Trump administration suggests layoffs ‘imminent’ as some federal staff told to ‘blame Democrats’ in out of office email notes – live | US Congress
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White House warns layoffs are imminent if shutdown drags on
Leavitt tells reporters that government agencies are already preparing for cuts and “layoffs are imminent”.
“Unfortunately, because the Democrats shut down the government, the president has directed his cabinet and the Office of Management and Budget is working with agencies across the board to identify where cuts can be made and we believe that layoffs are imminent,” she says.
Key events
Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who is now serving in a powerful role at Trump’s department of homeland security, said it was “shameful” that Puerto Rican super star Bad Bunny, a longtime critic of Donald Trump, was headlining the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, Variety reports.
“It’s so shameful they’ve decided to pick somebody who seems to hate America so much to represent them at the Halftime Show,” Lewandowski said in an interview with Benny Johnson.
Johnson, a conservative commenter, described Bad Bunny as an “anti-ICE activist” on Instagram, the Associated Press reported. On his show today, Variety reported, Johnson asked Lewandowski if Ice would have enforcement at the Super Bowl.
Lewandowski replied that Ice agents do enforcement everywhere. “There is nowhere you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally. Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else,” he said, according to Variety.
“If there are illegal aliens, I don’t care if it’s a concert for Johnny Smith or Bad Bunny or anybody else. … We’re going to do enforcement everywhere.”
Employees within HHS told to ‘set an OOO email blaming Democrats – report
Employees at an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services “were told to set an out-of-office message in their email accounts blaming Democrats” for the government shutdown, according to an email obtained by HuffPost.
It’s another example of the Trump administration using mainstream government resources to make targeted partisan attacks. As HuffPost notes, federal government employees have been barred since 1939 from using their jobs for political activity under the Hatch Act.
“The law’s purposes are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.” a federal website still notes.
Donald Trump got a significant amount of blame during the last partial government shutdown, which took place toward the end of his first term after he forced a shutdown over border wall funding — but with Democrats embracing the shutdown fight this time, the outcome could be very different, the Associated Press reports.
Democrats in Congress had demanded an extension to expiring health care benefits in order to pass the bill to extend government funding. (See my colleague Chris Stein’s recent analysis: ‘A righteous fight.’) Republicans in Congress had refused, but offered a stopgap bill to keep the government open for several weeks, which Democrats rejected.
A New York Times/Siena poll conducted last week, prior to the shutdown, shows that two-thirds of registered voters did not want Democrats to shut down the government if their demands were not met, although both parties could end up receiving some blame for the resulting closure.
About one-quarter of registered voters in the Times/Siena poll — which was conducted prior to the shutdown — said they would blame Trump and the Republicans in Congress if a shutdown happened, while about 2 in 10 said they would place blame on congressional Democrats. About one-third said they’d blame both sides equally.
The state department has updated the government shutdown banner on its website to join the list of government department sites bearing a partisan message. It reads: “Due to the Democrat-led shutdown, website updates will be limited until full operations resume.” As I reported this morning, it didn’t say that earlier.
The US Forest Service also has one now that reads (with some grammatical issues): “The Radical Left Democrats shutdown the government. This government website will be updated periodically during the funding lapse for mission critical functions. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”
White House fires much of the National Council on the Humanities
The White House has abruptly fired a large share of the council members advising the National Endowment for the Humanities, retaining only four Trump appointees, the Washington Post (paywall) is reporting citing terminated members and an updated list of scholars on the agency’s website.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Council on the Humanities is terminated, effective immediately,” read an email sent to council members this morning, reviewed by the paper. “Thank you for your service.” It was signed by Mary Sprowls of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.
The board of 26 scholars and humanities leaders is appointed by the president to six-year terms. It advises its chair on grantmaking, policy and funding decisions. Before the government shutdown, members were scheduled to attend a special meeting next week to review statue proposals for Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes”, one terminated board member told the Post.
By late this morning, the council’s website had been updated to show only four members, all appointed by Trump: Russell A. Berman, Keegan F. Callanan, William English and Matthew Rose. Two of the terminated member were also Trump appointees.
Analysis: ‘A righteous fight’: Democrats hold fast on healthcare but also use shutdown to pummel Trump
Chris Stein
Finally, after nine months of Donald Trump running rampant over much in the government they hold dear, Democrats in Congress have found the ground on which to fight.
Pressed to vote for a Republican plan to keep the government open through mid-November, Democrats balked, and instead laid out a series of demands that amounted to the undoing of much of what the GOP has accomplished over the past year.
It was a nonstarter for Republicans and, after days of bluster and fruitless voting, the government tipped into a shutdown just after midnight on Wednesday. For Democrats, that may have been the point – pummeled by voters last November, the party has been looking for opportunities to remake its case to Americans.
“This is a righteous fight. There is no fight better than this fight right now,” said Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren on a live stream with other Democratic senators convened shortly before the chamber’s final, futile votes on Tuesday evening.
On the surface, Democrats are waging a battle over healthcare, long a signature cause for the party. They want cuts to Medicaid that Republicans approved earlier this year reversed, along with premium tax credits for health plans under the Affordable Care Act – the signature Barack Obama achievement and constant Republican target – extended, funding to public media outlets like PBS and NPR restored, and a prohibition on Trump’s backdoor attempts to cut foreign aid.
But it is also about standing up to a president whom they see as uniquely dangerous, at a time when he may be especially vulnerable. Trump’s approval ratings are well underwater, lower than even Joe Biden’s at this point in his term. Inflation has not been quelled in the way the president promised it would, while the job market is looking shaky. And the issue of free speech – dominated in recent years by Republicans who have railed against “cancel culture” – appears up for grabs by Democrats, after Trump and his officials demonized those who did not toe their line on Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist.
“People are going to get hurt by a shutdown, but they’re also going to get hurt if their premiums go up by 75% when everything else is going up, the cost of car repairs, the cost of food, the cost of school supplies,” the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said. “And people are going to get hurt by a government that’s … lawless, because if you can’t speak your mind in this country without repercussions, that comes with a cost as well.”
You can read the rest of Chris’s analysis here:
With the Senate set to leave this afternoon and still be gone tomorrow to observe Yom Kippur, the government shutdown will last until at least Friday (though likely longer, as a funding compromise hasn’t yet materialised). Voting is expected to continue on Friday and Saturday. The House, meanwhile, won’t return until next week.
After weeks of threats from both sides and negotiations that went nowhere, the US is once again experiencing a government shutdown. For this week’s edition of our excellent Politics Weekly America podcast, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Marianna Sotomayor, a congressional reporter at the Washington Post, to look at who should take the blame, who suffers, and who will blink first.
You can listen to the episode here:
On that topic of the conversation Republicans and Democrats were seen having on the Senate floor earlier this afternoon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has told NBC News that “there is a lot of bipartisan hope that we can make this shutdown as short and costless as possible.
Peter Welch of Vermont added that Chuck Schumer is “very supportive of members having conversations with colleagues”. “This is a point where rank-and-file members should be talking,” Welch said.
New Mexico’s Ben Ray Luján also told NBC that as long as members are talking, “there’s always a chance for a solution”.
“I’ve seen moments where people thought that there was an impasse on whatever the policy was and snap the fingers, there’s a solution, there’s a resolution,” Luján said. “People work together and get it done.”
Group of bipartisan senators seeking way out of shutdown
Chris Stein
As the Senate this afternoon voted on the Republican proposal to restart government funding, a bipartisan knot of lawmakers could be seen discussing something on the chamber floor.
It was a good indication that lawmakers were looking for a way out of the funding lapse, which carries risks for both parties, not to mention Americans writ large.
Shortly after the votes concluded, South Dakota Republican Mike Rounds, who was spotted among the group, indicated that a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution (CR), may be under discussion.
Democrats “want to address a number of issues in a CR, all of which can be done during the regular appropriations process, which a 45-day CR would give us time to complete,” Rounds wrote on X, and referred to the minority’s demand to continue enhanced tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plan premiums.
“Republicans will work with Democrats on this issue, but not until we get government reopened again,” he said.
Only time will tell if this is an actual concrete sign of a deal being reached to reopen the government. Party leaders have not changed their demands since the shutdown began at 12.01am ET.
David Smith
Speaking to reporters at the briefing earlier, JD Vance engaged in whataboutism, claiming that it is Democrats who are lying.
“If you look at the legislative text that [Democrats] gave us, they tried to turn on two separate provisions that would give healthcare benefits to illegal aliens,” he said. “It’s a lie told by the Democrats that they’re not trying to give healthcare benefits to illegal aliens.”
The vice-president also continued his attack on Chuck Schumer, suggesting this all comes down to politics in New York state. “The reality here, and let’s be honest about the politics, is that Chuck Schumer is terrified he’s going to get a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he said.
He went on: “The reason why the American people’s government is shutdown is because Chuck Schumer is listening to the far left radicals in his own party because he’s terrified of a primary challenge.
“So I’d invite Chuck Schumer to join the moderate Democrats and 52 Senate Republicans and do the right thing, open up the people’s government and then let’s fix healthcare policy for the American people.”
Vance then took questions from reporters and claimed “it’s obviously a Democratic shutdown”, not a Republican one.
Peter Doocy of Fox News noted that Republicans are claiming Democrats want to fund healthcare for illegal immigrants, and Democrats say this is a lie, which portends a long shutdown.
The vice-president replied: “I can’t predict what congressional Democrats are going to do, Peter, but I actually don’t think it’s going to be that long of a shutdown. This is just the guess of the vice-president of the United States because I think you already saw some evidence that moderate Democrats are cracking. They understand the fundamental illogic.”
Trump administration scraps $8bn for climate-related projects in 16 states led by Democrats
Despite JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt being sparse on details about what is going to be cut amid the government shutdown, White House budget director Russell Vought has just announced another one.
The Trump administration is cancelling nearly $8bn in climate-related funding targeting projects in 16 US states, including California and New York, Vought said on X.
Calling the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda”, he lists the affected states (all of them are blue): “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA”
Details of the cancellations will come from the US energy department, Vought added.
White House warns layoffs are imminent if shutdown drags on
Leavitt tells reporters that government agencies are already preparing for cuts and “layoffs are imminent”.
“Unfortunately, because the Democrats shut down the government, the president has directed his cabinet and the Office of Management and Budget is working with agencies across the board to identify where cuts can be made and we believe that layoffs are imminent,” she says.
Leavitt says the Trump administration will soon announce another nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a day after withdrawing the nomination of conservative economist EJ Antoni.
“EJ Antoni remains a great ally of the president and our team. It became clear, unfortunately, that he was not going to have the votes, and so we will be announcing a replacement nominee very soon,” she says.
Leavitt says there are “sensitive discussions” taking place over Donald Trump’s proposal to end the war in Gaza but doesn’t comment further.
The president gave Hamas “three or four days” to accept the proposal, otherwise he would fully back Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza.
CNN is now also reporting that White House budget chief Russell Vought warned a group of House Republicans that some permanent layoffs of federal workers would take effect in “one to two” days, citing four people on the call.
CNN reports that Vought didn’t offer clarity on which federal workers could see layoffs or how many people could be affected, but signaled that the administration would start with agencies that fall outside their priorities, the people said.
The New York Times has heard similar.
As we’ve been reporting this comes in the context of Vought and others in the Trump administration warning that they would use their powers during a shutdown to further shrink the size of the federal government to reflect the White House’s agenda.
Vought also warned that a popular federal safety net program for mothers and young children – called WIC – will run out of money by next week, according to CNN’s sources.
Leavitt takes over again.
She says there are unfortunate consequences to a shutdown and decisions about what needs to come to an end are being made and layoffs are going to be part of that.
Asked about Jeffries saying the meme Trump posted of him was racist, Vance says: “I don’t even know what that means”.
He goes on to say he’s sure people know the moustache and hair were not real. Which … wasn’t the point being made.
