President Donald Trump says he is ready to make deep and permanent job cuts if the shutdown continues, bragging that Democrats have handed him a “silver platter” to reshape the federal government.
The president also confirmed that he’s considering denying federal employees billions of dollars in automatic back pay when the government finally reopens, suggesting that the move could be politically motivated.
“I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“For the most part we’re going to take care of our people. But there are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
The comments came as the shutdown entered its seventh day, with no end in sight to the impasse.
But with not enough votes in Congress to fund the government, the standoff has left about 750,000 civil servants furloughed and all non-essential services have been halted.
Trump has made it clear that more cuts are on the way, telling reporters on Tuesday that unless Democrats pass a stopgap bill, a “substantial” number of jobs would be cut by his Office of Management and Budget Director, Russ Vought.
Vought is an architect of Project 2025—the presidential blueprint that Trump once claimed he knew nothing about— who the White House now depicts as the Grim Reaper in AI-generated videos to troll Democrats over the shutdown.
“He’s sitting there and he’s getting ready to cut things,” Trump said of Vought.
“We have a lot of things that we’re going to eliminate and permanently eliminate. We’re able to take out billions and billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse, and they’ve handed it to us on a silver platter.”
As for how many jobs would be lost, the president said he would know in a few days, but “if this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and lot of those jobs will never come back.”
The shutdown is the first in seven years, and took effect just after midnight on Wednesday last week after a deadlocked Congress failed to reach a deal on funding.
Republicans blame Democrats for the standoff, while Democrats insist that any funding bill should include extensions to subsidies that help Americans afford health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
Uncertainty over the wages of furloughed workers arose after the White House circulated a draft memo this week arguing that federal employees placed on unpaid leave are not guaranteed back pay.
The memo, first reported by Axios, seemed to contradict the Trump administration’s earlier guidance, which stated definitively that furloughed workers would be paid retroactively once the funding lapse ends.
A federal law, which Trump signed after the last government shutdown in 2019, additionally says that furloughed U.S. government employees “shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations.”
Now, Trump says, “it depends on who we’re talking about.”
Republican Senator Tom Tillis said it was a “strategic mistake” for the White House to telegraph that some workers may not get back pay for the shutdown.
“If I were them, I’d start looking for another job,” he said, “and there’s a lot of good, hardworking people out there.”
But House Speaker Mike Johnson said the issue should “turn up the urgency” for Democrats to do “the right thing.”
