The White House budget office is telling federal agencies to prepare plans for mass firings in the event of a government shutdown, with instructions to target programs they are not legally required to continue.
The directive, outlined in an Office of Management and Budget memo to agencies and obtained by CNN, represents a sharp break from the government’s handling of past shutdown scenarios — and an escalation by the Trump administration amid a standoff with congressional Democrats over federal funding.
In the memo, OMB directs agencies to identify programs whose funds will lapse if Congress fails to meet the September 30 funding deadline and that have no alternative source of funding. Those programs should then be targeted for sweeping reductions in force that could permanently eliminate jobs that are deemed “not consistent” with President Donald Trump’s priorities.
“We remain hopeful that Democrats in Congress will not trigger a shutdown and the steps outlined above will not be necessary,” OMB wrote in the memo.
The move would represent a substantial escalation beyond normal shutdown protocols in recent years, under which government workers deemed nonessential in the case of a funding lapse were typically furloughed and eventually brought back when funding is restored — usually with back pay provided.
The threat to shut down unfunded programs came in a memo sent late Wednesday from the White House Office of Management and Budget to agency budget offices. The scope of those potential cuts wasn’t immediately known, and OMB has departed from past practice in not releasing agency contingency plans for a shutdown.
The memo directs agencies to identify programs and other spending items where discretionary funding is set to lapse Oct. 1 and where no alternative funding source is available. “Such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out,” the memo says.
Agencies would then draft plans to permanently eliminate jobs in areas not aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities. Those plans would be triggered if Congress doesn’t act to continue funding before Oct. 1.
In a typical shutdown, about six in 10 federal employees are deemed essential and continue to work. The rest are so-called nonessential federal employees, who are instructed not to work until funding resumes. A large-scale mass-firing of federal workers could have a measurable impact on economic growth.
The memo was first reported by Politico.
“Setting aside the question of legality, this would be an action of enormous self-harm inflicted on the nation, needlessly ridding the country of talent and expertise. It’s also extortive. ‘Give us what we want in a funding fight, or we’ll hurt the country,’” said Bobby Kogan, a former OMB official during the Biden administration who’s now senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.
Lawmakers are currently at an impasse on how to fund the government after the end of September. Democratic lawmakers had planned to meet with Trump on Thursday, but the president canceled the talks via social media, saying Democrats must drop their demands for renewing health care subsidies and ending Medicaid cuts before he’ll agree to in-person discussions.
Earlier Wednesday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said that the Trump administration is already violating federal spending laws outside of a shutdown and one of the things Democrats are fighting for is language in a stopgap to limit the president’s powers to do so.
“Donald Trump continues to make up reasons to exercise emergency powers that don’t exist, and he has done this outside of the context of a government shutdown,” Jeffries said in a roundtable with Bloomberg editors and reporters.
Jeffries, in a post on X, warned that Democrats “will not be intimidated” by the threat of mass firings.