Federal Employees Have Been Asked to Tell Their Bosses if They Get Fired
Multiple people at multiple agencies said their bosses have told them to email up the chain if they hear about RIFs, because, per one source, "they probably won't be told if people are fired."
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It may seem difficult to demonstrate a profound sadistic glee inside a simple four-word statement free of rhetorical flourish or extravagant punctuation, and perhaps it is just the lingering bouquet of brimstone and fearsweats that follow in his wake, but OMB director Russell Vought pulls it off: "The RIFs have begun," he posted on Friday afternoon, referring to the reductions-in-force that he and others in the administration have repeatedly promised would accompany an extended government shutdown.
The details of said RIFs are still not entirely clear, though a spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that employees across multiple divisions had begun receiving notices. Elsewhere, silence reigned.
"No news yet on RIFs," said one source inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "As expected we've gotten no communications about layoffs or withholding back pay."
The potential firings, according to unions representing federal employees and basically anyone paying attention to the laws that govern these sorts of things, are likely illegal.
"It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country," said Everett Kelley, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, in a statement. "In AFGE’s 93 years of existence under several presidential administrations – including during Trump’s first term – no president has ever decided to fire thousands of furloughed workers during a government shutdown."
At the Environmental Protection Agency, things have been somewhat odd, even considering, well, everything. In the first days of the shutdown, a source told me that an internal FAQ page included information about what are known as "carryover" funds which allow operations to continue even as funding lapsed — and then overnight that information disappeared and no carryover info was available. Still, while other agencies aggressively furloughed employees, the EPA kept running until Friday morning, more than a week into the shutdown.
"The first EPA employees are being furloughed. Very small group so far," another source at EPA told me today, news confirmed by other outlets as well. "No one is quite sure how the EPA is still operating when all the other agencies have begun significant furloughs." There is what the source called "wild speculation" that the EPA was using money clawed back from Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or Inflation Reduction Act spending, but the details are, obviously, murky.
That murkiness is sort of a recurring theme among people I've heard from recently. Multiple people at multiple agencies said their bosses have told them to email up the chain if they hear about RIFs, because, per one source, "they probably won't be told if people are fired."
Another employee inside the Commerce Department said they have heard "a whole lot of nothing so far... other than missing our first paycheck this week." They also received a notice to tell the bosses "if we hear about a RIF."
And of course all this is going down after nine months of other attempted firings, deferred resignation demands, funding rescissions, and more. HHS, apparently targeted early in this new round, already has lost something like 20,000 employees. Basically every agency is limping along as a shell of what it was a year ago.
And yet, many of them were pushing for some fight from Democrats before the shutdown hit, and that sentiment seems to remain as those Dems have, surprisingly, shown some spine to this point.
"Every other fed I've talked to agrees how much it sucks to be furloughed, but also that this shutdown needs to continue until the administration starts respecting the rule of law," said a NOAA employee. "Even the conservative Republicans."
