News
Johnson: Trump Will Stop Firing Federal Workers When the Government Reopens
Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday defended the administration’s Friday night firing of thousands of federal employees, contending that President Trump and Budget Director Russ Vought were compelled by the shutdown to act, and alleged firing federal workers will end when the shutdown does — explanations experts widely reject as unfounded.
Asked about the terminations, Speaker Mike Johnson claimed to have little knowledge of them, despite widespread reporting. He suggested the layoffs were a consequence of the shutdown, telling reporters that “the executive branch, the Office of Management and Budget, has to determine what are the most efficient and effective programs.”
“It’s a difficult task,” Johnson told reporters. “It’s not one that they relish. They don’t want to do it. Listen, the president’s own words, and the Russ Vought’s own words, and everybody who’s involved. They want the government to be opened. They’re begging Chuck Schumer and the Democrats. That’s how to make all this stop. They want this to end immediately, and they want it at the end before it started.”
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Vought, some felt, had appeared to celebrate the layoffs when he announced them on Friday. Politico noted that “Vought’s post appears to follow through on a threat to inflict more political pain on Democrats.”
“The RIFs have begun,” the OMB director had written on social media, referring to his reduction-in-force plans. Politico reported he had sounded the “layoff siren.” Initial estimates were that about 4,200 employees had lost their jobs across at least nine government agencies.
U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, reportedly blasted Trump and Vought:
“Once again, when President Trump and his self-described ‘grim reaper’ decide to ignore the pleas of congressional Republicans and conduct more mass firings, they are choosing to inflict more pain on the American people.”
“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers—they just want to,” she added.
U.S. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) responded to Vought, writing: “A reminder that Russell Vought previously said he wanted Gov workers ‘to be traumatically affected. 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.'”
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Experts denied the legality and condemned the perceived motivations for the firings.
Brendan Duke of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote: “Firing federal employees during a shutdown is not only illegal but must be seen for what it is: blatant extortion. The Trump Administration is using working people and their families as pawns in a power play with no concern for who gets hurt.”
“Claims that the shutdown has forced their hand are false,” Duke added. “Nothing about a shutdown justifies these firings or makes them necessary. That’s why they haven’t happened in past shutdowns – including in the first Trump admin.”
“Russ Vought is now officially using the government shutdown as a pretext for his continued attempts to permanently gut the civil service,” wrote Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “The executive branch cannot unilaterally reduce agency funding that Congress has allocated: This is a serious separation of powers issue.”
REPORTER: We know the president moved forward with mass layoffs. We’re also learning there were significant cuts to staff at special education services. Are you comfortable with those cuts?
MIKE JOHNSON: I haven’t seen the specifics of that and I don’t know pic.twitter.com/F0Nn0Ujnof
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 13, 2025
READ MORE: ‘I Know People. They Don’t Believe That’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Scorches Johnson
Image via Reuters
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President Donald Trump continues to tease out a possible 2028 run, despite the constitutional prohibition on a third term. On Friday, the 79-year old unveiled a new “slogan,” and his new name for Trump Republican voters.
Trump has acknowledged the constitutional block on a third term, recently telling reporters that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a constitutional attorney, told him a third term is not allowed — a fact he appeared to accept.
But Trump on Friday afternoon posted an AI meme of a silver-haired, older-looking Donald Trump, holding a campaign sign that reads — not “Make America Great Again” — but, “Trump 2028, Yes!”
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The post, on his Truth Social website, also says, “Trumplicans!”
“There is a new word for a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, which is almost everyone,” he recently wrote. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???”
Apparently, “Trumplicans” won out.
Health care activist Melanie D’Arrigo remarked on Wednesday that “Trump is workshopping names for his cult, while Americans struggle to afford the rising costs of groceries, healthcare and housing.”
Reporting on Trump’s musings, TIME on Thursday noted that his new MAGA moniker comes “amid high-profile divisions within the MAGA base.”
Were Trump to run for a third term, he would be 82 on Election Day in 2028.
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Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump is under fire over a report that claims he is proposing that the U.S. recognize Russian control of parts of Ukraine, including Crimea, which Russia has unlawfully annexed, as a means to end the war.
“The Telegraph understands that Donald Trump has sent his peace envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to make the direct offer to Vladimir Putin in Moscow,” the news outlet reported. “The plan to recognize territory, which breaks US diplomatic convention, is likely to go ahead despite concerns among Ukraine’s European allies.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin “on Thursday said Washington’s legal recognition of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as Russian territory would be one of the key issues in negotiations over the US president’s peace plan,” according to The Telegraph.
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Critics are blasting President Trump.
Shaun Pinner, a former British soldier who served as a contracted Marine fighting in Ukraine’s armed forces, responded to the report:
“I’ve lived through the cost of losing ground. I’ve seen the bodies, the destroyed homes, and I’ve been tortured by Russia like so many others. Land is never ‘just land.’ It’s people. Families. Lives shattered.”
“So yes, watching Trump casually bargain away territory that isn’t even his to give feels like a deep betrayal,” he added. “It’s a lesson I wish none of us had to learn the hard way, and one far too many are being forced to relive again because one of our so-called allies is now suggesting we reward genocide.”
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Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, remarked, “Trump would be rewarding imperial conquest, thereby encouraging other autocrats to do so, resulting in a very unstable world.”
Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, co-founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative, issued a warning:
“If the US recognizes territory taken by force, just replace ‘leader of the free world’ with ‘for sale’. Xi can come up with more cash than Putin for Trump and his pals to do the same for Taiwan.”
Marko Mihkelson, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament, remarked, “If this is true, then we have a major problem, Houston.”
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Image via Reuters
A Trump administration order to keep an aging and unneeded Michigan coal-fired power plant open and online reportedly is costing taxpayers about $615,000 per day, or $113 million to date. Closing the plant would save taxpayers about $640 million by 2040.
“The Trump administration in May ordered utility giant Consumers Energy to keep the 63-year-old JH Campbell coal plant in western Michigan, about 100 miles north-east of Chicago, online just as it was being retired,” according to The Guardian.
“The costs of unnecessarily running this jalopy coal plant just continue to mount,” Michael Lenoff, an attorney with Earthjustice, which is suing over the order, told The Guardian.
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President Donald Trump signed a national energy emergency order on his first day in office this year, rolling back regulations.
In court documents, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that the administration’s latest order is “arbitrary and illegal.”
Consumers Energy, the operator of the plant, did not ask the Trump administration for the order to keep the coal plant running, and the Trump administration did not consult local regulators, a spokesperson for the Michigan public service commission (MPSC), told the Guardian in May.
“The unnecessary recent order … will increase the cost of power for homes and businesses in Michigan and across the midwest,” the chair of the MPSC, Dan Scripps, said in a statement at the time.
Reporting on what it called Trump’s “pro-fossil fuel agenda,” The Guardian in January quoted the president:
“We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it – let me use it,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
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Image via Reuters
Trump Order to Keep ‘Jalopy’ Coal Plant Open Costs Taxpayers Over $100 Million
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Trump Teases 2028 ‘Campaign’ With New Slogan
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