Multiple labor unions sued the OMB director for abusing his position and pushing an extremist Project 2025 agenda.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2025 (Prospect.org)
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OMB Director Russ Vought is taking a “legally unsupportable position,” unions say.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought is illegally using the government shutdown as cover to fire federal workers en masse, abusing his position, and pushing an extremist agenda, according to a lawsuit brought Tuesday night by multiple labor unions representing more than two million federal workers.
Vought and OMB are taking a “legally unsupportable position” that a temporary government shutdown grants permission to cut federal workers at any programs for which funding has lapsed and “that are not priorities of the president,” concludes the lawsuit.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has explained, lapses in funding confer no new power on OMB to fire employees. And the activity of conducting firings or personnel changes is not “essential” work, the only work supposed to be carried out during a shutdown. These points form the backbone of the union lawsuit.
“The Trump administration is once again breaking the law to push its extreme Project 2025 agenda, illegally targeting federal workers with threats of mass firings due to the federal government shutdown,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which brought the lawsuit along with the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Government Employees, AFGE Local 1236 and 3172, and civil rights groups.
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“If these mass firings take place, the people who keep our skies safe for travel, our food supply secure, and our communities protected will lose their jobs,” Saunders continued. “We will do everything possible to defend these AFSCME members and their fellow workers from an administration hell-bent on stripping away their collective bargaining rights and jobs.”
Among other relief, the claim asks the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to declare that Vought and the OMB have exceeded their statutory authority, broken the law, and acted arbitrarily and capriciously in directing federal agencies to “use this opportunity” of the shutdown to conduct mass layoffs. It asks the court to throw out Vought’s memo ordering agencies to do that.
The lawsuit also names the Office of Personnel Management and its director, Scott Kupor, as defendants. Kupor “issued unlawful and unprecedented instructions” that federal workers may continue working during the shutdown in order to execute mass reductions, plaintiffs said in a statement.
According to the lawsuit, Vought’s illegality includes violating the decades-long practice during shutdowns of either furloughing workers but guaranteeing back pay after the shutdown ends, or requiring them to keep working until funding is restored to pay them. Vought’s OMB, however, is directing federal agencies to issue mass reduction-in-force notices, while stripping them of their back-pay rights, among other violations.
“In doing so, the administration is misusing the shutdown process for partisan ends and violating the very laws that govern how shutdowns are supposed to function,” the plaintiffs said in a statement.
So far, the demand for mass layoffs hasn’t really been carried out. According to Bloomberg, agencies that have released shutdown plans, comprising around two-thirds of all federal workers, have opted for temporary furloughs, as is customary when funding lapses. This defies Vought’s order and suggests that, as Democrats claimed, the threat is more of a bluff. But that could of course change at any time, and the lawsuit is a preemptive strike on the possibility, as outlined in Vought’s memo.
The plaintiffs take aim at Vought’s “arbitrary, cruel, and punitive” plan to gut the federal workforce. They include statements he made prior to officially joining the Trump administration. He said, for example, that he wanted federal employees “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’s September 24 memo blamed “congressional Democrats” for any shutdown. More recently, he argued that Republicans have Democrats “in a very good position.” Plaintiffs note that the rhetoric matches the overall Trump administration’s attacks on Democrats, which on Tuesday included attack ads posted on federal websites and via emails to workers.
One that appeared on the Department of Housing and Urban Development website said, in part, “The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands.”
Workers received similar messages in their in-boxes. “If Congressional Democrats maintain their current posture and refuse to pass a clean Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded before midnight on September 30, 2025, federal appropriated funding will lapse,” read an email to Health and Human Services workers.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas, founder of The Handbasket, was the first to report that the emails workers received were “mandated by the White House Office of Management and Budget via an intra-agency email to leadership and reinforced on a subsequent call … And there was one clear stipulation: Absolutely no modifications to the language,” Kabas reported.
The attacks drew anger from workers and advocates, who described the messages as unusually partisan. The nonprofit organization Public Citizen filed a Hatch Act complaint against HUD Secretary Scott Turner, saying he violated limits placed on him as a political appointee by idolizing the Trump administration and failing to tell the truth about who is responsible for the shutdown. “The post is in bold print, 36-inch size, and prominently displayed on the HUD web page paid for by tax dollars,” says the complaint by Dr. Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen.
A second post “is equally as partisan and political in nature, reciting the same derogatory descriptions of congressional Democrats, blaming solely Democrats for causing the shut down, and heaping praise for the virtues of Donald Trump in attempting to protect the American people,” Holman wrote. “This time the post is soaked in blood red color.”
The lawsuits also called out these messages, as well as Trump’s ongoing threats of illegal action, saying things like “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them and irreversible by them, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”
“President Trump is using the civil service as a bargaining chip as he marches the American people into a government shutdown. Federal workers do the work of the people and playing games with their livelihoods is cruel and unlawful,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of plaintiff Democracy Forward. “That is why we have sued today.”
WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH
Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked for the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey.
