The Trump administration started to lay off thousands of employees at federal agencies on Friday, following through on the president’s threat to use the government shutdown as an excuse to carry out one of Project 2025's goals of shrinking the federal workforce.

"The RIFs have begun," Project 2025 mastermind-turned-Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought wrote Friday in a post on X, referring to "Reductions in Force," or mass layoffs.

President Donald Trump and Republican leaders had been saying for days that they would use a government shutdown as pretense to further shrink the federal workforce, hoping that the threat would scare Democrats into voting the way Republicans wanted them to and gutting health care funding.

Now they have followed through on the threat, with

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