The Trump administration might use a shutdown to finish the job that DOGE started.
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.
