Donald Trump’s push to sack thousands of government workers has been temporarily blocked, with a judge saying the president may have unlawfully overstepped his authority to take advantage of the federal shutdown.
The scathing rebuke on Wednesday came as White House “Grim Reaper” Russell Vought revealed that he planned to sack more than 10,000 federal workers and has vowed to be as “aggressive” as he can in closing federal agencies.
But federal district judge Judge Susan Illston granted a temporary injunction halting the government, arguing that the sackings were likely to be illegal.
“The evidence suggests that the office of management and budget, OMB, and the office of personnel management, OPM, have taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, in government functioning to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them any more, and that they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like,” she said.
“I find, I believe, that the plaintiffs will demonstrate, ultimately, that what’s being done here is both illegal and is in excess of authority and is arbitrary and capricious.”
The injunction, which the administration is set to appeal, was issued after an estimated 4,000 people received layoff notices on Friday as the Trump administration made good on a longstanding promise to reshape the federal government.
But in a rare interview on the Charlie Kirk Show, Vought warned the 4,000 figure was “just a snapshot”, adding that, “I think we’ll probably end up being more than 10,000.
“I think it’ll get much higher, and we’re going to keep those RIFs (Reductions In Force) rolling throughout the shutdown,” the director of budget management told the show’s co-host Andrew Kolvet.
He also vowed that the White House would be “very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy - not just the funding, but the bureaucracy.”
“Think of Green New Deal programs at the Department of Energy. Think of the Minority Business Development Agency at Commerce that divvies up business grants on the basis of race,” he said, naming some of the agencies he was targeting.
“Think environmental justice at EPA. Think about CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) … which was participating in censorship to the American people."
The shutdown, which is the first in seven years, began on October 1, when Congress failed to pass the annual appropriations bills that fund the government for the fiscal year.
Fifteen days later, 750,000 civil servants remain furloughed and unsure if they will be paid when they finally return to work, while non-essential services have been halted.
Republicans blame Democrats for the impasse, while Democrats insist that any funding bill should include extensions to subsidies that help Americans afford health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
“I am so frustrated by this, we all are,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News on Wednesday.
However, when asked about the judge’s ruling, Johnson replied: “You lost me at ‘a federal judge in San Francisco’. We were obviously not going to get a fair hearing. There will be an appeal on this I’m sure. The White House is dug in. They will do what is required of them - and that is to triage federal spending.”
Cracks have nonetheless emerged within MAGA ranks, with some GOP members now openly pushing their leaders to reverse course and come to the negotiating table.
Among the most high-profile is Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has put the blame for the shutdown squarely on Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
“We control the House, we control the Senate, we have the White House,” she told CNN last week.
Trump has threatened to fire federal workers since government funding ran out at the start of this month, and has regularly trolled Democrats for not adhering to his demands.
One social media video posted by the President depicted Vought as the Grim Reaper—an appropriate moniker for the Project 2025 architect, who once said he wanted to put bureaucrats in “trauma.”
On Thursday, Trump unveiled a new nickname for Vought, telling reporters: “They call him Darth Vader but he’s really a nice person.”
During his interview, Vought also said the administration was putting the “final nail in the coffin” at the United States Agency for International Development, which was was formerly the world’s largest agency for foreign aid.
He also said he had set his sights on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he described as having “the DNA of (Democrat Senator) Elizabeth Warren.”
“RIFs are reductions in force, and this is something we did not do in our first term…. We honestly learned about it in our years in exile,” Vought said.
“If there are policy opportunities to downsize the scope of the federal government, we want to use those opportunities.”
