The Logoff will be off on Monday for Indigenous Peoples' Day; have a great holiday, and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is using the ongoing government shutdown as a pretext to lay off even more federal workers, it announced Friday.
Who’s being laid off? We don’t know for certain yet. The White House has described the layoffs as “substantial,” but has yet to provide more details.
As of this writing, the Commerce, Education, Energy, Health, Homeland Security, Treasury, and Housing departments are all affected, PBS NewsHour correspondent Lisa Desjardins reported Friday, as are the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. The scale of the cuts, however, is unclear.
Is this actually because of the shutdown? No. Federal government shutdowns aren’t new, and this isn’t nearly the longest one Washington has experienced. Generally, employees deemed essential continue working, while nonessential employees are furloughed.
Until Friday’s announcement, that was the case with this shutdown too — but now the Trump administration appears set on making things even more painful for government workers.
Is this legal? Very possibly not. Multiple federal employee unions have already sued the administration, arguing that the government cannot conduct layoffs during a shutdown, when only essential functions are supposed to be operating.
What does all of this mean for the shutdown? It’s too soon to say for sure — but likely nothing good. As my colleague Eric Levitz has explained, the shutdown is not really about health care, though health insurance subsidies are central to Democrats’ demands. Instead, it is in large part a fight about Donald Trump’s efforts to run roughshod over constitutional governance, canceling funding and firing federal workers on a whim. Friday’s layoffs are just the latest example of that, and the latest reason for Democrats not to give Republicans the votes they need to reopen the government.
