subcommittee scoured public data, coming up with a rough estimate of $21 billion. That includes about $15 billion for employees who participated in what is known as the “Deferred Resignation Program” buyouts and more than $6 billion for payments to employees involuntarily placed on paid administrative leave for months.
“What we have documented is simply the out-of-pocket costs, the immediate numerically verifiable costs from the public record,” Blumenthal told us. But that, he said, is only part of the toll: It doesn’t account for ways the cuts have made the government less efficient, with longer wait times and bureaucratic hiccups at agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs and the IRS. “The impact is wide-ranging and pervasive, and it can’t be measured just in dollar terms immediately,” he said.
Although taxpayers have footed a steep bill for paying workers not to work, Trump-administration officials believe that the project will ultimately save far more than it costs. The OPM official estimated the long-term savings from the shrunken federal payroll, which will kick in once the deferred resignations become official tomorrow, to be $28 billion annually. In a letter responding to Blumenthal’s report and trying to prove “that we haven’t all lost our minds,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote last month that his critics did not understand “the simple difference between one-time severance costs and ongoing annual cost savings.”
Perhaps more important in the minds of some Trump-administration officials, the wave of voluntary departures has acclimatized the public to the idea of dramatically downsizing the civil service. Trump gave the billionaire Elon Musk broad latitude shortly after taking office, allowing DOGE to fire thousands of probationary employees and gut USAID. There were about 2.4 million civilian federal workers at the beginning of the year. By the end of December, that number is expected to be closer to 2.1 million, Kupor has said. That estimate does not take into account any additional reductions from mass layoffs that the administration has threatened will occur if federal funding lapses this week.
In a memo last week, Vought, the OMB director, instructed federal agencies to prepare for significant “reduction-in-force” notices, or RIFs, to eliminate employees and projects that are not in line with Trump’s priorities. Some in the president’s orbit are encouraging him to take a hard-line stance. White House aides and allies believe that they will have the advantage as Washington careers toward tomorrow’s deadline. Some believe that a shutdown would give Trump fresh authority to fire civil servants en masse, including those who have been on paid administrative leave for months due to court rulings that prevented their termination.
For some of the workers who accepted offers earlier this year to resign and continue receiving full pay and benefits through tomorrow, the threat of potentially being fired from their job during a mass reduction was a major factor in their decision, according to several we spoke with.
“I read Project 2025 from front to back far more times than I would like to admit to anybody,” said one former nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, who, like others, spoke to us anonymously to avoid retaliation from the White House. “I tried to find slivers of silver linings; I tried to find them. And I didn’t. I did not think that this was going to be a regular 12-round fight. I saw this as a massacre.”
The nurse, who had worked at the VA for more than three decades, opted to retire early this spring and continue receiving pay through the end of the fiscal year.
If the goal of Vought’s memo was to scare Democrats into retreat, it failed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer incited a mini revolt within his party by surrendering a springtime fight over spending, arguing at the time that a shutdown would be more damaging than agreeing to a GOP spending deal, because the administration would have the authority to decide the fate of programs and personnel.
But Schumer’s thinking has changed, prompted both by the realization that grassroots Democrats want their party to put up a tougher fight against Trump and by the president’s continued drive to usurp Congress’s authority over spending. In the intervening months, Trump employed a maneuver to cancel congressionally approved spending and received the Supreme Court’s blessing to reshape the federal bureaucracy by executive order. “The world’s a different place right now,” Schumer told reporters earlier this month.
For federal workers, Vought’s threat could transform the stakes of a shutdown from a forced paid vacation—Congress has always approved retroactive pay for furloughed employees—to a life-altering event. But as a negotiating tactic, the memo landed much differently among its intended audience. “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare,” Schumer said in response. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government.”
Democrats believe that they are better prepared now for a spending showdown than they were in March. The party is largely unified around its demand that the GOP extend health-insurance subsidies in the Affordable Care Act; if they expire at the end of the year, prices will shoot up for millions of people.
But for the moment, Republicans have a simpler argument: They have proposed a mostly straightforward extension of federal spending for seven weeks to buy time for broader budget negotiations. The GOP is divided over the subsidies, but even if they are not addressed in this bill, lawmakers will still have time to act before they expire at the end of the year, Republicans in Congress have argued.
Trump has been more on message this time than he was during the previous government shutdown he presided over, in December 2018 and January 2019. At the time, he publicly accepted blame for an impending shutdown—“I’ll be the one to shut it down,” he told a grinning Schumer in the Oval Office as cameras rolled. The president later caved after 35 days of partial government closure. Furloughed workers received five weeks worth of back pay, the last time such a large number of employees were paid to sit at home.
On Friday, Trump pointed the finger at Democratic leaders. “These people are crazy, the Democrats,” he said. “So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down, but they’re the ones that are shutting down.”
Trump has also been trying to reframe the debate over the spending legislation by falling back on two issues that helped him triumph in last year’s election: immigration and transgender rights. He has sought to recast Democrats’ demand for more health-care spending as a ploy to give taxpayer-funded benefits to undocumented immigrants and has accused the party of supporting “transgender for everybody.”
Federal workers have become almost an afterthought and ultimately could become collateral damage in a lopsided partisan standoff, says Abby André, the executive director of the Impact Project, which has been tracking the fates of federal workers during Trump’s second term.
“Games of chicken are really common in the lead-up to shutdowns,” she told me. “But this administration has demonstrated a willingness to follow through on threats that previous administrations would have thought ill-advised for any number of reasons—chief among them having a functioning federal government.”
The lesson many Trump-administration officials have taken from eight months of paying federal workers to stay at home is that many functions of the government can be eliminated without massive public backlash. Most of Voice of America’s programming, for example, was shut down after Trump signed an executive order in March calling for the U.S. Agency for Global Media to be eliminated.
Patsy Widakuswara, the White House bureau chief for VOA, is among hundreds of journalists who have been on paid administrative leave since then. She is leading a lawsuit to get her job back and force VOA to restart operations in much of the world. But many of the broadcaster’s workers, who now face imminent risk of being terminated, are “paralyzed by fear” that Trump could close an agency that has been in place since World War II, she told us. Collecting her salary as a GS-14 employee—which amounts to $142,000 to $185,000 a year—while not being allowed to cover the Trump administration’s actions has been demoralizing, she said.
“I feel terrible as a VOA journalist, and I also feel horrified as an American taxpayer, because this is all waste,” she said. “The intention is not to improve anything. The intention is to just dismantle.”
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