Federal Workers Notch Win Against Illegal RIFs

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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.

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Workers fought back hard, saying in the lawsuit that Vought was abusing his position and illegally using the government shutdown as an excuse to fire them. Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction stopping the Trump administration from issuing or enforcing the RIFs; the court then issued subsequent relief preventing the government from firing workers after the shutdown ended and forcing officials to reinstate any fired worker.

By that time, some workers had already taken new jobs; many had indeed been traumatized by the shutdown and the months without pay, during which they struggled through an uncertain future and drained their savings accounts.

Vought continued to attack the federal workforce after courts told him no, including by rule changes that would politicize how they’re graded on their work, as the Prospect reported, and, more recently, taking chairs away from Transportation Security Administration airport workers to force them to stand all day.

More than 270,000 workers have now left federal employment since January 20, 2025, according to the Office of Personnel Management, shrinking the federal workforce to its smallest level since the 1960s.

“We brought this case forward in defense of our nation’s federal workers—including the highly skilled, nonpartisan professionals AFSCME represents who have dedicated their careers to keeping our communities safe and healthy, from the planes we fly on to the food we eat,” Patrick Moran, president of plaintiff American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement.

“But this billionaire-run administration continues to put politics between these essential workers and their public service, at great expense to our communities. We’re glad this settlement places limits on their ability to use federal workers as bargaining chips to push their extreme agenda during the next government shutdown, but the fight is far from over.”

The post appeared first on The American Prospect.