Federal workers are scrambling to figure out if they still have a job after the Trump administration launched a fresh wave of layoffs amid a federal government shutdown, prompting widespread confusion and panic.
A hearing is scheduled to take place Wednesday after labor unions sued to block the latest firings, setting the stage for another legal battle over Donald Trump’s efforts to drastically cut back the federal workforce.
About 4,200 federal employees across seven agencies were laid off on Friday, the administration has said, although 700 firings at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were swiftly reversed over the weekend.
It remains unclear if Trump, who told reporters that “a lot” of government workers would be fired, plans to go further. The federal workforce has already shed hundreds of thousands of staff on his watch this year.
As unions seek to establish the extent of the latest layoffs, workers at the Department of Education said that they do not have access to their work email accounts during the shutdown – so cannot check to see if they’ve received “reduction in force” (RIF) notices.
A table showing the number of federal employees who received reduction in force notices as of 10 October
“My coworker in the Office of Special Education programs was RIF’ed. She had access to her government email and found out,” an employee at the eduction department, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said. “The rest of us are in a panic. I think I may have been fired and I don’t have a way to find out. They sent the RIF notices to our official government emails which we don’t have access to.”
Another education department employee said: “I don’t have email access due to the shutdown. Some have received permission to check. I have not.”
They later were able to access their email, where they received an update to a reduction-in-force from earlier in the year that was halted by court challenges, with a revised separation date of 3 November.
The first employee criticized the timing of the firings, which were conducted the day before the funeral of the office’s longtime division director, Greg Corr, who had recently retired after 38 years there. The majority of employees in the special education and rehabilitative services department, which houses the office of special education programs, were reported to have been fired as part of the reduction-in-force.
A copy of a reduction-in-force notice at the education department seen by the Guardian claimed that “the continued lapse in funding” made it “necessary” to implement the layoffs and cited a separation date of 9 December. No previous government shutdowns have resulted in a reduction-in-force.
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“This is what they do to folks with a combined 1,000 years of experience working to improve the lives of children with disabilities on the day before our director’s funeral,” the first employee said. “What kind of humanity is this?”
Trump is wrong to suggest the agencies targeted by these layoffs are “Democrat-orientated”, they argued, saying: “This is not a ‘Democrat’ program. This is special education.”
The administration presented a reduction-in-force at the education department in March, but state attorneys general and unions sued to block the effort to dismantle it. A preliminary injunction to block those firings was granted by a federal court in May. The supreme court allowed the firings to proceed in a brief, unsigned order issued in July that provided no explanation, while the legal challenge to the closure of the department is ongoing in court.
More than 4,100 employees worked at the education department when Trump took office. Between a previous reduction-in-force and these latest firings, staffing at the agency is now under 2,000.
“This administration is using the same playbook that led to the termination of 1,500 staff in March to further illegally dismantle the Department of Education without any regard for the impacts on the American public, and we are tired of it,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE local 252, a union representing education department workers.
Gittleman, an employee at the department herself, received a reduction-in-force notice in March. “These RIFs will double down on the harm to K-12 students, students with disabilities, first generation college students, low-income students, teachers and local education boards, which are already feeling the impacts of a hamstrung Department from the March RIF,” she said.
The notices have increased anxiety and fear of other federal employees at agencies that have not been slated for cuts during the shutdown, where many workers are already either furloughed or working without pay.
“Our staffing levels are pretty low, so it’s hard to comprehend how much more cuts are going to be made and who,” Imelda Avila-Thomas, president of AFGE local 2139, and a Department of Labor employee, said. Approximately 75% of staff at the department have been furloughed, but the agency has not enacted a reduction-in-force yet. “That chaos is so debilitating on everybody’s mental health, physical health and just in general it’s demoralizing,” she said. “Morale is already low, and then we have this happening. I don’t want to say anybody is safe, I think we all understand that’s not a thing.”
The White House deferred comment to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Department of Education responded with an out of office message stating “due to the lapse in appropriations, we are currently in furlough status. We will respond to emails once government functions resume.”
