The US government has shut down, and federal workers’ jobs are once again on the chopping block.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a plan to keep the government funded past September 30. While the GOP controls Congress and the White House, passing a funding bill requires 60 Senate votes under current rules, meaning some Democrats need to be on board.
Federal workers’ jobs are on the line — they could be fired, not just furloughed, as has been the case with prior government shutdowns. The Office of Management and Budget wrote a memo to federal agencies last week directing them to “consider” terminations for employees working in programs that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”
As they waited for the news, over a dozen federal workers told Business Insider on Tuesday before the start of the shutdown that they were meeting the uncertainty with feelings of anger, fear, and indifference. In the hours before the shutdown, some agencies sent emails to their employees blaming Democrats for blocking a funding deal.
A Department of Defense worker said their office won’t be affected by furloughs, so they’re not too worried. Meanwhile, a Department of the Interior employee said that the threat of terminations is weighing on workers, and another federal employee said that while they’ve dealt with the threat of imminent shutdowns before, just to have them averted at the last minute, this time feels different.
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The OMB memo did not indicate how many workers it is targeting through the reduction-in-force directive. When asked by reporters about the scale of the firings on Tuesday, Trump said that the administration “may do a lot.” The White House and OMB did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Democratic lawmakers intended to use the threat of a shutdown as a negotiating tool to receive policy wins, mostly around restoring healthcare subsidies that were cut in the GOP spending bill passed in the spring, but Republican lawmakers refused to negotiate. After Democratic leadership met with President Donald Trump on Monday, Vice President JD Vance signaled the conversation was not fruitful.
“I think we’re headed into a shutdown because Democrats won’t do the right thing,” Vance told reporters after the meeting. “I hope they change their mind.”
Federal jobs on the line
Following the DOGE office’s government cuts in the first half of the year, federal employees have become used to career uncertainty. An Internal Revenue Service employee told Business Insider that with the IRS already stretched thin, any further firings will cripple the agency and the key government services that Americans rely on.
Every federal agency is required to develop a contingency plan in the event of a government shutdown. The Treasury Department’s plan for the IRS stated that it expects to use funds from the Inflation Reduction Act to prevent a lapse in funding and intends for normal IRS operations to continue.
Other agencies are preparing for operations to be disrupted. For example, the Department of Education’s contingency plan said it plans to furlough 1,485 of its 1,700 employees. It will cease new grantmaking activities and pause reviews of civil rights complaints while continuing to disburse student loans and Pell Grants.
The Department of Labor is also planning to cease some activities during the shutdown, including data collection through the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It means that, should the shutdown continue through Friday, the jobs report would not be released. The Social Security Administration’s plan said that payments will continue to be disbursed to recipients, but tasks like overpayment processing and benefit verifications will cease.
The OMB notice said that reduction-in-force notices are in addition to any furlough notices agencies send out during the shutdown, meaning that impacted employees are expected to receive two separate notices if they are both furloughed and included in termination plans.
The Trump administration has already fired over 200,000 federal workers due to the DOGE cuts, and while the terminations were met by legal challenges, the Supreme Court ruled in July that the firings can proceed. It’s unclear when, or if, federal agencies will begin their new reduction-in-force plans as a result of the government shutdown.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday: “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”
