Federal workers have grown accustomed to a specific kind of dread over the past year. 2025 has been nonstop: First came the “fork” email from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, followed quickly by numerous layoffs from the Trump administration.
As of July, more than 150,000 federal workers had resigned from their roles since president Donald Trump took office for the second time, according to The Washington Post. Tens of thousands were also fired.
For the past few months, it seemed like this bloodletting was over—but that all changed on Friday.
Thousands of employees at eight government agencies were subjected to RIFs, or reductions in force—the government’s formal process of laying off federal workers. According to a court filing from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Friday, this latest round of firings has affected more than 4,000 federal employees. The court filing also claimed that the administration targeted the Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services the hardest, hacking away at a combined 2,500 jobs across the two agencies and the entire Washington, DC, office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Department of Education culled nearly its entire team handling special education, CNN reported on Tuesday. At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, cuts ranged from a few dozen to several hundred jobs, according to the same filing.
Every Day Is an Adventure
“People are scared. Who says their goal is to traumatize people?” says one IRS worker, referencing private speeches given by Russell Vought, the head of OMB and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 who has been the public face of the job-cutting. ”If any normal human said ‘My goal is to traumatize families’ there should be police at that person's doorstep.”
“It’s pretty demoralizing,” a Food and Drug Administration employee tells WIRED. “It’s clear this admin will act illegally to try to make agencies or offices they don’t like suffer more.” (The Trump administration has used government resources, like websites, to place blame on Democrats for the shutdown in what critics claim is a violation of the Hatch Act, a law forbidding the use of public assets for political messaging.)
“Every day is an adventure: new EOs, new memos,” says one Department of Homeland Security worker. “It’s constantly being on watch on where to pivot and what to stop, start, and sustain.” (All of these employees have been granted anonymity so they can speak candidly about their experiences.)
Instead of the haphazard cuts led by DOGE this spring, we’ve entered a new phase of targeted cuts orchestrated by the Trump administration to reorient the government away from what the president calls “Democrat” priorities.
These RIFs appear to be spelling out a quiet rewrite of the administrative state. The cuts targeted offices and programs focused on public health, housing grants and homelessness programs, special education programs, and environmental cleanup, CNN reported on Tuesday. At the IRS, tech workers were affected, and the cuts “will absolutely impact critical modernization projects we were planning,” one IRS source tells me.
“The majority of our members are working-class people. They don't own summer homes,” AFGE Local 2883 president Yolanda Jacobs said in a press call on Wednesday. “Many of them live paycheck to paycheck. These reckless actions are disrupting and destroying the lives of everyday working people who are constantly being used as bargaining chips.”
Retribution
Any pretense that these cuts were simply about budget discipline has disappeared. In the weeks since the shutdown began, the administration has hijacked government websites, worker email signatures, and airport TV screens to blame Democrats for possible cuts in an attempt to rebrand them as accountability rather than retribution. In an exhibit attached to that court filing, the OMB emailed agencies to prepare for RIFs, focusing on areas where funding had lapsed on projects that were “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”
But President Trump put it more bluntly, speaking with reporters on Friday: “It’ll be Democrat-oriented because we figure, you know, they started this thing,” he said. “So they should be Democrat-oriented. It’ll be a lot.”
The filing claims that other RIF plans could still be ongoing, “but those assessments remain under deliberation and are not final.”
The White House declined to comment, directing WIRED to OMB. OMB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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“OMB is making every preparation to batten down the hatches and ride out the Democrats’ intransigence,” the agency wrote on X Wednesday morning. “Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs, and wait.” (OMB doesn’t pay military members. Congress does.)
Vought’s goal doesn’t seem to be just to define what it is the government is allowed to do, but to strike enough fear into workers to keep them from challenging that definition. By the end of September, when a government shutdown began to seem inevitable, federal employees I had never spoken to before were reaching out to me on LinkedIn and via Signal for some kind of clarity on whether they’d still have a job in the coming weeks, hoping that I had information that hasn’t been published regarding whether their agency or department would be on the chopping block.
“I just need a sanity check … are they going to RIF all federal employees if they don’t have an agreement?” one federal worker messaged me, asking about a potential shutdown in late September. “If I’m furloughed I won’t get back pay?” they said in a second message two weeks later.
The Trump administration continues to insist that these RIFs are about making the government more efficient by trimming bloat, but to federal workers, it feels more like an agonizing game they never agreed to play.
“So tired of being used as a pawn,” one IRS source says. “Is WIRED hiring?”
This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
