by Natalia Mittelstadt
The Interior Department plans to lay off 2,050 employees, according to a new court filing.
The department made the announcement in a filing Monday to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in which the agency also detailed plans for the layoffs across 89 units or agencies, according to The Hill news outlet.
The plan calls for laying off roughly 470 employees in the Bureau of Labor Management, 140 in the Fish and Wildlife Service and 270 in the National Park Service – including more than 180 from parks in the country’s Southeast, Northeast, and Pacific West regions.
The Department of the Interior is responsible for managing America’s natural resources and cultural heritage, as stated on its website.
Rachel Borra, the department’s chief human resources officer, said in the filing that the layoff plans “predated” the shutdown of the federal government that started Oct. 1 – after Congress could not agree on a spending measure to keep it fully operational.
She also said the layoffs are unrelated to guidance on layoffs issued by the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management before the shutdown.
Most national parks have remained open during the shutdown with limited staffing during
The court on Wednesday granted federal employee unions a temporary restraining order to stop layoffs directed by the OMB. In the order, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee, said the Trump administration is attempting “to fire line-level civilian employees during a government shutdown as a way to punish the opposing political party.”
She added that “the harms suffered by federal employees affected by [layoffs] are having drastic and imminent public consequences.”
Since President Donald Trump took office, he has prioritized downsizing the size of the federal government. Before the government shutdown went into effect, over 200,000 federal employees, representing nearly 9 percent of the federal workforce, had been let go since January, according to a Cato Institute report dated September 26. Four days later, America witnessed its largest mass resignation in history, with 100,000 federal employees quitting their jobs.
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Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
