Iowa Senator Joni Ernst says the layoffs President Trump has ordered during the federal government shutdown are long overdue.
Ernst suggests the president’s “Reduction in Force” or RIF program should target Internal Revenue Service employees who owe back taxes. “Getting rid of the riff-raff with a RIF,” Ernst said during a speech on the Senate floor.
There are far more who should be fired, according to Ernst. “Eliminate the positions of government employees and contractors who weren’t working before the government shutdown,” Ernst said. “…There are dozens of National Laboratory employees with nothing to do.”
The U.S. Department of Energy operates 17 National Laboratories. Ernst cited a 2023 report in The Nation magazine in which employees at a nuclear weapons complex in New Mexico admitted they had napped and played games during the workday. “To pass time one of them started journaling,” Ernst said. “One of his entries reads: ‘Did nothing all day today. Over 10 hours in here.’ The following day he wrote: ‘I do hope to play another good game of chess.'” That came from an electrician assigned to work in a restricted area of the facility where the first atomic bomb was created. Energy Department officials told the magazine they did not find evidence a manager was falsifying time sheets for electricians who are part of a massive workforce upgrading the country’s nuclear stockpile.
On October 1, Ernst released a Congressional Budget Office analysis that estimates 750,000 government employees have been furloughed during the shutdown. Ernst said the shutdown exposes how some of those employees are “non-essential” and “should be put on the chopping block.”