Trump directs the Pentagon to pay troops during the shutdown

Donald Trump ordered US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to pay military salaries despite the federal government shutdown.

The president said Saturday that Hegseth must make sure troops don’t miss their regular paycheck scheduled for Wednesday. This directive comes at a time when some salaries of other government employees have already been withheld and others are being laid off.

Trump said on his platform, Truth Social, “I will not allow the Democrats to hold our military, and the entire security of our nation, hostage with their dangerous government shutdown.”

The Republican and Democratic parties are exchanging accusations of failing to agree on a spending plan to reopen the government.

Trump’s letter asks Hegseth to “use all available funds to obtain pay for our troops” on Oct. 15, when military personnel will see their pay withheld for the first time since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.

Many U.S. military employees are considered “essential,” meaning they must still report for duty without pay. About 750,000 other federal employees — about 40% — have been furloughed or sent home, also without pay.

Furloughed employees are legally supposed to receive back pay after the shutdown ends and return to work, but the Trump administration has hinted that that may not happen.

“The far-left Democrats have to open up the government, and then we can work together to address health care, and a lot of the other things they want to destroy,” Trump said Saturday.

Democrats have refused to vote for a Republican spending plan that would reopen the government after nearly 12 days of shutdown, saying any decision must preserve expired tax breaks that reduce health insurance costs for millions of Americans and reverse Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for seniors and low-income people.

Republicans accuse Democrats of stopping the government’s work unnecessarily, and blame them for the effects of the federal shutdown.

Finding a way to pay military salaries could help reduce some of the political risks congressional leaders face if the shutdown continues.

In an attempt to pressure Democrats, the Trump administration also began laying off thousands of government employees, an unprecedented move during the shutdown.

“Regional investment funds have begun,” Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management, announced in a post on X on Friday morning, referring to an acronym for “reductions in effect.”

The administration later revealed on Friday that seven agencies had begun firing more than 4,000 people, fulfilling the president’s repeated threats to use the shutdown to advance his long-sought goal of reducing the federal workforce.

The cuts included dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to CBS News, a BBC partner, citing sources familiar with the situation.

The agency’s entire Washington, D.C., office has been laid off, sources told CBS, adding that among the laid-off employees are those who work on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly mortality and morbidity report, the agency’s Ebola response and immunizations. They added that there were also cuts in the human resources department.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS that the layoffs were not necessary, and that “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that conflict with the Trump administration’s agenda to Make America Healthy Again.”

Those agencies confirmed that employees at the Treasury Department and at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were also among those laid off on Friday.

The American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO, two major unions representing federal workers, have filed a lawsuit in Northern California, asking a judge to temporarily block the layoff orders.

“It is shameful that the Trump administration is using the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide vital services to communities across the country,” said Everett Kelly, president of AFGE.

A spokesman for the White House Budget Office told the BBC on Saturday that the layoffs were just the beginning.

“The RIF numbers in the court filing are just a snapshot in time,” he said. “More RIFs are coming.”

In a lawsuit 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 reductions.

Government lawyers said the labor unions failed to prove that their members would be irreparably harmed by the layoffs, which is necessary for a judge to issue the restraining order. But they said the restraining order would “irreparably harm the government.”

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