Federal Workers Notch Win Against Illegal RIFs
Organized labor won a major victory last month in a settlement ordering the Trump administration to announce that it has abandoned its attempt to illegally fire millions of federal workers during last year’s government shutdown.
Under the settlement between a coalition of unions and the Department of Justice, the federal government must also tell agencies to modify their shutdown plans “to remove any authorization” of reductions in force (RIFs), and to give 30 days’ notice if they intend to modify those plans and conduct RIFs during future government shutdowns.
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The settlement does not completely end the case. It only holds it in abeyance and prevents shutdown RIFs until the end of the year. But it offers a measure of protection until then, attorneys said, as well as a pathway to fight back if the Trump administration attempts shutdown RIFs in the future.
“If they wanted to try this again they’d have to put in new guidance, a new contingency plan. It would be pretty clear they were doing something that was clearly unlawful,” said Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), one of the unions that sued the Trump administration, along with several others that together represent more than two million federal workers. Legal groups Altshuler Berzon, Democracy Defenders Fund, and Democracy Forward represented the unions.
If Democrats win in the midterms, “there are further protections they can put in,” Sanghvi said. “The fact that we are here and the government is settling shows that the unions have won here. Workers have fought back and they’ve won.”
THE SETTLEMENT COMES AS MORE AMERICANS approve of unions and as organized labor gains new ground in spite of GOP interference and efforts to privilege billionaires, bosses, and management. Seventy-one percent of Americans approve of labor unions, according to a September Gallup poll, and a record 47 percent say they should have more influence.
Days after the shutdown RIF settlement, federal workers won another struggle when they finalized a collectively bargained agreement with the office of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA)—the first congressional office workers’ union to do so. Among other gains, the eight-person unit won higher salaries and a grievance policy. Khanna congratulated his staff on social media, writing, “I am extremely proud of my office for signing the first long-term union contract in the history of the U.S. Congress.”
The settlement over RIFs is the latest development in federal workers’ case against the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and its Christian nationalist director, Russell Vought. During the 2025 federal government shutdown, Vought attempted to illegally fire thousands of workers as part of the Trump administration’s plan to enact the extremist goals of their Project 2025, including destroying public services. Vought said he also wanted to destroy the mental health of people providing public services, saying his goal was for federal workers “to be traumatically affected,” and that “when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought attempted to administer his purge in secret and provided hardly any public information about what agencies he was targeting or how many people he was firing. Much of the information came from press releases, legal filings, and news reports, which illustrated that he issued about 1,500 RIFs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—about 90 percent of staff—and thousands more elsewhere. For the CFPB, this was one of several attempts to fire most of the staff, all of which have been successfully fought in court. Since January 2025, Vought had also issued RIFs for about 10,000 workers at the Department of Health and Human Services, and about 4,500—all but 15 workers—at the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.