The American Prospect

09/30/2025

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought is illegally using the government shutdown as cover to fire federal workers en masse, abusing his position, and pushing an extremist agenda, according to a lawsuit brought Tuesday night by multiple labor unions representing more than two million federal workers.

Vought and OMB are taking a “legally unsupportable position” that a temporary government shutdown grants permission to cut federal workers at any programs for which funding has lapsed and “that are not priorities of the president,” concludes the lawsuit.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has explained, lapses in funding confer no new power on OMB to fire employees. And the activity of conducting firings or personnel changes is not “essential” work, the only work supposed to be carried out during a shutdown. These points form the backbone of the union lawsuit.

“The Trump administration is once again breaking the law to push its extreme Project 2025 agenda, illegally targeting federal workers with threats of mass firings due to the federal government shutdown,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which brought the lawsuit along with the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Government Employees, AFGE Local 1236 and 3172, and civil rights groups.

“If these mass firings take place, the people who keep our skies safe for travel, our food supply secure, and our communities protected will lose their jobs,” Saunders continued. “We will do everything possible to defend these AFSCME members and their fellow workers from an administration hell-bent on stripping away their collective bargaining rights and jobs.”

Among other relief, the claim asks the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to declare that Vought and the OMB have exceeded their statutory authority, broken the law, and acted arbitrarily and capriciously in directing federal agencies to “use this opportunity” of the shutdown to conduct mass layoffs. It asks the court to throw out Vought’s memo ordering agencies to do that.