House Democratic leaders are holding firm in opposition to the Republicans’ spending bill, brushing aside new threats from the Trump administration to use the shutdown to advance mass firings of federal workers and drastic cuts to programs Democrats hold dear.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the threats — aired on Wednesday by Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought — are merely a continuation of the president’s efforts to gut the federal government, which began the day he was sworn in.
With that in mind, Jeffries warned that Democrats won’t cave to GOP demands to support the current spending bill, since they don’t view a new round of layoffs or cuts to federal programs as unique to the shutdown.
“These are all things that the Trump administration has been doing since Jan. 20,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol.
“The mass firings of federal workers — the Trump administration has been engaging in this since Jan. 20,” he added. “Targeting the green-energy economy — Republicans have been doing that since Jan. 20.”
The comments came shortly after Vought announced that his department, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has frozen $18 billion in funds Congress had previously approved for two major transportation projects in New York City.
Hours later, Vought staged a call with congressional Republicans during which he said more federal layoffs would be coming before the week’s end. Separately, he announced that almost $8 billion in clean-energy projects would be cancelled, almost exclusively in states controlled by Democrats.
Some of those moves were expected — Vought had previewed the firings last week in a memo that directed federal agencies to prepare reduction in force (RIF) notices if the government shuts down. The move is a sharp break from the traditional shutdown routine, when many federal employees are furloughed — but not fired — and have received back pay when the government reopened.
Still, even Democrats representing the region around Washington, D.C., where federal jobs are abundant and the layoffs will be felt disproportionately, say the escalation should not alter the commitment of Democratic leaders to oppose the Republicans’ spending bill. That’s because the administration has no greater powers to fire federal workers during a shutdown, they say, than it does when the government is open.
“A shutdown doesn’t obviate the civil service protections that federal workers have. A shutdown doesn’t obviate the legal requirements that the administration has to follow a process if they want to conduct a reduction in force,” said Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.). “So if they attempted to use the shutdown as a pretext to circumvent any of those legal requirements, it would end up in court and they would almost certainly lose.”
Jeffries amplified that message on Wednesday, the first day of the shutdown, saying Democrats won’t be swayed to support a spending bill they loathe in response to layoffs and cuts they think the administration would pursue in any event.
“All of this talk that we see right now, as if it has anything to do with the shutdown Republicans have caused — no, it’s their ideology,” Jeffries said. “Cruelty is the point, when it comes to the Republican Party.”
