President Donald Trump ordered Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to pay military personnel despite the federal government shutdown.
The president said Saturday that Hegseth must ensure troops do not miss their regular paychecks scheduled for Wednesday. The directive comes as other civil servants have already withheld some salaries and others have been laid off.
“I will not allow the Democrats to hold our military and our entire national security hostage with a dangerous government shutdown,” Trump said on his Truth social platform.
Republicans and Democrats are blaming each other for failing to agree on a spending plan to reopen the government.
Trump’s message asked Hegseth to “use all available funds to get our troops paid” on Oct. 15, which will see their paychecks withheld for the first time since the shutdown began Oct. 1.
Many U.S. military employees are considered “essential.” That means you still have to serve without pay. About 750,000 other federal employees (about 40%) were also laid off or sent home without pay.
Furloughed employees are legally required to return to work with back pay after the shutdown ends, but the Trump administration has hinted that this may not happen.
President Trump wrote on his social media that day, “The radical left Democrats must open the government,” and “Then we can work together to solve health care and many other problems they want to destroy.”
Democrats refused to vote on a Republican spending plan that would reopen the government after a nearly 12-day government shutdown. They said any resolution should preserve expiring tax credits that would reduce health insurance costs for millions of Americans and reverse President Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for seniors and low-income people.
Republicans accuse Democrats of needlessly shutting down the government and blame Democrats for the knock-on effects of the federal shutdown.
Finding a way to pay military salaries could help reduce political risk for congressional leaders if the shutdown continues.
The Trump administration also began laying off thousands of civil servants to pressure Democrats, an unprecedented move during a shutdown.
“RIF is live,” White House Executive Director Russell Vought announced in a post to X on Friday morning.
The administration said late Friday that seven agencies had begun laying off more than 4,000 employees, in line with the president’s repeated threats to use the shutdown to achieve his long-held goal of reducing the federal workforce.
The cuts include dozens of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employees, according to CBS News, the BBC’s U.S. partner, citing sources familiar with the situation.
The agency’s entire Washington, D.C., office has been laid off, sources told CBS, adding that among those laid off are employees working on the CDC’s weekly mortality and morbidity reports and Ebola response and vaccination work. The human resources department is also said to have been downsized.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, told CBS that the laid-off workers were not necessarily necessary and that “HHS continues to close wasteful and redundant organizations, including those that run counter to the Trump administration’s ‘Get America Healthy Again’ agenda.”
Employees at the Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were also laid off Friday, the agencies confirmed.
The two major unions representing federal workers, the American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO, filed a lawsuit in Northern California asking a judge to temporarily block the layoff order.
“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration used a government shutdown as an excuse to illegally lay off thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said AFGE President Everett Kelly.
A White House budget office spokeswoman told the BBC on Saturday that the layoffs were just the beginning.
“The RIF numbers presented to the court are only a snapshot of the time,” he said. “More RIFs are coming.”
In a court filing opposing the union’s request for a temporary restraining order, the Justice Department said agencies such as the Education Department, Housing and Urban Development Department, Commerce Department and Environmental Protection Agency could also cut staff.
Government lawyers said the union failed to prove that its members would suffer irreparable harm as a result of the layoffs. This is necessary for a judge to issue a restraining order. But they said the injunction would “cause irreparable harm to the government.”
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