Lay-Offs? You Can’t be Serious.
In a previous article I shared the perspective of a federal employee going through a typical government shutdown experience. But this time there is one huge difference – the prospect of actual lay-offs. No furloughs. Just plain, old fashion, termination.
That’s a real game changer at many different levels. But I will stick to the perspective of the federal employee. How does that affect them? What are the odds that they will be asked to never return to work for the US government?
Back to Essentials
As noted in the previous article, every shutdown requires that agency directors determine who is “essential” and who is not. Yet one important thing I pointed out was that not all employees are clearly non-essential. IT staff, for example, were considered non-essential. Yet when things went wrong with the technology, they were asked to return to work. There are many other gray-area jobs that simply cannot be ignored given circumstances and events. Incident Command, for example, can require that previously non-essential employees be called up to support rescue and recovery operations for natural disasters.
What concerns me is that the White House may be repeating the semantic trap that they fell into when DOGE declared “probationary” employees expendable. In “Diagnosing DOGE: Purge of the Probies”, it was noted how it appeared that the White House had misunderstood how the term “probationary” was used. Probies are not only new hires. They are anyone who is in a new position. Agency directors, even the MAGA folks, pushed back when they realized that a “probie” may be someone with 25 years of experience!
Regarding the current shutdown, I wonder if the White House is inferring that someone who is “non-essential” is “expendable.” If they are non-essential, why are they needed in the first place? Some careful consideration needs to be made regarding this matter.
The first consideration is to re-define “non-essential.” Rather it being “non-critical” (as has normally been the case), it needs to be narrowed to “non-missional.” Let’s take the timber managers of the US Forest Service. Technically, they are “non-essential.” They could go home for two weeks and the world would still turn. Trees are not going anywhere. But timber managers are about as “essential” to the core mission of the US Forest Service as almost any position in the agency. The same applies to much of the IT staff. The cloud center could continue to tick without a human being for weeks. But if something went wrong? The entire agency could crash.
Simply based on semantics, a federal employee may be terminated. Most likely to be laid-off would be staff that are not critical to the mission of the agency. But something tells me that agency directors are going to stick to the term “non-essential.” Being terminated will be staff that are, in a normal world, essential to the mission of the agency. But because of a label assigned to them, they may be doomed to be terminated. It may be arbitrary. It may be unfair. It will be irrational. From my experience working with bureaucrats, I fully expect that the least qualified will be retained.
Its irrational because lay offs will be highly disruptive. The federal government is not the private sector. Someone doesn’t just walk in, fill out a form, and get hired for a job. What will happen is that needed positions will be terminated, only to be discovered to be critical. According to protocol, a job position would first have to be justified, approved by supervisory personnel, budgeted, posted for three weeks, and applications reviewed. The position I was hired for in 2008 was posted eight months before I was hired! The federal government is not Starbucks. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. If you lay-off “non-essential” personnel who are actually an important part of the mission of the agency, it will be highly disruptive to replace them.
Changing the rules and the process would avoid this disruption. The people who were “laid-off” could be quickly re-hired if they were needed. But it will require a change in protocol. And it beggars the question – what’s the point? Why not just furlough everyone?
What is Really Happening Regarding Lay-Offs?
A Business Man is Running the Country
People tend to overlook this important fact – Trump is a business man. He is totally unlike a vast majority of the members of Congress and he is certainly in a different world than the typical federal bureaucrat. I worked in the private sector for the first twenty two years of my career. Trust me – career federal employees have no clue. Trump sees the shutdown as a strategic opportunity to achieve one of his primary objectives – to curtail government spending and balance the budget.
Trump is using the threat of lay-offs as leverage to convince the Democrats to approve the continuing resolution and end the shutdown. But if the shutdown goes on for a week, he will start pruning the bureaucracy.
If I was a federal employee – I would be concerned.
And then there is the Deficit
The deficit is out-of-control and it has to be stopped. That is the elephant in the room. It is why Senator Schumer’s proposal to add 1.5 trillion to the budget is dead on arrival. In a rational world, federal employees would be as susceptible to the ebb and flow of economics as everyone else. But federal politicians have a bad habit of thinking that budget deficits are not important. They are. The good news is that I won’t have to pay for it. The bad news is that my children and my grandchildren will throughout their lifetimes. That is reality. Most Americans agree.
Two years ago I wrote the following:
A shutdown will force the government to prioritize discretionary spending – in essence, running on a balanced budget. What will no longer be possible will be funding non-essential programs that contribute to the national debt. One economist even speculated that the entire Department of Education may be shutdown.
Well, we all know the Department of Education is about to close its doors. The debt crisis has seen a radical change in various agencies in regards to priorities and the issuance of grants. So it is no surprise that federal employees would be exposed to the same cycle of workforce reduction that taxpayers experience.
So if I was still working as a federal employee ( I am retired ), I would be nervous.
And then there is the art of the deal
Trump shared his thinking on why lay-offs may be necessary. It would bring the Democrats to the table. Even though data seems to indicate that a majority of federal employees voted for Trump in the 2024 election1, a massive 75% of political donations went to the Democrats. Unfortunately, Trump seems to be focusing on the the donations rather than actual votes. Secondly, Trump may be seeing the federal government from the bubble called Washington, DC. If there was anything I learned in thirteen years working for the USFS, it was that the staff in Washington, DC was culturally and functionally much different from that of the workers in the field. What Trump sees as “non-essential” are the bureaucrats around the capital. Probably no agency represents that disparity more than the USDA (of which the USFS is a part) where farmers are overwhelmingly Republican yet 92% of the contributions went to the Democrats.
In essence – Trump is going for the Democratic base in the Washington, DC area. Will Schumer be willing to risk the livelihood of people that would most likely vote for a Democrat?
If I was a federal employee working out of the Washington, DC office, I would be nervous.
No Sympathy From the Public?
In the previous article, I noted how the public responded with encouragement and support – at least in Juneau, Alaska. But the rest of the country has a different perspective. They are not happy about reckless spending, they have little sympathy for federal workers who are placed on furlough only to receive their backpay when the shutdown ends. No one else gets that sort of treatment.
I would imagine most Americans would empathize with the plight of working for no pay (as with a furlough) or getting laid-off. A normal person would not wish that on anyone. Yet losing your job is a reality that most Americans have experienced.
As a federal employee – I would be nervous.
Game Changer
If I was still working for the feds, Trump’s proposed lay-offs would be a game-changer. With furloughs, I knew I would have a job after the politicians came back to the table. So while cash flow suffered, I had some measure of security. Lay-offs would have introduced fear and insecurity into the equation. And that would have entailed an immediate entry into the job market, not trusting the USFS to consider an IT person as “essential.” IT personnel are mobile and dynamic. The State of Alaska always had open positions posted and I knew most of the supervisors. Threaten me with a lay-off? It is highly likely I would have been gone before the shutdown ended or soon thereafter. I would have hated to do it – but the USFS had not been my first rodeo.
Shutdowns with furloughs are bad enough. But the possibility of a lay-off changes the dynamic. Normally, I would use the shutdown time to rest and do things about the house. If I had to face a lay-off, I would most likely be hitting the job search circuit pretty hard. If I traveled down to Missouri, I would have most likely visited major employers.
So what is recommended? Keep the resume current and keep your profile current on LinkedIn and other placement services like Indeed.
Important thing to remember – employment security is not a right.
If I was still working, it would have been interesting to observe the residual effect of lay-offs. Regarding morale, imagine if you were laid-off and then your old boss called you and asked you back. I would have gladly rejoined the USFS if I wasn’t working, but in the back of my mind would be the bitterness of knowing that my position was considered “non-essential”. I would have had little confidence in the USFS. Yet another dimension would be the after-effect of applying for work at several other locations. Responses start coming in and you reconsider staying with the USFS. If you are going to work with insecurity in the federal government, you might as well spread your wings and return to the private sector.
In Summary – Be Realistic
If you are a federal employee tagged as non-essential, you have a lot batting against you if your position is considered in any measure “non-missional.” Timber managers have nothing to sweat about. But the rest of the staff may need to soberly recognize the reality that is emerging during this shutdown.
- A businessman runs the country
- There is a huge deficit that is not yet controlled
- Lay-offs are part of the political bargaining that is happening right now
My advice?
- Keep ahead of the game.
- Get your resume up to date
- Update profiles on LinkedIn and other professional job sites
- Start looking
Resources
“Social Security – When Will America Face Reality?”, by Eric Niewoehner, February 6, 2023.
“The Debt We Owe,” by Eric Niewoehner, June 2, 2022.
“Diagnosing DOGE: Purge of the Probies,” by Eric Niewoehner, February 28, 2025
“Political Donations from The Federal Government’s Apolitical Workforce,” FedSmith, by Ralph R. Smith, Oct 25, 2024
“Presidential Survey Shows Trump with Majority of the Votes,” FedSmith, by Ralph R. Smith, Oct. 15, 2024.
1Nailing down the voting preferences of federal workers is a bit difficult. FedSmith’s internal survey of 2500 employees showed Trump with 52% of the vote. But other sources show results in favor of Harris. Donations, of course, reflect a more “activist” commitment to political involvement.
© Copyright 2025 to Eric Niewoehner