Donald Trump orders US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to pay military personnel despite federal government shutdown.
The president said Saturday that Hegseth must ensure soldiers do not miss their regular pay, due Wednesday. The directive comes as other government employees have already had their salaries withheld and others are being laid off.
“I will not allow Democrats to hold our military and our nation’s entire security hostage with their dangerous shutdown of government,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.
The Republican and Democratic parties blame each other for failing to agree on a spending plan to reopen the government.
Trump’s message asks Hegseth to “use all available funds to get our troops PAID” on October 15, the date military personnel will have their pay withheld for the first time since the shutdown began on October 1.
Many U.S. military employees are considered “essential,” meaning they must still report to work without being paid. Some 750,000 other federal employees – or about 40% – were furloughed or sent home, also without pay.
Furloughed employees are legally supposed to receive back pay once the shutdown ends and they return to work, but the Trump administration has insinuated that might not happen.
“The radical left Democrats should OPEN THE GOVERNMENT, and then we can work together to solve health care and many other things they want to destroy,” Trump said Saturday.
Democrats have refused to vote for a Republican spending plan that would reopen the government after nearly 12 days of shutdown, saying any resolution must preserve expired tax credits that lower health insurance costs for millions of Americans and reverse Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, the health program for seniors and low-income people.
Republicans accuse Democrats of needlessly shutting down the government and blame them for the consequences caused by the federal work stoppage.
Finding a way to pay military salaries could help reduce some of the political risk for congressional leaders if the shutdown drags on.
In an effort to pressure Democrats, the Trump administration also began laying off thousands of civil servants, an unprecedented move during a shutdown.
“RIFs have begun,” White House Management Office Director Russell Vought announced Friday morning in an article on X, referring to the acronym for “force reductions.”
The administration revealed later Friday that seven agencies had begun laying off more than 4,000 people, following up on the president’s repeated threats to use the shutdown to further his long-held goal of reducing the federal workforce.
The reductions affected dozens of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to CBS news, the BBC’s American partner, citing sources familiar with the matter.
The agency’s entire Washington, D.C., office was laid off, the sources told CBS, adding that among the laid-off employees were those who worked on the CDC’s weekly mortality and morbidity report, the agency’s response to Ebola and vaccinations. There have also been reductions in the human resources department, they said.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, told CBS that the laid-off workers were not essential and that “HHS continues to close unnecessary and redundant entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”
Employees from the Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were also among those fired Friday, those agencies confirmed.
The American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO, two major unions representing federal workers, filed a lawsuit in Northern California, asking a judge to temporarily block the layoff orders.
“It is shameful that the Trump administration used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally lay off thousands of workers who provide essential services to communities across the country,” said AFGE President Everett Kelley.
A spokesperson for the White House budget office told the BBC on Saturday that the layoffs were just the beginning.
“These FIR numbers from the court file are just a snapshot in time,” he said. “More RIFs are coming.”
In a court filing opposing the unions’ request for a temporary restraining order, the Justice Department revealed that agencies such as the departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency could also see staffing declines.
Government lawyers said the unions failed to establish that their members would be irreparably harmed by the layoffs, which is necessary for the judge to grant the restraining order. But they said a ban order would “irreparably harm the government.”
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