The administration of American president Donald Trump has already dismissed thousands of civil servants.Credit: Tierney L. Cross / Getty
US government agencies have been ordered to initiate another series of punishing layoffs at the same time as the congress is growing with a plan to reduce their budgets – a potential blow to science.
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On Wednesday, Russell Vought, director of the Office for the Management and Budget of the White House (OMB), sent a memo Organize agency leaders to submit two -step plans for important “strength reductions” (RIF) by March 13 and April 14. The note does not provide absolute numbers, but calls for “maximum elimination of functions which are not legally mandated”.
The administration of American president Donald Trump “has targeted all federal workers and does not seem to worry about how they cause employees or the American public”, the American Federation of Government employees, a union representing around 800,000 workers, said in a statement of February 26. “Chaos is the point.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comments on this subject and to other statements in this story.
Hugging the government
The OMB note is the last In a series of actions from the Trump administration To reduce the federal workforce, which, according to her, is corrupt, ineffective and communicates on its regulation of companies. Scientific agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) – two main donors of the American university sciences – have already undergone significant layoffs. In the past two weeks, the agencies have drawn thousands of “probationary” employeeswhich were newly hired or which had recently been transferred to new positions, although a federal judge judged yesterday that some of these layoffs were illegal. The Trump administration has also served hundreds of people who have worked on diversity, equity and inclusion or programs for the federal government, calling them “illegal and immoral discrimination programs”.
Russell Vought, director of the White House Management and Budget Office, sent a memo earlier this week calling for significant reductions in force between government agencies.Credit: Andrew Harnik / Getty
The dismissal of permanent mass employees, as planned in the last memo, would represent a significant escalation and could also face significant judicial disputes. RIFs in government agencies require a valid reason, such as budgetary constraints, according to Nick Bednar, a legal academic from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. But the administration could soon have all the justification it needs: Trump’s republican allies at the Congress work to adopt a budget bill which aims to reduce at least 1.5 to 2 dollars of the federal budget from the 2026 financial year. In comparison, the entire discretionary budget – the party that the Congress Allopes each year and includes the financing of scientific agencies – was less than 1.7 million Dollars in 2024.
Vought has long recommended the reduction of government’s budgets. In a 2023 report, making federal budget suggestionsVought, then president of a right -based organization based in Washington DC called the Center for Renewing America, used terms of war to describe the upcoming battle to dismantle a federal government “awake and armed”, including a “small scientific elite”, which feeds on taxpayers. “It is the central and immediate threat to the country-the one that all our statesmen must get up to defeat,” he wrote, advocating that the government can be “hungry to dismantle it”.
Disappearance programs
The extent of the Trump administration’s effort to reduce the US government has no modern precedent. In the 1990s, the president of the time, Bill Clinton, ordered agencies to reduce their workforce, but the reductions were relatively light: at least 4% of the workforce was reduced, and the work to do so was distributed over 3 years and mainly accomplished by attrition strategies such as leaving vacant posts when people withdrew.
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Some agencies have experienced even greater oscillations on their workforce over the years. During the first presidency of Trump, from 2017 to 2021, for example, the American environmental protection agency (EPA) led to around 1,100 people, or 7% of its staff, despite the efforts of the congress to block budget cuts.
If the latest RIFs are carried out on a specified scale, they could permanently weaken scientific agencies, according to politicians.
At the NSF, a reduction of up to 50% of the workforce – around 800 of the 1,600 people – was suggested by several sources of the NSF on the basis of budget cuts projected for 2026. “We are concerned that whole programs and divisions disappear,” explains an NSF employee who asked for anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the press.
These extreme cuts in the workforce reflect the magnitude of Vought’s proposal in 2023: it suggests reducing the agency’s budget by more than half, from around 9 billion to less than $ 4 billion. The agency would not be “able to fulfill its statutory mission – it cannot do it with $ 4 billion,” explains Kenny Evans, researcher in scientific policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas. “The NSF, as we know, could stop existing.” (The NSF grants about $ 8.5 billion in research subsidies each year.)