Trump directs Pentagon to pay troops during shutdown
Donald Trump orders US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to pay military personnel despite the federal government shutdown.
Hegseth should make sure soldiers don’t miss their regular paychecks scheduled for Wednesday, the president said Saturday. The directive comes at a time when some of the salaries of other government employees have been cut and others have been laid off.
“I will not allow Democrats to hold our Military and our Nation’s Security HOSTAGE with dangerous Government Shutdowns,” Trump said on the Truth Social platform.
The Republican and Democratic parties are blaming each other for failing to agree on a spending plan to reopen the government.
Trump’s message asks Hegseth to “use all available funds to get our troops PAID” on Oct. 15, the day military personnel’s pay was cut for the first time since the shutdown began Oct. 1.
Many U.S. military employees are considered “essential,” meaning they must still report to duty without pay. Approximately 750,000 federal employees (about 40 percent) were furloughed or sent home.
Furloughed employees are legally required to receive back pay after the shutdown ends and they return to work, but the Trump administration has hinted that may not happen.
“Radical Left Democrats MUST OPEN UP THE GOVERNMENT, then we can work together on Healthcare and many of the other things they want to destroy,” Trump posted Saturday. he said.
Democrats refused to vote for the Republican spending plan that would reopen the government after a nearly 12-day shutdown, saying any decision must preserve expiring tax credits that reduce health insurance costs for millions of Americans and reverse Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, the health program for elderly and low-income people.
Republicans accuse Democrats of needlessly shutting down the government and blame them for the knock-on effects caused by the federal walkout.
Finding a way to pay military salaries could help reduce some of the political risk congressional leaders face if the shutdown lasts long.
The Trump administration has also begun laying off thousands of public employees, an unprecedented move during the shutdown, in an effort to pressure Democrats.
“RIFs have begun,” White House Executive Office Director Russell Vought said in a post on X Friday morning, referring to the acronym for “reductions in force.”
The administration announced later Friday that seven agencies had begun cutting more than 4,000 jobs, making up for the president’s repeated threats to use the shutdown to advance his long-held goal of reducing the federal workforce.
The reductions included dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the BBC’s US partner CBS news reported, citing sources familiar with the situation.
The agency’s entire Washington, D.C. office was laid off, sources told CBS, adding that among the laid-off employees were those who worked on the CDC’s Weekly Mortality and Morbidity Report, the agency’s Ebola response and vaccines. They said there were also reductions in the human resources department.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, told CBS that the workers released were not essential and that “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative assets, including those that conflict with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”
Those laid off Friday included employees at the Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, those agencies confirmed.
The American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO, two major unions representing federal workers, filed a lawsuit in Northern California asking a judge to temporarily block the layoff orders.
“It is shameful that the Trump administration used the 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 Kelley.
A spokesman for the White House budget office told the BBC on Saturday that the layoffs were just the beginning.
“These RIF numbers in the court file are just a snapshot in time,” he said. “More RIFs are coming.”
In a court filing opposing the unions’ request for a temporary restraining order, the justice department revealed that agencies such as the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency could also see staff cuts.
Government lawyers said the labor unions failed to establish that their members would be irreparably harmed by the layoffs, which was necessary for the judge to issue the restraining order. But they said the restraining order would “irreparably harm the government.”
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