US agencies face March 13 deadline to submit mass layoff plans

WASHINGTON - The potential scale of US President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the US federal government could become clearer on March 13, the deadline for government agencies to submit plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and to slash their budgets.

Agencies ranging from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department are required to submit their cost-cutting proposals to the White House and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the government’s human resources department, kicking off a process that could eliminate tens of thousands of federal jobs.

This new round of layoffs marks the latest step in Mr Trump’s sweeping effort to remake the federal bureaucracy – a task he has largely put in the hands of tech billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge.

So far, Doge has overseen cuts of more than

100,000 jobs across the 2.3 million-member federal civilian

workforce, the freezing of foreign aid, and the cancelling of thousands of programs and contracts.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by labour unions and others challenging the legality of those moves, with mixed success.

The prospect for more job losses comes with financial markets already rattled about the economic risks posed by Mr Trump’s global trade war.

Over the weekend, Mr Trump declined to predict whether his tariff policies might cause a recession.

Americans are broadly supportive of the idea of cutting the size of the federal government, with 59 per cent of respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on March 12 saying they supported that goal.

But they expressed concern about the way Mr Trump was going about doing so, with a similar 59 per cent of respondents saying the opposed the moves to fire tens of thousands of federal workers.

Mr Trump appears to be rushing to enact deep, pain-inducing reforms to use his political capital before whatever is left of the post-election honeymoon period comes to an end, said Rice University political science professor Mark Jones.

“The Trump administration knows that it has a limited time horizon,” Prof Jones said. “The risk is they cut too much, or they don’t cut strategically, and it has negative blowbacks in terms of the ability of the federal government to function.”

With Mr Musk at his side, Mr Trump

signed an executive order on Feb 11

directing all agencies to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force”, using a legal term commonly referred to as RIF to denote mass layoffs.

An OPM memo said plans should include “a significant reduction” of full-time staff, cuts to real estate, a smaller budget, and the elimination of functions not mandated by law.

A handful of agencies have telegraphed how many employees they plan to cut in the second phase of layoffs.

These include the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is aiming to cut more than 80,000 workers, and the US Department of Education, which said on Feb 11

it would lay off nearly half its 4,000-strong staff

.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US government agency that provides weather forecasts, is planning to lay off more than 1,000 workers.

Several agencies have also offered employees lump-sum payments to voluntarily retire early, a move that could help the agencies avoid the legal complications inherent in the RIF process, which unions have vowed to fight in court.

Mr Trump and Mr Musk have argued that the government is bloated and prone to wasting taxpayers’ money.

Doge says it has saved US$105 billion (S$140.1 billion) by eliminating waste, but it has publicly documented just a fraction of those savings, and its accounting has been plagued by errors and revisions. REUTERS