President Donald Trump is eying massive cuts to the federal workforce under cover of the government shutdown, and CNN's Alayna Treene reported that layoffs of that scope have never been done before.
Sources say the president and his White House budget chief Russell Vought have targeted certain agencies for most of the cuts after congressional Republicans were able to get a funding bill passed before the start of the fiscal year on Wednesday, and the executive branch is moving on to another priority in the Project 2025 blueprint.
"The latest I heard from my conversations with people at the White House has been that they are ironing things out, as you mentioned, from my conversations with them, they said that they have a list," Treene reported. "They actually held up a couple of pieces of paper to me, but they wouldn't divulge the specifics of which agencies they're actually targeting, only that they know where they want these cuts to be, and part of that, of course, is because Russell Vought the the White House budget chief, he's had his eye on several agencies for months now."
"He knows exactly the places in the government that he wants to cut, and that's not only people that they want to to fire, essentially, which we now know is in the thousands, but they're also looking at programs that they want to slash, and from what we've heard from the president himself," she added.
Trump flaunted Vought's work on Project 2025, from which he attempted to distance himself during last year's election campaign, as he announced he would meet with the longtime budget hawk, and Treene said the president intended to carry thought on his threat to slash agencies prioritized by Democrats.
"In some of the conversations I'm having with people throughout the administration, a lot of them are targeting Democratic priorities," Treene said. "At least that's how people in this White House are describing it, and one thing, again, I need to make clear is just how rare this is. It's not even just rare, it's unprecedented in no other shutdowns that we've looked at. We've dug into the data, has any previous president or administration used a shutdown in this way to try to enact widespread cuts to the federal workforce and to these types of programs, and, look, I mean, from what they're trying to argue for, the reasoning for a lot of this, we keep hearing the president himself call this an unprecedented opportunity that he couldn't believe Democrats gave him."
"They're arguing that if the Democrats had agreed to that short-term funding bill, the CR, as they call it, then this could have been avoided, that they could have negotiated a budget together," Treene added. "But now, since the government is shut down, they essentially can move forward with some of these cuts without congressional approval, and also that essentially the White House is going to take the budget into their own hands."
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