Congress

Democrats float RIF reversals as shutdown demand

Published

12 months ago

October 15, 2025

President Donald Trump’s decision to fire thousands of federal workers this month was meant to pressure Democrats into quickly ending the government shutdown. Instead, it could have the opposite effect.

As the shutdown enters its 15th day, many Democrats say they want a commitment that employees subjected to reductions-in-force, or RIFs, will be rehired before they agree to reopen the government — even as courts independently act to curb the firings.

“It’d be pretty unconscionable to open it up and still have to put up with those thousands and thousands of firings,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who represents a fed-heavy district bordering Washington.

Negotiating the fates of those workers could further complicate the path out of the shutdown, with Democrats already demanding the extension of key expiring health insurance subsidies and an end to Trump’s moves to cancel congressionally approved spending.

Beyer said he would leave it to the top Hill Democrats — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — to figure out whether a U-turn needs to be written into legislation. “But it definitely should be fully reversed,” he said.

Federal workers and their advocates won an early victory Wednesday when a California-based federal judge halted some of the layoffs on a temporary basis. The White House budget office has said in court papers some 4,000 employees have already been subject to RIFs, and budget director Russ Vought said in an interview with “The Charlie Kirk Show” Wednesday the layoffs could ultimately go “north of 10,000.”

It’s possible that the layoffs might be overturned without congressional intervention as lawsuits stack up. But some Trump administration mass firings undertaken before the shutdown were initially blocked by federal judges only to be ultimately found valid and allowed to remain in effect.

Jeffries has denounced the firings as an intimidation tactic and said they “will be reversed, either congressionally or by the courts.” Schumer has called on the White House to undo the latest firings but has not said whether forcing a backtrack should get tacked on to Democrats’ demand list.

“The administration should reverse every single firing from last week and should stop playing politics with people’s livelihoods and their lives,” he said in a Wednesday floor speech.

Schumer, in particular, has sought to maintain flexibility in navigating a path out of the shutdown. Unlike some Democrats — including Jeffries — he has not demanded an extension of the expiring health care subsidies as a prerequisite to reopen the government, only that the parties negotiate on a bipartisan product. Adding a reversal of the Trump firings to the list could make an off-ramp even harder to find than it already is.

Other Democrats, including some who represent parts of the Washington area, said they are confident the court challenges would ultimately prevail. Federal worker unions filed the initial lawsuits following threats from Vought that preceded the start of the actual government shutdown — arguing, among other things, that the act of firing workers is a nonessential function that cannot be performed during a lapse in federal funding.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said negotiating the cancellation of the RIFs “certainly should be on the table” but added, “I think they’re going to be reversed” by the courts. Added Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), “To the extent those are illegal anyway, they really don’t need to be on the table. But I think we’ll have to see how that plays out.”

Trump said Tuesday more workforce cuts could come as soon as Friday if the government isn’t open by then.

“We’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we were opposed to,” he said. “And they’re never going to come back in many cases.”

Many Democrats have argued Trump would have pursued the sweeping cuts whether the government was open or not. The president has already slashed 200,000 federal jobs through the Department of Government Efficiency, according to a Partnership for Public Service estimate.

That has driven a larger desire to not only fight the Trump administration but to curtail its power to dismantle programs that have been authorized and funded by Congress.

“I think not just RIF removals, but the treatment of federal workers should be part of these negotiations,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) said. “They have nothing to do with the shutdown though, and they’re using this as an excuse to fire people that they were already going to fire.”

Asked about undoing the RIFs, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said “we might reverse some of them as part of the appropriations process.” But he added that Democrats cannot agree to any spending deal so long as Trump can continue cutting federal workers against congressional will: “Getting to stop the unilateral action is definitely something that I’m looking for.

Kaine and other Senate Democrats have gotten some Republican backup. Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) spoke out against the administration’s first round of permanent layoffs last week. And Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) signed onto a letter with dozens of Democrats demanding that the administration guarantee it will give back pay to furloughed workers in keeping with a requirement Trump signed into law in 2019.

But conservative Republicans continue championing the mass layoffs, saying they are proof that the federal government is too big and can easily be pared back.

“The president is doing what he needs to do,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said during a telephone town hall Tuesday. “He said that what we’re going to do is start laying off federal workers — not furloughing them, but laying them off — delivering on the government efficiency promises that he made when he ran for office.”

Calen Razor and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

Congress

Lummis blocks resolution denouncing Trump’s ‘public service announcements’

Published

44 minutes ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A Republican senator blocked a resolution Tuesday that would have denounced President Donald Trump’s recent campaign-style ads funded with taxpayer dollars.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming objected to Sen. Maggie Hassan’s nonbinding resolution, which said it was the sense of the Senate that the ads “should not be paid for by the United States government.” Because Hassan (D-N.H.) was trying to pass the resolution without a formal vote, any one senator could block it.

“It just tells the president that he is wrong — that these ads need to be pulled down and that they should not be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” Hassan said on the floor.

Lummis however countered that Hassan’s concerns about the ads say “more about her side of the aisle” and compared Trump’s ads to President Bill Clinton’s antidrug campaign, among others. One of the ads Trump is running at taxpayer expense is virtually identical to a 2024 campaign ad.

“When a Democratic president tells Americans what to do, it’s a public service,” Lummis said. “When this president tells Americans that liberty is worth defending, it’s a problem.”

Congress

Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun. They got a gaffe instead.

Published

1 hour ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

It started with a pledge to expose a Biden-era conspiracy to take down President Donald Trump. It ended with a botched attack over basketball tickets.

Armed with subpoena power in Congress and a friendly Justice Department on their side, Republican lawmakers have spent two years promising to expose former special counsel Jack Smith as the leader of an anti-Trump witch hunt that morphed into a full-blown attempt to take down the Republican establishment.

Smith’s appearance Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee — his third time testifying under oath on Capitol Hill, the second time in public — was supposed to be a watershed moment for the GOP intent on extracting a smoking gun ahead of the midterm elections. Instead, the hearing was most memorable for the fusillade of insults hurled by the panel’s Republicans.

Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri unsuccessfully sought to implicate Smith in a plot to attend a sporting event as a cover for investigating Trump election interference claims, then called him a “dirtbag.” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said the former prosecutor made him “want to throw up in my mouth.” And Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, comparing him to “Javert from ‘Les Mis,’” said Smith’s probe was “the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice.”

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley insisted the hearing was “not the end” of his investigative work, but the four-hour grilling had the feeling of finality. The Republican-led probe into Smith’s efforts to bring criminal charges against the president has already stretched for two years, and Democrats stand a chance of retaking control of Congress in the midterms.

And at least one Republican member of the panel, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, said he believed the investigation into Smith had run its course in Congress.

“At this point, I think we kind of know what we know,” Hawley said in an interview following the hearing. “I think at this point, it’s up to the DOJ to either prosecute him for perjury for lying under oath, which I think the House has formally referred him for … or try to have him disbarred.”

Judiciary Committee Republicans did little Tuesday to challenge the substance of Smith’s criminal case against Trump for seeking to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Smith reinforced his contention that Trump mounted an unprecedented criminal assault on the transfer of power, seeking to derail Joe Biden’s victory and then capitalizing on the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol — unleashed by a mob of his supporters — to further that goal.

Smith also defended the work of his staff and decried the Trump-led Justice Department’s decision to fire them as “illegal.” And he made his most forceful case yet that the probe he led was actually fueled by Republican witnesses who broke from Trump over his handling of the 2020 election.

”It’s very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between the rule of law and not, were Republicans,” Smith said.

When Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) ripped into Smith for secretly obtaining her late brother Lindsey Graham’s phone records as part of his inquiry, Smith hailed him as a “patriotic public servant” and who likely would have been a featured witness in Trump’s trial — because he eventually concluded Trump’s election fraud claims were false.

Smith similarly hailed Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and former Vice President Mike Pence as heroic figures who were crucial witnesses against the president. Smith ultimately dropped his case after Trump prevailed in the 2024 election. Though he said he remained confident in his ability to secure a conviction at trial, Smith emphasized that Justice Department policy forbids criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

When they weren’t lobbing personal attacks at Smith, Republicans homed in on what they described as procedural flaws of Smith’s investigation. They criticized him for subpoenaing phone records of members of Congress, like Lindsey Graham, who communicated with Trump and his administration during the post-2020 election timeframe.

They hit Smith for securing court orders that prevented telecom companies from alerting lawmakers to those subpoenas, and challenged his respect for the constitutional protections members of Congress are afforded to avoid scrutiny from federal prosecutors. That line of questioning produced one of the only bipartisan moments of the hearing: a pitch by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for legislation that would limit the ability of prosecutors to obtain secrecy orders when they issue subpoenas in sensitive probes.

Lee is poised to be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the next Congress if Republicans maintain control of the chamber.

Smith used his appearance, as well as friendly questions from the panel’s Democrats, to parry GOP criticism of his tactics. He followed all Justice Department policies and laws, he insisted, and said he had respect for the separation of powers — including Congress’ constitutional protection from executive branch scrutiny.

Smith said he never targeted GOP lawmakers but pursued critical evidence of Trump’s actions and state of mind that would have been necessary to prove his case in court, and he repeatedly returned to an overarching contention: that he had enough evidence to convict Trump of “one of the most serious crimes that’s ever happened in our nation’s history.”

He also reminded lawmakers what he couldn’t say: anything at all about his charges against Trump for hoarding classified information at Mar-a-Lago. Smith’s findings in that probe remain sealed from public view by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who has ordered the Justice Department to keep it secret.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said subpoenaing that report would be one of Democrats’ first actions should they have the majority in the next Congress.

Ultimately, Smith’s hearing Tuesday may end up being best remembered for a high-profile gaffe by Schmitt, who accused Smith of secretly traveling to Atlanta at the very moment local prosecutor Fani Willis — who had also charged Trump over the 2020 election scheme — was facing damaging questions about her conduct. As proof, displayed on an elaborate poster, Schmitt offered text messages suggesting that Smith attended a basketball game on Feb. 3, 2024 — the same day the Atlanta Hawks played the Golden State Warriors.

Schmitt revelled as a clearly flummoxed Smith struggled to discern what Schmitt was talking about.

“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” Schmitt said. “So I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself.”

After a few moments, Smith did recall having attended a basketball game — but not in Atlanta. It wasn’t the Hawks his colleagues were discussing in a series of texts, Smith explained, but the Hawkeyes, whose star Caitlin Clark was playing in Maryland that day.

“It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play, and so we went to the game,” Smith said.

Immediately after the exchange, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) fact-checked Schmitt in real-time, confirming the date of the Iowa-Maryland game and suggested that her colleagues’ reliance on “false information based on confusion about the name of a team” warranted an apology.

“You don’t call someone a dirtbag when you haven’t done your own research and you don’t have your facts straight,” Klobuchar said after the hearing. “And it just shows how completely out of control this whole thing was.”

Schmitt did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his allegations.

Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Congress

Cruz blocks Senate Democrats’ bid to pass AI safety bill

Published

4 hours ago

September 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A Democratic trio attempted to pass an artificial intelligence bill via a unanimous consent request on Tuesday but were blocked on the Senate floor.

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) sought to pass their Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act using the procedural mechanism, which allows expedited consideration of legislation but fails if one senator opposes it.

“The whole world has recognized that we’ve got to do something,” Warner said in a speech on the floor. “We should not miss the moment to put a safety protocol in place now.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) objected to the bill, preventing any chance of passage.

“Congress must not legislate on the issue of artificial intelligence hastily or in a closed manner,” he said on the floor, adding that it gave some in the government too much power to dictate the technology that could be permitted to be released.

As some lawmakers grow concerned over dire warnings from AI labs’ top executives about the technology’s risk to humanity, Congress’ attempts to legislate AI guardrails have largely stalled.

In the past few weeks, two other AI-related bills, the Ratepayer Protection Act and AI Emergency Button Act, were also nixed in an attempt to pass them unanimously.

Warner, Schatz and Kim’s new bill would have established a new safety board within the Commerce Department to vet models before they are deployed and set safety standards for the industry. It would also have created a reporting process for safety and security incidents.