By James Oliphant
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration is expected on Friday to move ahead with a second wave of mass firings and budget cuts across the U.S. federal government after agencies were told to submit large-scale downsizing plans.
The new round of layoffs comes amid President Donald 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 canceling of thousands of programs and contracts.
Federal agencies faced a Thursday deadline to submit reorganization blueprints for what Trump last month termed “large-scale reductions in force.”
The prospect for further job losses comes with financial markets already rattled about the economic risks posed by Trump’s global trade war. Stocks tumbled again on Thursday over concerns that Trump’s policies could lead to a recession.
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 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.
The Department of Veterans Affairs was aiming to cut more than 80,000 workers, and the U.S. Department of Education said on Tuesday it would lay off nearly half its 4,000-strong staff.
The Social Security Administration, the agency that provides benefits to tens of millions of older Americans, plans to cut 7,000 workers.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides weather forecasts, planned to lay off more than 1,000 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.
The layoffs follow two court rulings on Thursday that ordered agencies to reinstate thousands of probationary employees who had been dismissed in recent weeks.
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 the Treasury.
The White House vowed to challenge Alsup’s decision.
The ruling does not pertain to the career employees that are set to be fired in the new round of downsizing. That process could eliminate tens of thousands of federal jobs.
After Alsup’s ruling was handed down, a federal judge in Maryland also directed the administration to reinstate tens of thousands of recently hired federal workers.
U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore agreed with 20 Democrat-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.
(Reporting by James Oliphant; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Stephen Coates)
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