The top official at the Trump administration’s budget office said that the number of federal job cuts during the ongoing government shutdown could exceed 10,000; while a federal judge put the layoffs on hold temporarily.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought appeared on “The Charlie Kirk Show” on Wednesday at the White House and said the administration’s efforts to cut the federal workforce in the midst of the shutdown are likely to grow beyond the roughly 4,000 workers who’ve received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices thus far.
“That’s just a snapshot, and I think it’ll get much higher,” Vought said. “I think we’ll probably end up being north of 10,000.”
“We’re going to keep those RIFs rolling throughout this shutdown, because we think it’s important to stay on offense for the American taxpayer,” he added.
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The White House budget chief said the Trump administration wants to go beyond cutting back the workforce to closing down parts of the federal bureaucracy.
“We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding,” Vought said.
The administration’s efforts to cut the workforce through layoffs were temporarily blocked on Wednesday by a federal court ruling.
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Following a hearing in San Francisco, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston granted a request by a pair of government employee unions to block the administration’s layoffs at over 30 agencies while the case plays out.
Illston cited comments made by President Donald Trump as well as Vought that she said showed explicit political motivation for the layoffs, such as Trump saying the cuts would target “Democrat agencies.”
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“You can’t do that in a nation of laws. And we have laws here, and the things that are being articulated here are not within the law,” said Illston, who was appointed to the judiciary during the Clinton administration.
Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Hedges argued the unions must bring their claims to a federal labor board before going to court.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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