A group of federal workers who were laid off during the U.S. government shutdown are accusing the Trump administration of violating the law by failing to rehire them after they were fired during the government shutdown.
35 former employees of the General Services Administration argue that they should have been reinstated under the spending law that ended the shutdown, which included a provision that reversed any layoff that occurred during the lapse in federal spending that began on Oct. 1. The provision was one of the few concessions the Democrats managed to extract from Republicans in exchange for agreeing to end the longest shutdown in U.S. history.
That includes around 200 people in the GSA, who the administration claims are not covered by the statute because they were notified before the government shut down that they would be laid off.
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“Congress was specific in the bill it wrote that it was concerned with RIF notices issued during the shutdown, not RIFs that were noticed before Oct. 1, 2025,” McLaurine Pinover, a spokeswoman for the Office of Personnel Management, said in a statement, referring to layoffs known in federal parlance as reductions in force. “RIFs that were noticed before the shutdown but happened to have a separation date that fell later were not ‘implemented or executed’ during the shutdown, but rather before.”
Senator Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat who led negotiations on the federal worker protections in the spending package said that the administration’s interpretation ran squarely counter to the law.
“The RIF provision in the government funding deal is clear: Any RIF that was initiated on or since Oct. 1 is null and void, and any RIF not completed by Oct. 1 is halted,” Kaine said. “Congress’s intent to protect federal workers from baseless firings is obvious — a fact that will strengthen federal workers’ cases in any litigation to hold the administration to account for attempts to disregard the law.”
The law says that any reduction in force “proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented or otherwise taken” during the shutdown “shall have no force or effect.”
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Nick Bednar, an administrative law expert at the University of Minnesota, said that language makes it clear that Congress meant for the law to cover any federal worker at any stage in the RIF process — not just those who were first told they were being laid off after the shutdown began.
“If Congress only wanted to cover RIFs where the notice was issued after Oct. 1, it did not need to include the words ‘executed’ or ‘implementation,’” he said. “Yet it did.”
The U.S. government shutdown lasted 43 days, and affected thousands of employees, delayed essential services, and disrupted industries heavily reliant on government support, including housing, construction, infrastructure, and federal contracting. The shutdown caused measurable economic costs, estimated at $11 billion, demonstrating that even temporary interruptions in government spending and operations can ripple through both public and private sectors.
At the same time, broader economic indicators, such as consumer spending and employment, reportedly remained resilient, suggesting that the underlying U.S. economy retained strength despite the disruption.