By Phil Mattingly, Adam Cancryn, Sarah Ferris, CNN
(CNN) — A memo from the White House budget office telling federal agencies to prepare plans for mass firings should the government shut down signaled a dramatic escalation in a funding staredown with fewer potential off-ramps as next week’s deadline nears.
But it also provided the first glimpse of the Trump administration’s internal operational planning that, up to Wednesday night, had been shrouded in a level of secrecy that broke from the approach of past administrations of both parties.
Those efforts center on the agency contingency plans that make up the bespoke guidance documents for the federal workforce in the event of a funding lapse, which have long been posted publicly and updated every few years. The most recent agency plans, submitted during the Biden administration, were pulled offline earlier this year with no explanation.
Officials across several agencies said they’d been largely in the dark about the White House plans, and many were scrambling to deliver the requested information detailed in the OMB memo. OMB officials held their first shutdown planning call with their agency counterparts earlier this week.
The threat of mass firings came as the White House seeks to amplify pressure on Democrats ahead of next week’s funding deadline, and signal that President Donald Trump would take advantage of a shutdown to accelerate his priorities in the exact manner that Democratic lawmakers — including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — feared earlier this year.
Schumer in March argued for backing a GOP funding bill to keep the government open at the expense of angering his base. But with Democratic leaders vowing this time to hold steady on their demands, Trump officials are trying to shake that resolve by making clear the ways they would maximize the pain of a prolonged closure.
The standoff is opportune timing for OMB Director Russ Vought and a faction of administration officials who have long pushed for further workforce cuts, two people familiar with the internal dynamics said, offering a potential chance to carry out the kind of government-wide reductions that have so far proven politically unpopular while simultaneously blaming Democrats for fueling them.
The Wednesday night memo tracks closely with something each agency has been navigating since Trump’s first day in office: executive orders, guidance memorandums and regulatory proposals reshaping the federal workforce, career employee classification system and the protections that have defined it for decades.
“You could fire people now, you could fire people in December, you could do the large-scale reductions in force at any time,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a longtime GOP policy adviser. “But it’s now part of rhetorical positioning that the White House has chosen.”
On Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio warned that there could be “permanent cuts,” including the layoffs described in Vought’s memo, if a potential shutdown is dragged out, and argued that Democrats would be to blame.
“What we don’t know is how long this is going to last, so if it starts to last too long, then we’re going to have to make permanent cuts,” the Republican told reporters, arguing that the onus is on congressional Democrats to accept the House-passed stop gap funding package to avert a shutdown. “If the Democrats continue to hold this hostage for obscene amounts of spending, then we’re going to have to make changes to the way the federal budget is structured.”
But not all Republicans have appeared eager to make the threat the centerpiece of the party’s shutdown messaging.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who leads the Senate spending panel, said that federal employees “should not be treated as pawns” in the funding fight. And among Republican strategists who believed the GOP’s support for a clean funding extension gave them the upper hand in the standoff, there is growing anxiety over the prospect that the White House’s rhetoric and layoff threats could weaken that advantage.
“Trump is going to exert whatever power he can, he’s going to exact whatever pain he can,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye. “That could backfire — and there’s certainly the risk of that especially if we start seeing firings in areas that we haven’t seen before that directly impact voters’ lives.”
At the White House Thursday, Trump and his top aides focused on Democrats, accusing them of repeatedly wanting to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies as a way of funding health care for undocumented immigrants.
“They never change,” Trump said in the Oval Office of Democrats, immediately pivoting away from a question about his administration’s mass firing plans. “They want to open up the borders.”
Democrats double down
While senior aides in both parties across Washington Thursday said they were unsurprised by Vought’s missive, the threat of mass firings underscores the high stakes for Democrats as many in the party acknowledge a shutdown is likely inevitable at this point.
The concerns are particularly acute for lawmakers representing seats with large numbers of federal workers, like Maryland or Virginia — though, at least for now, it’s not enough to force Democrats to back off their demands.
Instead, for multiple Democrats, Vought’s move has only hardened their party’s resolve not to yield to the GOP’s funding plan without a win on health care, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
Top Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, dismissed Vought’s memo as a scare tactic.
“We will not be intimidated by Russ Vought, who is completely and totally out of control. The OMB has been illegally shutting down parts of the government throughout the entire year, and the notion that Democrats are going to be intimidated by this guy, when all he has done is send a message to voters in Virginia and across the country that Republicans are determined to hurt the American people,” said the New York Democrat.
Democrats said they did not believe that voters — even fired federal workers themselves — would listen to Trump when he blamed Democrats, instead of his own budget office, for the layoffs.
“If Trump’s master plan is that federal workers will be on Republicans’ side, they’re f**king morons,” one senior aide to a moderate House Democrat told CNN.
One of the biggest questions is what will happen to the federal workers at airports: Two sources said TSA and air traffic control workers are expected to be deemed “essential” so they would still be expected to work, though they wouldn’t be paid until a shutdown ends.
OMB memo echoes past directive
The OMB memo circulated on Wednesday carried similar – and in places identical – language to a February directive signed by Vought and the acting head of the Office of Personnel Management, which included the directive that agencies focus on “the maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated while driving the highest-quality, most efficient delivery of their statutorily-required functions.”
That guidance memo was remarkable at the time for the sheer scale of the “large-scale” reductions of force it detailed and the sharply critical language it directed at the federal workforce it contained.
“The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump’s promises to sweepingly reform the federal government,” Vought and then-acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote.
The memo explicitly directed agency officials to utilize their shutdown contingency plans from the first Trump administration to shape the development of the reductions in force mandated in the second.
The legal challenges, chaotic and often haphazard firings, and pervasive uncertainty about the future have consumed large swaths of the federal workforce throughout the months that have followed.
The administration’s legal pathway had been decidedly unclear for months as judges slapped injunctions on the efforts. But Supreme Court and circuit court orders this summer tied to separate cases marked an opening – and potential roadmap – for a move that infuriated Democratic lawmakers and unsettled some Republicans in the day that followed.
The effort, as demonstrated by the caveat that the RIF plans would be set aside if Democrats dropped their demands, was clearly designed to drive up GOP leverage in the partisan battle.
But the degree to which the OMB threat connects to the clearly stated, and ambitiously pursued, Trump administration priority signals it’s hardly an empty threat.
“An administration happy to downsize and to shed federal government employees has an asymmetric weapon against Congressional government shutdown threats,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in President George W. Bush’s administration, wrote on X.
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CNN’s Arlette Saenz and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.