Agencies across the US government have been ordered to initiate another punishing round of layoffs at the same time Congress is moving forward with a plan to slash their budgets — a potential blow to science.

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On Wednesday, Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), sent a memo directing agency heads to submit two-step plans for significant ‘reductions in force’ (RIFs) by 13 March and 14 April. The memo does not provide absolute numbers, but calls for “maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated”.

The administration of US President Donald Trump “has targeted every single federal worker and does not seem to care how much turmoil they cause for either the employees or the American public,” the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing about 800,000 workers, said in a 26 February statement. “The chaos is the point.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this and other statements in this story.

Starving the government

The OMB memo is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to downsize the federal workforce, which it has said is corrupt, inefficient and commits overreach in its regulation of businesses. Science agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) — two major funders of US academic science — have already endured sizable layoffs. Over the past two weeks, agencies have fired thousands of ‘probationary’ employees, who were newly hired or had recently transferred into new positions, although a federal judge ruled yesterday that some of these firings were illegal. The Trump administration has also purged hundreds of people who worked on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or programmes for the federal government, calling them “illegal and immoral discrimination programs”.

Firing permanent employees en masse, as called for in the latest memo, would represent a significant escalation and could also face significant legal challenges. RIFs at government agencies require a valid reason, such as budgetary constraints, according to Nick Bednar, a legal scholar at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. But the administration might soon have all of the justification it needs: Trump’s Republican allies in Congress are working to pass a budget bill that seeks to cut at least US$1.5–2 trillion from the federal budget beginning in fiscal year 2026. By comparison, the entire discretionary budget — the portion that Congress allocates each year and includes funding for science agencies — was less than $1.7 trillion in 2024.

Vought has long advocated slashing government budgets. In a 2023 report making federal budget suggestions, Vought, then-president of a right-wing organization based in Washington DC called the Center for Renewing America, used war-like terms to describe the coming battle to dismantle a “woke and weaponized” federal government, including a “small scientific elite”, that feeds on taxpayer resources. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country — the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish,” he wrote, advocating that the government can be “starved in order to dismantle it”.

Disappearing programmes

The sheer scale of the Trump administration’s effort to downsize the US government has no modern precedent. In the 1990s, then-US president Bill Clinton ordered agencies to reduce their workforces, but the reductions were comparatively mild: at least 4% of the workforce was cut, and the work to do so was spread across 3 years and primarily accomplished by attrition strategies such as leaving positions vacant when people retired.

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Some agencies have seen even larger swings in their workforce over the years. During Trump’s first presidency, from 2017 to 2021, for example, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) culled around 1,100 people, or 7% of its staff members, despite congressional efforts to block budget cuts.

If the latest RIFs are carried out at the scale specified, they could permanently weaken science agencies, policy specialists say.

At the NSF, a reduction as high as 50% of the workforce — about 800 of 1,600 people — was suggested by multiple NSF sources on the basis of projected budget cuts for 2026. “We are concerned that entire programmes and divisions will disappear,” says an NSF employee who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the press.

These extreme cuts in workforce mirror the scale of Vought’s 2023 proposal: in it, he suggests reducing the agency’s budget by more than half, from about $9 billion to less than $4 billion. The agency wouldn’t “able to fulfill its statutory mission — it can’t do that with $4 billion,” says Kenny Evans, a science-policy researcher at Rice University in Houston, Texas. “NSF as we know it could cease to exist.” (The NSF awards about $8.5 billion in research grants each year.)