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President Donald Trump’s administration is expected on Friday to move ahead with a second wave of mass firings and budget cuts across the U.S. government, just one day after two federal judges ordered the reinstatement of thousands of workers.
Federal agencies had faced a Thursday deadline to submit large-scale downsizing plans as part of Trump’s push to radically remake the federal bureaucracy, a task he has largely left to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
So far, DOGE has overseen potential cuts of more than 100,000 jobs across the 2.3 million-member federal civilian workforce, the freezing of foreign aid, and the cancellation of thousands of programs and contracts.
Opponents of Trump’s radical remaking of government have tried to slow him with lawsuits. Rulings in federal courts in California and Maryland on Thursday ordered agencies to reinstate thousands of probationary employees who had been dismissed in recent weeks.
The White House, calling the judges partisan activists, vowed to fight back. The California ruling has already been appealed.
“This injunction is entirely unconstitutional,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Friday. “You cannot have a low-level District Court judge filing an injunction to usurp the executive authority of the president of the United States.”
Financial markets have already been rattled by the economic risks posed by Trump’s global trade war. Stock markets have fallen dramatically over the past two weeks, wiping out $5 trillion in value over concerns that Trump’s policies could lead to a recession, although Wall Street stocks were higher on Friday.
With the tech billionaire 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.
A subsequent memo from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management 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.
IRS Cuts
The Internal Revenue Service, the tax-collecting agency that has long been a target of scorn for Republicans, is planning to eliminate 20% to 25% of its workforce by May 15, according to a person briefed on the agency’s plans. The IRS had about 100,000 workers when Trump took office, meaning up to 25,000 are set to lose their jobs.
The 20% to 25% target includes the roughly 5,000 IRS employees who took a buyout last month and potentially 7,000 probationary workers who were fired, though court rulings on Thursday could lead to the reinstatement of probationary staff, the person said.
The planned job cuts are being described internally as the first phase of the agency’s efforts to reduce career workers, the person briefed on the matter said, indicating there could be additional cuts after May 15.
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The Trump administration has yet to give a total of how many people it has fired, but Reuters reporting on internal memos, public statements and other sources add up to more than 100,000 people fired or offered buyouts with the Department of Veterans Affairs alone aiming to cut more than 80,000 workers.
Court Challenges
Several agencies have offered employees lump-sum payments to voluntarily retire early, which could help the agencies avoid legal complications inherent in the RIF process, which unions have vowed to fight in court.
Court rulings on the layoffs have had mixed results but federal judges in California and Maryland on Thursday ordered the reinstatement of thousands of probationary federal workers.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ruled that probationary workers, typically those with less than two years on the job, should be reinstated at the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Treasury.
After Alsup’s ruling was handed down, U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore directed the administration to reinstate tens of thousands of federal workers.
Bredar agreed with 20 Democratic-led states that 18 agencies that had fired probationary employees en masse in recent weeks violated regulations governing the process for laying off federal workers.
The two rulings were the largest legal setbacks for Trump and Musk’s downsizing plans yet.
The Trump administration late Thursday appealed the decision reinstating workers at six agencies to a San Francisco-based federal appeals court, and is expected to also appeal the decision out of Baltimore.
(Reporting by James Oliphant in Washington and Nathan Layne in New York; Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington and Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Scott Malone, Chizu Nomiyama and Leslie Adler)
