With the government shutdown now a week old, Fox Business host Larry Kudlow urged Donald Trump to seize upon the “great opportunity” presented to him and slash as many as half a million jobs from the federal payroll.
“They’re not essential, and the public would understand that,” Kudlow, who previously served as Trump’s chief economic adviser, declared on Tuesday.
The Fox star’s remarks came shortly after the president suggested that he may not honor the law he signed during his first term, which requires furloughed workers “to be paid at the earliest date possible after the lapse in appropriations ends.”
The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, which was passed following the 2018-19 federal shutdown, requires retroactive pay and leave accrual for federal employees who are furloughed due to lapses in appropriations. Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and a key architect of Project 2025, has recently cast doubt on whether those workers will receive back pay.
Sitting beside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about Vought’s intentions and whether he personally felt that sidelined federal workers should be made whole once the government is reopened.
Saying it would “depend on who we’re talking about” while blaming Democrats for placing “a lot of people in great risk and jeopardy,” the president then indicated that some employees would be out of luck.
“For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way,” he declared.
As for Vought, whom he has likened to the “Grim Reaper” and tasked with getting rid of a host of government-funded programs, Trump said it would be “pretty soon” when his OMB director would begin slashing things.
“We have a lot of things that we’re going to eliminate and permanently eliminate,” Trump said, adding that he would reveal the list of programs he intended to cut “in four or five days” if the shutdown were to continue.
“If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back,” Trump concluded.
During an appearance on Fox News’ America Reports, Kudlow was excited over the prospect of hundreds of thousands of federal workers losing their jobs permanently, though he insisted he wasn’t looking to be “cruel” about it.
“Just think of it this way. You have something like 750-800,000 jobs that are called ‘nonessential,’” Kudlow said. “I’ve been through this a bunch of times. If they’re nonessential, they’re nonessential. OK? Cut them. End them. OK. You might want to give them some buyout stuff and some severance pay. I don’t want to be cruel about this.”
Asserting that the “size and scope of government should be reduced,” Kudlow proclaimed that the shutdown represented a “great opportunity to do it” while claiming that “Democrats have overstepped very badly” during the impasse with Republicans.
Saying this could be “like DOGE 2.0,” referencing the “government efficiency” department he’s long celebrated that was once spearheaded by former “first buddy” Elon Musk, Kudlow then speculated about the number of employees who could be fired.
“There’s about 275,000, almost 300,000 federal workers who will be ending their term,” he stated. “They’re being bought out with incentives and severance pay this year. You can do another 3-400,000 — I don’t know how many — 500,000, because they’re not essential, and the public would understand that.”
Kudlow went on to say that the terminated workers “could be treated well” and that “you’d have to spend a little money in the short run in order to save an enormous amount of money in the long run.”
Meanwhile, the former Trump adviser heaped praise on Vought – saying the OMG chief’s “secret sauce” has been on display throughout this shutdown.
“The president has the authority, since there’s no financing, the appropriations are not there anymore. That’s the whole shutdown,” Kudlow concluded. “So he can do this, and that’s what he should do.”
