How the shutdown enabled the Trump administration's mass firing spree

The big picture: This is the first time an administration has used a shutdown to terminate federal workers.

• The firings appear to be in line with the overall goal of bringing the federal government under the president's control and shrinking its size, as OMB Director Russell Vought laid out in Project 2025.

Zoom in: On "The Charlie Kirk Show" last week, Vought said: "We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding, but the bureaucracy — that we now have an opportunity to do that."

• Though the shutdown does slow the administration down in some areas, Vought said it still allows his department to focus on "saving money." "If there are policy opportunities to downsize the scope of the federal government, we want to use those opportunities."
• "We have to solve the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy and have the president take control of the executive branch," Vought told Tucker Carlson last November.

Zoom out: The latest reductions in force, or RIFs, reflect Vought's vision of small government, says Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

• "This is just him taking advantage of an opportunity to try and pursue that vision, and I think it would have happened with or without the shutdown."

Between the lines: The administration is shedding people and agencies it ideologically opposes. President Trump said earlier this month that terminations would be "Democrat oriented."

• In the interview last week, Vought mentioned targeting "green New Deal programs at the Department of Energy," the Minority Business Development Agency and "environmental justice at EPA."
• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is almost entirely closed down. "It had the DNA of Elizabeth Warren," Vought said, referring to the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, who helped create the agency.

Yes, but: Some legal experts and former government officials believe these RIFs won't hold up in court.

• Still, the law is vague on whether the White House can use a shutdown to fire people, Bednar says.

• In the past, courts have mostly deferred to administrations — Congress might have to step in and explicitly prevent shutdown firings, he says.

By the numbers: So far, there have been about 4,000 shutdown terminations, all now held up in court.

• Around 300,000 federal employees outside the military or postal service — about 14% of the workforce—are expected to depart this year.
• That's led to rising unemployment, particularly in the Washington, D.C., area, and to spillover into the private sector as contractors and consultants lose work and funding.

What's next: Vought said this week that terminations would be "rolling" through the shutdown and "north of 10,000" federal workers may ultimately lose their jobs.

The bottom line: The White House's moves will make it harder to attract expert and skilled employees to a workforce tasked with scientific research, crafting policy and effecting regulations.

• There are worries, for example, about the public health risks in cutting a quarter of the Centers for Disease Control or thousands of expert workers at the IRS or the people who coordinate education for disabled kids or work on cybersecurity.

One thing seems clear: This is shift from a professional, nonpartisan civil service.

• "The foundation of the Civil Service has long been that you select people on their qualifications and not their partisan loyalty," Bednar says.