WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — On the first day of a federal government shutdown, Russell Vought, the White House budget director, said Wednesday that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump will start a mass firing of federal workers in the next “one to two” days.
The federal government entered its first shutdown in nearly seven years after the U.S. Senate failed to approve a short-term spending bill. “A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Trump said Tuesday.
“We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want.” U.S. Vice President JD Vance confirmed that firings would come soon if the government does not reopen.
“We are going to have to lay some people off if the shutdown continues,” he said. “We don’t like that. We don’t necessarily want to do it, but we’re going to do what we have to do to keep the American people’s essential services continuing to run.”
Vought said in a memo last week that federal agencies will be required to reduce the workforce in programs, projects, or activities “not consistent with the President’s priorities,” without specifying how many workers could be affected.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), around 750,000 federal workers could be furloughed every day in a shutdown, a daily cost of 400 million U.S. dollars in compensation.
“The effects of a shutdown depend on its duration and on an Administration’s decisions about how to proceed,” the CBO said in a recent statement.
Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua that “Trump and his team already have frozen some large federal grants and are threatening massive layoffs of federal employees.”
“Trump has said he wants to target programs and people favored by Democratic leaders. That could backfire in the upcoming elections because voters want leaders to work together to resolve important budget issues,” West said.
When asked how much money the federal government would save due to the firings, Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Xinhua that “it is very trivial.
Federal salaries in total are only about 5 percent of the budget.” “It’s not clear how many people will actually be laid off, but let’s say it’s 20,000 … That saves you less than 2 billion dollars over a year, or 0.03 percent of the federal budget,” Baker said.
Clay Ramsay, a researcher at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, told Xinhua: “Many Americans grossly underestimate how much they rely on actual day-to-day government services.
So whether they oppose the layoffs or support them, when they discover there’s something they can’t do because of the shutdown, they are likely to be surprised.” (Xinhua)
