Washington:
The potential scale of President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the U.S. federal government could become clearer on Thursday, the deadline for government agencies to submit plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and to slash their budgets.
Agencies ranging from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department are required to submit their cost-cutting proposals to the White House and the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources department, kicking off a process that could eliminate tens of thousands of federal jobs.
This new round of layoffs marks the latest step in Trump’s sweeping effort to remake the federal bureaucracy – a task he has largely put in the hands of tech billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
So far, DOGE has overseen cuts of more than 100,000 jobs across the 2.3 million-member federal civilian workforce, the freezing of foreign aid, and the canceling of thousands of programs and contracts. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by labor unions and others challenging the legality of those moves, with mixed success.
The prospect for more job losses comes with financial markets already rattled about the economic risks posed by Trump’s global trade war. Over the weekend, Trump declined to predict whether his tariff policies might cause a recession.
Americans are broadly supportive of the idea of cutting the size of the federal government, with 59% of respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Wednesday saying they supported that goal.
But they expressed concern about the way Trump was going about doing so, with a similar 59% of respondents saying the opposed the moves to fire tens of thousands of federal workers.
Trump appears to be rushing to enact deep, pain-inducing reforms to use his political capital before whatever is left of the post-election honeymoon period comes to an end, said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.
“The Trump administration knows that it has a limited time horizon,” Jones said. “The risk is they cut too much, or they don’t cut strategically, and it has negative blowbacks in terms of the ability of the federal government to function.”
With Musk at his side, Trump signed an executive order on February 11 directing all agencies to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force,” using a legal term commonly referred to as RIF to denote mass layoffs.
An OPM memo said plans should include “a significant reduction” of full-time staff, cuts to real estate, a smaller budget, and the elimination of functions not mandated by law.
A handful of agencies have telegraphed how many employees they plan to cut in the second phase of layoffs. These include the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is aiming to cut more than 80,000 workers, and the U.S. Department of Education, which said on Tuesday it would lay off nearly half its 4,000-strong staff.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. government agency that provides weather forecasts, is planning to layoff more than 1,000 workers.
Several agencies have also offered employees lump-sum payments to voluntarily retire early, a move that could help the agencies avoid the legal complications inherent in the RIF process, which unions have vowed to fight in court.
Trump and Musk have argued that the government is bloated and prone to wasting taxpayers’ money. DOGE says it has saved $105 billion by eliminating waste, but it has publicly documented just a fraction of those savings, and its accounting has been plagued by errors and revisions.
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