More than 7,200 federal workers filed initial unemployment claims last week, according to data posted on an obscure Labor Department website.
The website shows that 7,224 federal workers filed claims for the Federal Employees Unemployment Compensation Program for the week ending October 11.
Figures first reported by Bloomberg Newsthey are released with a delay of one week.
“The UCFE program provides unemployment compensation to federal employees who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own,” according to the program fact sheet.
The timing of the increase in claims aligns with the first full week of the government shutdown and the Trump administration’s announcement of layoffs at several government agencies.
Data shows there were about 3,300 claims in the previous week, when the lockdown began. In the week ending September 26 there were about 600 claims.
White House budget director Ross Vought told The Charlie Kirk Show this week More than 10,000 employees Their jobs can be eliminated in “reduction in force” actions.
“There’s going to be a lot” of job cuts, “and it’s going to be directed toward Democrats because we thought, you know, they started this thing,” Trump told reporters last week.
A federal judge in California on Wednesday issued a temporary restraining order preventing layoffs from continuing.
US District Judge Susan Yvonne Elston said the way the layoffs were implemented was “contrary to the law.”
The judge said the administration “exploited the gap in government spending and government performance to assume that all bets were off, that the laws no longer applied to them, and that they could impose the structures they wanted on a government situation they did not like.”
In her ruling, Elston noted that some employees may not even know they have been laid off because “RIF notices have been sent to government email accounts, and furloughed employees may not have access to work email during the shutdown.”
White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt told reporters Thursday that the president “has the ability and the legal authority to fire people from the federal government” and that Elston, Clinton’s nominee, “is another far-left partisan judge.”
“We are 100 percent confident that we will win this award on merit,” Leavitt said.