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Trump shutdown layoffs affect bipartisan priorities
U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at the White House, following his annual physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 10, 2025.
Ken Cedeno | Reuters
President Donald Trump has vowed to target only “Democrat Agencies” for permanent staffing cuts amid the government shutdown — but the administration’s layoffs so far have affected programs and services that cut across party lines.
The White House on Friday issued thousands of reduction-in-force notices, known as RIFs.
Around 4,200 federal employees from at least eight departments and agencies were affected.
The department sustaining the largest cuts was the Treasury Department, where nearly 1,450 staffers received RIF notices.
The RIFs there included cutting the entire 83-person staff of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which invests in public-private partnerships to support lower-income communities, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The CDFI has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Congress. In March, after Trump signed an executive order targeting the fund for cuts, a group of 23 senators wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to reaffirm “the critical role it plays in the communities it serves.”
The letter noted that every dollar provided to CDFI “generates at least eight more dollars from private-sector investment.”
The signatories included a group of Republican senators: Mike Crapo of Idaho, Montana’s Tim Sheehy, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde-Smith, and Jim Justice of West Virginia.
In late July, a longer list of Republican and Democratic senators urged White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to swiftly give CDFI the funding that Congress appropriated for it.
CDFI employees who received RIF notices on Friday were told that their service would end Dec. 13, the Journal reported.
The second-largest number of RIFs was issued to employees at the Health and Human Services Department, where more than 1,300 employees were reportedly affected.
But the terminations of about 700 staffers at DHS, who work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were reportedly reversed the next day.
But other fired employees, including those from the CDC’s Washington field office, its Injury Center and its Division of Violence Prevention, will not be rehired, The New York Times reported.
At the Education Department, 466 employees received RIFs.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, wrote on social media on Friday that the hundreds of Education Department impacting special education services, school grants and more.
“Special education oversight. Grants to high-need schools. Protection of civil rights. Gone,” she Pringle wrote. “This administration is destroying our education system from the inside out.”
The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, where some of the cuts reportedly took place, is among the offices targeted in Project 2025, the right-wing manual for a major government overhaul.
Some Republican senators have spoken out against the firings by the Trump administration.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Friday that she “strongly oppose[s]” Vought’s attempt to permanently lay off furloughed workers, even as she blamed the shutdown on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, wrote in an X post Friday, “There is no question this is poorly timed and yet another example of this administration’s punitive actions toward the federal workforce.”
“The termination of federal employees in a shutdown will further hurt hard-working Americans who have dedicated their lives to public service and jeopardize agency missions once we finally re-open the government,” she wrote.
The Trump administration, which blames Democrats for the shutdown that hit Day 14 on Tuesday, has argued that the firings are an unavoidable consequence of the federal funding lapse, though that has not been the case in prior shutdowns.
At the same time, Trump has touted the prospect of mass cuts as an “unprecedented opportunity” to eliminate parts of the government that his Republican Party dislikes.
His administration has already made clear through its Department of Government Efficiency that slashing the federal bureaucracy is a major priority, though that group’s cuts have fallen short of its initial goals.
The president’s latest firing threats are explicitly partisan.
On the second day of the shutdown, Trump said he was considering cutting “Democrat Agencies” on either a temporary or permanent basis.
During a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, he said, “We’re only cutting Democrat programs.”
Democrats will “get a little taste of their own medicine,” he added.
What that meant was unclear, as federal agencies and programs are not divided by party.
Trump, at the meeting, described them as “very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly.”
