Tag: APP DC Bureau

By the time Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl, he had established an enormous network of wealthy and influential friends. Emails made public this week show the crime did little to diminish the desire of that network to stay connected to the billionaire financier.

Thousands of documents released by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday offer a new glimpse into what Epstein’s relationships with business executives, reporters, academics and political players looked like over a decade.

They start with messages he sent and received around the time he finished serving his Florida sentence in 2009 and continue until the months before his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019.

During that time, Epstein’s network was eclectic, spanning the globe and political affiliations: from the liberal academic Noam Chomsky to Steve Bannon, the longtime ally of President Donald Trump.

Some reached out to support Epstein amid lawsuits and prosecutions, others sought introductions or advice on everything from dating to oil prices. One consulted him on how to respond to accusations of sexual harassment.

Epstein was charged with sex trafficking in 2019, and killed himself in jail a month later. Epstein’s crimes, high-profile connections and jailhouse suicide have made the case a magnet for conspiracy theorists and online sleuths seeking proof of a cover-up.

The emails do not implicate his contacts in those alleged crimes. They instead paint a picture of Epstein’s influence and connections over the years he was a registered sex offender.

Epstein kept a diverse political network

Epstein emailed current and former political figures on all sides, sending news clips and discussing strategy or gossip often in short, choppy emails laden with spelling and grammatical errors.

In several emails in 2018, Epstein advised Bannon on his political tour of Europe that year. Bannon first forwarded Epstein a news clip that described the German media as “underestimating” Bannon and that he was “As Dangerous as Ever.”

“luv it,” Epstein responded.

Epstein wrote that he’d just spoken to “one of the country leaders that we discussed” and that “we should lay out a strategy plan. . how much fun.”

Several months later, Epstein sent some advice: “If you are going to play here , you’ll have to spend time, europe by remote doesn’t work.”

“its doable but time consuming,” Epstein continued in a follow-up email, “there are many leaders of countries we can organize for you to have one on ones.”

Just a few months earlier, Epstein was insulting Trump — whose movement Bannon was a representative of — in emails to Kathryn Ruemmler, the former White House counsel under President Barack Obama.

Ruemmler sent a message to Epstein calling Trump “so gross.” A portion of that message was redacted, but Epstein replied, “worse in real life and upclose.”

In other emails with Ruemmler, Epstein detailed a whirlwind of well-known people he appears to have been meeting, hosting or speaking with that week, including an ambassador, a tech giant, foreign business people, academics and a film director.

“you are a welcome guest at any,” he wrote.

Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs, where Ruemmler now works, declined to comment.

Epstein’s wealthy social circles

The financier emailed often with people in the upper echelons of wealth around the world, brokering introductions and chatting about politics and foreign affairs.

That included Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, who Epstein sent an email to in 2014 saying “that was fun , see you in 3 weeks.”

Four years later, Epstein asked if Thiel was enjoying Los Angeles, and, after Thiel said he couldn’t complain, replied “Dec visit me Caribbean.” It’s unclear if Thiel ever responded.

In emails with Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati businessman, Epstein complimented Bannon, saying in 2018 that “We have become friends you will like him.”

“Trump doesn’t like him,” responded Sulayem.

A year earlier, Sulayem asked Epstein about an event where it appeared Trump would be in attendance, asking, “Do you think it will be possible to shake hand with trump.”

“Call to discuss,” Epstein wrote back.

In January 2010, biotech venture capitalist Boris Nikolic was attending the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Epstein emailed to ask, “any fun?”

Nikolic replied that he had met “your friend” Bill Clinton, as well as then-French President Nicholas Sarkozy and “your other friend,” Prince Andrew, “as he has some questions re microsoft.”

But then Nikolic said he was getting sick of meetings. Later, he wrote Epstein that “it would be blast that you are here.” He mentioned flirting with a 22-year-old woman.

“It turns out she is with her husand. Did not have chance to check him out. But as we concluded, anything good is rented ;)” Nikolic wrote.

Epstein kept in touch with academics

The theoretical physicist and cosmologist Laurence Krauss was among them. In 2017, Krauss reached out to Epstein via email for advice on responding to a reporter writing a story about allegations of sexual harassment against him.

“Is this a reasonable response? Should i even respond? Could use advice,” Krauss asked Epstein.

In an explicit exchange, Epstein asked Krauss if he’d had sex with the person in question and then suggested he should not reply to the journalist.

“No. We didn’t have sex. Decided it wasn’t a good idea,” replied Krauss.

Krauss said in an email to The Associated Press that he never hid the fact that he knew Epstein, and interacted with him several times.

“I sought out advice from essentially everyone I knew when false allegations about me were circulated in the press in 2018,” said Krauss. “I was as shocked as the rest of the world when he was arrested” in 2019.

In an August 2015 email exchange, Epstein told Chomsky, the famed linguist and social scientist, to only fly to Greece if he feels well, joking he previously had to send a plane for another “lefty friend” to see a doctor in New York.

In the same exchange, which dipped into academic arguments about warning signs on currency collapses, behavioral science models, and Big Data, Epstein offered his residences for Chomsky’s use.

“you are of course welcome to use apt in new york with your new leisure time, or visit new Mexico again,” Epstein wrote.

The emails also show that Epstein kept up a friendly relationship with Larry Summers, who was the treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and former Harvard University president, and bantered about the 2016 presidential race and Trump.

Other emails showed a closer relationship. In 2019, Summers was discussing interactions he had with a woman, writing to Epstein that “I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy’. I said awfully coy u are.”

Epstein replied, “you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring. , no whining showed strentgh.”

Summers issued a statement saying he has “great regrets in my life.”

“As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement,” the statement said.

Chomsky, Thiel, Bannon, and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem did not immediately respond to requests for comment, which were sent through email addresses available on their own or their organizations’ websites.

President Donald Trump’s administration said Monday that it will partially fund SNAP for November, after two judges issued rulings requiring the government to keep the nation’s largest food aid program running.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, had planned to freeze payments starting Nov. 1 because it said it could no longer keep funding it during the federal government shutdown. The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net. It costs more than $8 billion per month nationally. The government says an emergency fund it will use has $4.65 billion — enough to cover about half the normal benefits.

Exhausting the fund potentially sets the stage for a similar situation in December if the shutdown isn’t resolved by then.

It’s not clear exactly how much beneficiaries will receive, nor how quickly they will see value show up on the debit cards they use to buy groceries. November payments have already been delayed for millions of people.

“The Trump Administration has the means to fund this program in full, and their decision not to will leave millions of Americans hungry and waiting even longer for relief as government takes the additional steps needed to partially fund this program,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who led a coalition of Democratic state officials in one of the lawsuits that forced the funding, said in a statement.

How will SNAP beneficiaries manage?

People who receive the benefits are trying to figure out how to stretch their grocery money further.

Corina Betancourt, who’s 40 and lives in Glendale, Arizona, already uses a food bank sometimes to get groceries for herself and her three kids, ages 8 through 11. With her SNAP benefits reduced and delayed, she’s expecting to use the food bank more and find ways to stretch what she has further.

But she is worried that there won’t be enough for her children to eat with about $400 this month instead of around $800. “We always make things work somehow, some way,” she said.

In Camden, New Jersey, 41-year-old Jamal Brown, who is paralyzed after a series of strokes and on a fixed income, said family members asked him for a list of groceries he needs so they can stock him up.

But not everyone has that help.

“How did you expect to live a healthy life if you’re not eating the right stuff?” he asked. “If you don’t have the access to the food stamps, you’re going to go to the cheapest thing that you can afford.”

Details on how payments will roll out are still to come

The administration said it would provide details to states on Monday on calculating the per-household partial benefit. The process of loading the SNAP cards, which involves steps by state and federal government agencies and vendors, can take up to two weeks in some states. But the USDA warned in a court filing that it could take weeks or even months for states to make all the system changes to send out reduced benefits. The average monthly benefit is usually about $190 per person.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference that it would take his state about a week to load benefit cards once the funding is made available.

“These are folks who are hungry, and every day matters,” Bonta said.

The USDA said last month that benefits for November wouldn’t be paid due to the federal government shutdown. That set off a scramble by food banks, state governments and the nearly 42 million Americans who receive the aid to find ways to ensure access to groceries.

The liberal group Democracy Forward, which represented plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, said it was considering legal options to force full SNAP funding.

Other high-profile Democrats are calling for the government to do that on its own.

“USDA has the authority to fully fund SNAP and needs to do so immediately. Anything else is unacceptable,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on social media.

State governments step in

Most states have boosted aid to food banks, and some are setting up systems to reload benefit cards with state taxpayer dollars. The threat of a delay also spurred lawsuits.

Federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ruled separately but similarly Friday, telling the government in response to lawsuits filed by Democratic state officials, cities and non-profits that it was required to use one emergency fund to pay for the program, at least in part. They gave the government the option to use additional money to fully fund the program and a deadline of Monday to decide.

Patrick Penn, Deputy Under Secretary Food Nutrition and Consumer Services for USDA, said in a court filing Monday that the department chose not to tap other emergency funds to ensure there’s not a gap in child nutrition programs for the rest of this fiscal year, which runs through September 2026.

Advocates and beneficiaries say halting the food aid would force people to choose between buying groceries and paying other bills. The majority of states have announced more or expedited funding for food banks or novel ways to load at least some benefits onto the SNAP debit cards.

New Mexico and Rhode Island officials said Monday that some SNAP beneficiaries received funds over the weekend from their emergency programs. Officials in Delaware are telling recipients that their benefits won’t be available until at least Nov. 7.

To qualify for SNAP in 2025, a household’s net income after certain expenses can’t exceed the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that’s about $32,000 per year.

WASHINGTON — Republicans and Democrats remained at a stalemate on the government shutdown over the weekend as it headed into its sixth week, with food aid potentially delayed or suspended for millions of Americans and President Donald Trump pushing GOP leaders to change Senate rules to end it.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Sunday that Trump has spoken to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., as he has publicly and repeatedly pushed for an end to the Senate filibuster. But Republicans have strongly rejected Trump’s calls since his first term, arguing that the rule requiring 60 votes to overcome any objections in the Senate is vital to the institution and has allowed them to stop Democratic policies when they are in the minority.

Leavitt said Sunday that the Democrats are “crazed people” who haven’t shown any signs of budging.

“That’s why President Trump has said Republicans need to get tough, they need to get smart, and they need to use this option to get rid of the filibuster, to reopen the government and do right by the American public,” Leavitt said on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News.

Democrats have voted thirteen times against reopening the government, denying Republicans the votes in the 53-47 Senate as they insist on negotiations to extend government health care subsidies that will be cut off at the end of the year. Republicans say they won’t negotiate until the government is reopened.

With the two parties at a standstill, the shutdown, now in its 33rd day, appears likely become the longest in history. The previous record was set in 2019, when Trump demanded that Congress give him money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

A potentially decisive week

Trump’s push on the filibuster could prove a distraction for Thune and Republican senators who have opted instead to stay the course as the consequences of the shutdown have become more acute, including more missed paychecks for air traffic controllers and other government workers and uncertainty over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Republicans are hoping that at least some Democrats will eventually give them the votes they need as they hold repeated votes on a bill to reopen the government. Democrats have held together so far, but some moderates have been in talks with rank-and-file Republicans about potential compromises that could guarantee votes on health care in exchange for reopening the government. Republicans need five additional Democrats to pass their bill.

“We need five with a backbone to say we care more about the lives of the American people than about gaining some political leverage,” Thune said on the Senate floor as the Senate left Washington for the weekend on Thursday.

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that there is a group of people talking about ”a path to fix the health care debacle” and a commitment from Republicans not to fire more federal workers. But it’s still unclear if those talks could produce a meaningful compromise.

The coming week could also be crucial for Democrats as the open enrollment period for health care marketplaces governed by the Affordable Care Act opened Nov. 1 and people are already starting to see spikes in premium costs for the next year, meaning it may be too late to make immediate changes. Democrats are also watching the results of gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday.

No appetite for bipartisanship

As Democrats have pushed Trump and Republicans to negotiate, Trump has showed little interest in doing so. He immediately called for an end to the Senate filibuster after a trip to Asia while the government was shut down.

Leavitt said Sunday that the president spoke to both Thune and Johnson about the filibuster. But a spokesman for Thune said Friday that his position hasn’t changed, and Johnson said on Sunday that Republicans traditionally have resisted calling for an end to the filibuster because it protects them from “the worst impulses of the far-left Democrat Party.”

Trump’s call to end it “is a reflection of all of our desperation,” Johnson said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Trump has spent much of the shutdown mocking Democrats, posting videos of House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a Mexican sombrero. The White House website has a satirical “My Space” page for Democrats, a parody based on the social media site that was popular in the early 2000s. “We just love playing politics with people’s livelihoods,” the page reads.

Democrats have repeatedly said that they need Trump to weigh in. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said that he hopes the shutdown could end “this week” because Trump is back in Washington.

Republicans “can’t move on anything without a Trump sign off,” Warner said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

Record-breaking shutdown

The 35-day shutdown that lasted from December 2018 to January 2019 ended when Trump retreated from his demands over a border wall. That came amid intensifying delays at the nation’s airports and multiple missed paydays for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on “This Week” that there have already been delays at several airports as air traffic controllers aren’t getting paid “and it’s only going to get worse.”

Many of the workers are “confronted with a decision,” he said. “Do I put food on my kids’ table, do I put gas in the car, do I pay my rent or do I go to work and not get paid? They’re making decisions.”

“I’ve encouraged them all to come to work. I want them to come to work, but they’re making life decisions that they shouldn’t have to make,” Duffy said.

SNAP crisis

Also in the crossfire are the 42 million Americans who receive SNAP benefits. The Department of Agriculture planned to withhold $8 billion needed for payments to the food program starting on Saturday until two federal judges ordered the administration to fund it.

House Democratic Leader Jeffries accused Trump and Republicans of attempting to “weaponize hunger.” He said that the administration has managed to find ways for funding other priorities during the shutdown, but is slow-walking pushing out SNAP benefits despite the court orders.

“But somehow they can’t find money to make sure that Americans don’t go hungry,” Jeffries said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in his own CNN appearance Sunday, said the administration continues to await direction from the courts.

“The best way for SNAP benefits to get paid is for Democrats– for five Democrats to cross the aisle and reopen the government,” Bessent said.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is calling on the Senate to scrap the filibuster, so that the Republican majority can bypass Democrats and reopen the federal government.

“THE CHOICE IS CLEAR — INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION,’ GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER,” Trump posted Thursday night on his social media site, Truth Social.

The filibuster is a long-standing tactic in the Senate to delay or block votes on legislation by keeping the debate running. It requires 60 votes in a full Senate to overcome a filibuster, giving Democrats a check on the 53-seat Republican majority that led to the start of the Oct. 1 shutdown when the new fiscal year began.

Trump’s call to terminate the filibuster could alter the ways the Senate and congressional dealmaking operate, with the president saying in his post that he gave a “great deal” of thought to the choice on his flight back from Asia on Thursday.

Trump spent the past week with foreign leaders in Malaysia, Japan and South Korea, finishing his tour by meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The president declared the trip a success because of a trade truce with China and foreign investment planned for American industries, but he said one question kept coming up during his time there about why did “powerful Republicans allow” the Democrats to shut down parts of the government.

His call to end the filibuster came at a moment when certain senators and House Speaker Mike Johnson believed it was time for the government shutdown to come to an end. It’s unclear if lawmakers will follow Trump’s lead, rather than finding ways to negotiate with Democrats.

From coast to coast, fallout from the dysfunction of a shuttered federal government is hitting home: Alaskans are stockpiling moose, caribou and fish for winter, even before SNAP food aid is scheduled to shut off. Mainers are filling up their home-heating oil tanks, but waiting on the federal subsidies that are nowhere in sight.

Flights are being delayed with holiday travel around the corner. Workers are going without paychecks. And Americans are getting a first glimpse of the skyrocketing health care insurance costs that are at the center of the stalemate on Capitol Hill.

“People are stressing,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, as food options in her state grow scarce.

“We are well past time to have this behind us.”

While quiet talks are underway, particularly among bipartisan senators, the shutdown is not expected to end before Saturday’s deadline when Americans’ deep food insecurity — one in eight people depend on the government to have enough to eat — could become starkly apparent if federal SNAP funds run dry.

Money for military, but not food aid

The White House has moved money around to ensure the military is paid, but refuses to tap funds for food aid. In fact, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” signed into law this summer, delivered the most substantial cut ever to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, projected to result in some 2.4 million people off the program.

At the same time, many Americans who purchase their own health insurance through the federal and state marketplaces, with open enrollment also beginning Saturday, are experiencing sticker shock as premium prices jump.

“We are holding food over the heads of poor people so that we can take away their health care,” said Rev. Ryan Stoess, during a prayer with religious leaders at the U.S. Capitol.

“God help us,” he said, “when the cruelty is the point.”

Deadlines shift to next week

The House remains closed down under Johnson for the past month. Senators are preparing to depart Thursday for the long weekend. Trump returns late Thursday after a whirlwind tour of Asia.

That means the shutdown, in its 30th day, appears likely to stretch into another week if the filibuster remains. If the shutdown continues, it could become the longest in history, surpassing the 35-day lapse that ended in 2019, during Trump’s first term, over his demands to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The next inflection point comes after Tuesday’s off-year elections — the New York City mayor’s race, as well as elections in Virginia and New Jersey that will determine those states’ governors. Many expect that once those winners and losers are declared, and the Democrats and Republicans assess their political standing with the voters, they might be ready to hunker down for a deal.

“I hope that it frees people up to move forward with opening the government,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

GOP cut SNAP in Trump’s big bill

The Republicans, who have majority control of Congress, find themselves in an unusual position, defending the furloughed federal workers and shuttered programs they have long sought to cut — including most recently with nearly $1 trillion in reductions in Trump’s big tax breaks and spending bill.

Medicaid, the health care program, and SNAP food aid, suffered sizable blows this summer, in part by imposing new work requirements. For SNAP recipients, many of whom were already required to work, the new requirements extend to older Americans up to age 64 and parents of older school-age children.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Republicans now “have the nerve” to suggest it’s a political strategy to withhold food aid.

“We are trying to lift up the quality of life for the American people,” Jeffries of New York said about his party.

“The American people understand that there’s a Republican health care crisis,” he said. “The American people understand Republicans enacted the largest cut to nutritional assistance in American history when they cut $186 billion from their one, big, ugly bill.”

During the summer debate over Trump’s big bill, Johnson and other Republicans railed against what they characterized as lazy Americans, riding what the House speaker calls the “gravy train” of government benefits.

The speaker spoke about able-bodied young men playing video games while receiving Medicaid health care benefits and insisted the new work requirements for the aid programs would weed out what they called “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“What we’re talking about, again, is able-bodied workers, many of whom are refusing to work because they’re gaming the system,” Johnson said in spring on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“And when we make them work, it’ll be better for everybody, a win-win-win for all,” he said.

What remains out of reach, for now, is any relief from the new health care prices, posted this week, that are expected to put insurance out of reach for many Americans when federal subsidies that help offset those costs are set to expire at the end of the year.

Democrats have been holding out for negotiations with Trump and the Republicans to keep those subsidies in place. Republicans say they can address the issue later, once the government reopens.

WASHINGTON — The White House budget office said Friday that mass firings of federal workers have started, an attempt by President Donald Trump’s administration to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers as the government shutdown dragged into a 10th day.

Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on the social media site X that the “RIFs have begun,” referring to reduction-in-force plans aimed at reducing the size of the federal government.

In a court filing, the budget office said the positions of well over 4,000 employees would be cut, though it noted that the funding situation was “fluid and rapidly evolving.”

The layoffs would hit the hardest at the departments of the Treasury, which would lose over 1,400 employees, and Health and Human Services, with a loss of over 1,100. The Education Department and Housing and Urban Development each would lose over 400 staffers. The departments of Commerce, Energy and Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency were all set to reduce their payrolls by hundreds of more employees. It was not clear which particular programs would be affected.

The aggressive move by Trump’s budget office goes far beyond what usually happens in a government shutdown and escalates an already politically toxic dynamic between the White House and Congress. Talks to end the shutdown are almost nonexistent.

Typically, federal workers are furloughed but restored to their jobs once the shutdown ends, traditionally with back pay. Some 750,000 employees are expected to be furloughed during the shutdown, officials have said.

Democrats — and some Republicans — criticize the administration’s actions

In comments to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday night, Trump said many people would be losing their jobs, and that the layoffs would be focused on Democrat-oriented areas, though he didn’t explain exactly what that meant.

“It’ll be a lot, and we’ll announce the numbers over the next couple of days,” he said. “But it’ll be a lot of people.”

Trump said that, going forward, “We’re going to make a determination, do we want a lot? And I must tell you, a lot of them happen to be Democrat oriented.”

“These are people that the Democrats wanted, that, in many cases, were not appropriate,” he said of federal employees, eventually adding, “Many of them will be fired.”

Still, some leading Republicans were highly critical of the administration’s actions.

“I strongly oppose OMB Director Russ Vought’s attempt to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed due to a completely unnecessary government shutdown,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, who blamed the federal closure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski called the announcement “poorly timed” and “yet another example of this administration’s punitive actions toward the federal workforce.”

For his part, Schumer said the blame for the layoffs rested with Trump.

“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said. “They don’t have to do it; they want to. They’re callously choosing to hurt people — the workers who protect our country, inspect our food, respond when disasters strike. This is deliberate chaos.”

Notice of layoffs has already begun at several federal agencies

The White House had previewed its tactics shortly before the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, telling all federal agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans to the budget office for its review.

It said reduction-in-force plans could apply to federal programs whose funding would lapse in a government shutdown, are otherwise not funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

On Friday, the Education Department was among the agencies hit by new layoffs, a department spokesperson said. A labor union for the agency’s workers said the administration is laying off almost all employees below the director level at the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, while fewer than 10 employees were being terminated at the agency’s Office of Communications and Outreach.

Notices of layoffs have also taken place at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which leads federal efforts to reduce risk to the nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure, according to DHS, where CISA is housed. The agency has been a frequent Trump target over its work to counter misinformation about the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic. DHS said the layoffs were “part of getting CISA back on mission.”

Federal health workers were also being fired, though an HHS spokesman did not say how many or which agencies were being hit hardest. A spokesperson for the EPA, which also has an unspecified number of layoffs, blamed the Democrats for the firings and said they can vote to reopen the government anytime.

Threats of more cuts across the federal workforce

An official for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents federal workers and is suing the Trump administration over the job reductions, said in a legal filing Friday that the Treasury Department is set to issue layoff notices to 1,300 employees.

The AFGE asked a federal judge to halt the layoffs, calling the action an abuse of power designed to punish workers and pressure Congress.

“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

Democrats have tried to call the administration’s bluff, arguing the cuts could be illegal, and had seemed bolstered by the fact that the White House had not immediately pursued the layoffs once the shutdown began.

But Trump signaled earlier this week that job cuts could be coming in “four or five days.”

“If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back,” he said Tuesday.

Workforce cuts appear unhelpful to bipartisan shutdown negotiations

Meanwhile, the halls of the Capitol were quiet on Friday, the 10th day of the shutdown, with both the House and the Senate out of Washington and both sides digging in for a protracted shutdown fight. Senate Republicans have tried repeatedly to cajole Democratic holdouts to vote for a stopgap bill to reopen the government, but Democrats have refused as they hold out for a firm commitment to extend health care benefits.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have suggested that Vought’s threats of mass layoffs have been unhelpful to bipartisan talks.

And the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said in a statement that the “shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers” to lay off workers.

“This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks,” she added.

Still, there was no sign that the top Democratic and Republican Senate leaders were even talking about a way to solve the impasse. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continued to try to peel away centrist Democrats who may be willing to cross party lines.

“It’s time for them to get a backbone,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said Friday.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks federal service, says more than 200,000 civil servants have left since the start of this administration in January due to earlier firings, retirements and deferred resignation offers.

“These unnecessary and misguided reductions in force will further hollow out our federal government, rob it of critical expertise and hobble its capacity to effectively serve the public,” said the organization’s president and CEO, Max Stier.