President Donald Trump’s budget director revealed he is halting billions in federal funding to Army Corps of Engineers projects due to the government shutdown, which stretched into its 17th day on Friday.
The Corps is “immediately pausing” over $11 billion in funding for “lower-priority” projects, including in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore, according to White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. He added that the projects are being considered for permanent cancellation.
Vought blamed the “Democratic shutdown” for the development, claiming it has drained the Corps’s ability to manage billions of dollars in projects, in a post to X.
The move is part of broader efforts by the Trump administration to use the government gridlock to shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy and cut perceived waste, fraud, and abuse.
Vought has already cut or paused billions in federal funding to massive infrastructure projects across the country, including in Chicago and New York City. The Trump administration has accused some developments of possibly tying contracts to “illegal” and “race-based” diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives suspected of violating civil rights law.
Trump’s budget director has extended efforts to cut government spending on federal employees. He announced on Wednesday that he expects “north” of 10,000 federal workers to be laid off during the shutdown, noting 4,000 have already been sent reduction-in-force notices. The majority of layoffs thus far have hit the Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Commerce Departments.
“We’re going to keep those RIFs rolling throughout the shutdown because we think it’s important to stay on offense for the American taxpayer,” Vought said. “We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding, but the bureaucracy, that we now have an opportunity to do that.”
However, a federal judge temporarily blocked efforts to fire government workers on Wednesday.
WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WORKER LAYOFFS HAVE BEGUN
Susan Illston, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argued that the Trump administration has “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, in government functioning, to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore.”
“I believe that the plaintiffs will demonstrate, ultimately, that what’s being done here is both illegal and is in excess of authority,” she continued, adding that some of the firings seemed “politically motivated.”
