For families, businesses, and the broader US economy, the consequences of a shutdown could be vast, upending everything from some food safety inspections to the ability to visit national parks.
But the hardships could prove especially acute for millions of federal employees and active military service members, whose lives are often upended during a government closure.
Roughly 750,000 civilian federal workers will be furloughed each day beginning today, the start of the new financial year, according to congressional estimates.
Other workers, from military personnel to airport baggage claims inspectors, must continue to report for duty because they hold vital roles, but they will not be paid until funding is restored.
Yesterday, before the shutdown took effect, the White House raised the stakes even further, after Trump doubled down on a threat to fire civilian federal employees if funding lapses.
The President suggested he could also “do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them”, referring to Democrats.
Hours later, a set of unions representing federal employees sued the Trump Administration on grounds that mass layoffs during a shutdown would be unlawful.
The lawsuit, brought by unions including the American Federation of Government Employees, asked a federal court in California to invalidate a White House memo issued last week that initiated the layoff process, formally known as a reduction in force.
“Announcing plans to fire potentially tens of thousands of federal employees simply because Congress and the Administration are at odds on funding the government past the end of the financial year is not only illegal — it’s immoral and unconscionable,” said Everett Kelley, the national president of AFGE, which says it represents more than 800,000 government workers.
In their court filing, unions also pointed to more recent guidance from the Trump Administration, which exempted some officials from furlough so that they could work during a shutdown and carry out the layoff plans.
The lawyers said the arrangement was “contrary to federal law,” as they urged the court to strike down “the cynical use of federal employees as a pawn” in the funding fight.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The threats left many government workers bracing for yet another painful blow under Trump, who has waged a highly disruptive campaign to reduce the size of the federal government.
It was not immediately clear how agencies would implement the White House directive that had set in motion the plan for mass layoffs. Many agencies have already shed workers and, in some cases, have had to hire them back.
Another round of widespread cuts could further deplete the ranks of the federal government, which is already expected to have about 300,000 fewer workers on its payroll in December compared with January, officials have said.
These existing cuts to the workforce include retirements under the government’s incentive programme as well as layoffs, some of which have been challenged in court by union officials.
Democrats have repeatedly attacked the White House in recent days for seeking to use federal workers as bargaining chips in a bid to pressure them into supporting a short-term funding deal that would keep federal spending mostly at current levels into November.
Party leaders have refused to accept that approach, which Republicans adopted in the House earlier in September, because the stop-gap does not extend a set of expiring subsidies that help millions of people pay for health insurance.
“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since Day One — not to govern, but to scare,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said in a statement last week. “This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the Government.”
The Democrats’ refusal to accept that deal only has emboldened Trump.
At one point, Trump told reporters yesterday that his top budget aide, Russell Vought, could “trim the budget to a level that you couldn’t do any other way”. And he obliquely referenced “benefits” as one possible focus, as he accused Democrats of “taking a risk by having a shutdown”.
“When you shut it down, you have to do layoffs,” Trump said later in the day, in comments that appeared to conflate the necessity of furloughs in a shutdown with his prior threat of layoffs.
“So we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and they’re Democrats.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Tony Romm
Photograph by: Meridith Kohut
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