\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s efforts to drastically cut back the federal workforce.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It remains unclear if Trump, who told reporters that \u201ca lot\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 so cannot check to see if they\u2019ve received \u201creduction in force\u201d (RIF) notices.<\/p>\n
A table showing the number of federal employees who received reduction in force notices as of 10 October<\/p>\n
\u201cMy coworker in the Office of Special Education programs was RIF\u2019ed. She had access to her government email and found out,\u201d an employee at the eduction department, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said. \u201cThe rest of us are in a panic. I think I may have been fired and I don\u2019t have a way to find out. They sent the RIF notices to our official government emails which we don\u2019t have access to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another education department employee said: \u201cI don\u2019t have email access due to the shutdown. Some have received permission to check. I have not.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The first employee criticized the timing of the firings, which were conducted the day before the funeral of the office\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
A copy of a reduction-in-force notice at the education department seen by the Guardian claimed that \u201cthe continued lapse in funding\u201d made it \u201cnecessary\u201d to implement the layoffs and cited a separation date of 9 December. No previous government shutdowns have resulted in a reduction-in-force.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to This Week in Trumpland<\/span><\/p>\n A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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\u2019s funeral,\u201d the first employee said. \u201cWhat kind of humanity is this?\u201d<\/p>\n Trump is wrong to suggest the agencies targeted by these layoffs are \u201cDemocrat-orientated\u201d, they argued, saying: \u201cThis is not a \u2018Democrat\u2019 program. This is special education.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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,\u201d said Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE local 252, a union representing education department workers.<\/p>\n Gittleman, an employee at the department herself, received a reduction-in-force notice in March. \u201cThese 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOur staffing levels are pretty low, so it\u2019s hard to comprehend how much more cuts are going to be made and who,\u201d 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. \u201cThat chaos is so debilitating on everybody\u2019s mental health, physical health and just in general it\u2019s demoralizing,\u201d she said. \u201cMorale is already low, and then we have this happening. I don\u2019t want to say anybody is safe, I think we all understand that\u2019s not a thing.\u201d<\/p>\n The White House deferred comment to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.<\/p>\n The Department of Education responded with an out of office message stating \u201cdue to the lapse in appropriations, we are currently in furlough status. We will respond to emails once government functions resume.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[3874,1326,11130,319,659,10474,558,7706,7078,11209,13662,1438],"class_list":{"0":"post-28201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-access","9":"tag-dont","10":"tag-email","11":"tag-federal","12":"tag-find","13":"tag-fired","14":"tag-government","15":"tag-panic","16":"tag-scramble","17":"tag-shutdown","18":"tag-theyve","19":"tag-workers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}