by Daniel Johnson
October 11, 2025
Trump has also mused publicly that Democrat workers should be fired.
More than 4,000 federal employees received layoffs notices on Oct.10 following multiple reports indicating that the administration had chosen not to give back pay to furloughed federal workers who had been designated “non-essential” workers after the government shutdown due to the inability of the Democrats and the Republican Party, who control all the levers of power, to come to a compromise.
According to CNN, the firings represent Donald Trump making good on a threat to fire workers if the Democrats didn’t agree to his strong arm negotiation tactics and agree to a budget largely dictated by the Republican Party.
To that end, Trump has not only blamed the Democrats for the shutdown, but has also mused publicly that the workers who should be fired are Democrats.
“We figure they started this thing, so they should be Democrat-oriented,” Trump said, in regards to the federal workers, whom he noted that he would fire “a lot” of. Like Trump, the White House and Republican leaders have cast the blame for the shutdown on the Democratic Party.
As an OMB spokesperson told CNN on Oct. 10, “We regret that the Democrats have shut down the government and forced workers to be put in this position.”
However, the layoffs are not the fault of the Democratic Party, that decision rests squarely with the party in power, that is, the Republicans.
As Sen. Patty Murray, (D-WA) the top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, noted in a post to her Twitter (X) account, “Once again: if President Trump & Russ Vought decide to do more mass firings, they are CHOOSING to inflict more pain on people. ‘Reductions in force’ are not a new power these bozos get in a shutdown. We can’t be intimidated by these crooks.”
Likewise, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated that “nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this. They don’t have to do it; they want to,” According to Schumer, the layoffs are “deliberate chaos.”
The American Federation of Government Employees referred to the actions of the Trump administration as disgraceful in its own statement, noting that the move to fire furloughed workers is unprecedented in American history.
“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,” Everett Kelley, the union’s national president, said.
Although it is not known how many of the workers the Trump administration has laid off are Black, both government workers and Democrats, if Trump’s threat on that front is even credible, are camps that Black Americans tend to fall into.
Moreover, according to Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a government shutdown does not give an administration any additional power to declare a reduction in force, the tactic that the Republican administration is using to further downsize the federal government.
“There is no extra legal authority on their part to conduct RIFs on the basis of a shutdown,” he told CNN on Oct. 7.
Stier noted in an additional statement on Oct. 10 that the administration is attempting to use the employment status of federal workers as a kind of hostage situation.
The Trump administration, he said, is using “civil servants as hostages in this ongoing breakdown of our public institutions. These unnecessary and misguided reductions in force will further hollow out our federal government, rob it of critical expertise and hobble its capacity to effectively serve the public.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) echoed the point about utilizing public servants as hostages in a conversation with Vox‘s Sean Rameswaram on a recent episode of the outlet’s “Today Explained” podcast.
As she told him, “He’s saying, ‘We think that Democrats care about the federal workers, care about the people who are doing your food inspection, care about the people who keep planes flying in the air, care about those people. And the threat is, we will fire them.’ Why? Out of spite. I just gotta stop and say on this one, what kind of person does that? What kind of person says that he is president of the United States, and his plan to run government is to take people who are doing the work and punish them for his own political reasons? That’s not someone who’s looking out for America.”
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