Here’s an update on Russ Vought’s “mass layoffs,” following through on the threats he and Trump made in advance of the shutdown. From what I can tell, this seems to be a version of what we described yesterday: a comparatively small number of layoffs aimed mainly at allowing the White House to say it followed through on its threat (call it counter-TACO praxis) and tightly focused on a few agencies or departments President Trump is personally aggrieved at. The most concrete number I’ve seen refers to 4,200 employees across seven departments and agencies. That’s a big deal for the people losing their jobs. It’s also a very small number compared to what we saw in the spring. The New York Post suggests (famous last words, I know) that as many as a third of those layoffs may come from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been a focus of Trump’s anger since 2021 when its then-director Chris Krebs disputed Trump’s claims of cyber-election hacking in the 2020 election. I’ve gotten more concrete reports that at least a quarter of these firings are at the CDC alone, focused on core public health work. STAT News reports that almost the entire staff of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report have been fired. (That is essentially the publication that the CDC uses to communicate the latest information on disease circulation in the country.) Other targeted offices seem tied to clean energy projects and other bêtes noir. As one source put it, these are not ‘reductions in force’. They are ideological firings targeting specific offices and parts of the government Trump has long been mad at.
You’ve probably seen that Russ Vought went on Twitter today and said “the RIFS [government speak for permanent layoffs] have begun.” Obviously, I can’t know directly what this means or what they’re doing. But since I’ve written about this a few times, I thought I should share my reaction. I remain skeptical that this is actually happening in a substantial way.
It could totally be happening. But I think the driver here is that Trump was getting hit increasingly hard for having flinched on this threat. And as of yesterday, they started backing off on the threat not to pay backpay to federal workers. So I think the press about this was getting to the White House and both angering Trump and making them look like they’re flailing. I would say I’m certain that this is why they’re doing this (reaction to that bad press). The only question is whether they’re actually going to follow through to really undo that impression.
We’ve always been very cautious about doing any reporting from war zones. But here’s a report from TPM Reader TB …
I am assuming (or hoping) that TPM has received reports from others here in Portland regarding the huge gulf between the way the Administration is describing things and what is happening in reality. Either way, I feel compelled to share my observations because I am completely flabbergasted that the Administration continues to so blatantly manufacture this “warzone” imagery. I’m used to the hyperbole they use, but this goes so far beyond hyperbole, I can barely find the words.
Has Trump brought peace to Gaza? Ended the war and cycle of killing that has now been going on for two years? I’ve had a number of TPM Readers ask me different versions of this. And in those questions is a lurking undercurrent, sometimes more or less explicit, of “does this malevolent clown actually get credit for this?” I wanted to address this question. And my answer is that this is perhaps the first time when Trump’s frequent and degenerate boast — I alone can do it — has a very real element of truth.
I don’t think Trump expended any great amount of energy over this and I don’t think he really cares greatly about any of the people on either side of the conflict. Let’s remember that a few months ago he backed a plan to “voluntarily” depopulate Gaza and remake it as a series of mediterranean resorts, sort of Monaco only 150 times the size.
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The Trump administration and its allies are so confident that they’ll ultimately prevail in the courts that Trump has kept on the shelf a backup plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, which gives the president extremely broad latitude to deploy the military for law enforcement activities.
“I think we’re at a point where anything from the federal government has to be treated with a certain amount of skepticism, if not suspicion,” one expert told TPM.
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