U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at the White House, following his annual physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Washington, DC, United States, October 10, 2025.
Ken Cedeno | Reuters
President Donald Trump has pledged to target only “Democratic agencies” for permanent staff reductions amid the government shutdown — but the administration’s layoffs so far have affected programs and services that cut across party lines.
The White House on Friday issued thousands of reduction-in-force notices, known as RIFs.
Approximately 4,200 federal employees from at least eight departments and agencies were affected.
The department that suffered the largest cuts was the Treasury Department, where nearly 1,450 employees received RIF notices.
The RIFs included cutting the entire 83-person staff of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which invests in public-private partnerships to support low-income communities, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The CDFI enjoys strong bipartisan support in Congress. In March, after Trump signed an executive order to reduce the fund, a group of 23 senators wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to reaffirm “the critical role it plays in the communities it serves.”
The letter stated that every dollar provided to the CDFI “generates at least eight additional dollars from private sector investment.”
The signatories included a group of Republican senators: Mike Crapo of Idaho, Tim Sheehy of Montana, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi and Jim Justice of West Virginia.
In late July, a longer list of Republican and Democratic senators urged White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to quickly provide the CDFI with the funding Congress allocated it.
CDFI employees who received RIF notices Friday were informed their service would end Dec. 13, the Journal reported.
The second highest number of RIFs were issued to employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, where more than 1,300 employees were reportedly affected.
But the layoffs of about 700 DHS staffers, who work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were reportedly reversed the next day.
But other laid-off employees, including those in the CDC’s Washington field office, its Injury Center and its Violence Prevention Division, will not be rehired, The New York Times reported.
At the Ministry of Education, 466 employees benefited from a RIF.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, wrote on social media Friday that hundreds of education departments are impacting special education services, school grants and more.
“Control of special education. Grants to high-need schools. Protection of civil rights. Gone,” she wrote Pringle. “This administration is destroying our education system from the inside out.”
The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, where some of the cuts reportedly took place, is among the offices targeted in Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for a major government overhaul.
Some Republican senators have spoken out against the Trump administration’s layoffs.
Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Friday that she “strongly opposed” Vought’s attempt to permanently lay off furloughed workers, although she blamed the shutdown on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, wrote in an article Friday: “There is no doubt that this comes at a bad time and is yet another example of this administration’s punitive actions against the federal workforce.”
“Laying off federal employees during a shutdown will further harm American workers who have dedicated their lives to public service and jeopardize agency missions once we finally reopen government,” she wrote.
The Trump administration, which blames Democrats for the shutdown that hit day 14 on Tuesday, has argued that the layoffs are an inevitable consequence of a lack of federal funding, even though that hasn’t been the case in previous shutdowns.
At the same time, Trump has presented the prospect of massive budget cuts as an “unprecedented opportunity” to eliminate parts of the government that his Republican Party doesn’t like.
His administration has already made clear, through his Department of Government Effectiveness, that reducing the federal bureaucracy is a major priority, even though that group’s budget cuts have fallen short of its initial goals.
The president’s latest threats to fire him are explicitly partisan.
On the second day of the shutdown, Trump said he was considering eliminating “Democratic agencies” either temporarily or permanently.
At a Cabinet meeting Thursday, he said, “We’re just cutting Democratic programs.”
Democrats “will get a little taste of their own medicine,” he added.
What that meant was unclear, because federal agencies and programs are not divided by party.
Trump, during the meeting, described them as “very popular Democratic programs that frankly are not popular with Republicans.”
