"The longer this goes on, the deeper the cuts are going to be," warned Vice President JD Vance in a Sunday TV appearance, in what appears to be pressure on Democrats to join in a vote to reopen the federal government after a partial shutdown nearly two weeks ago.
"Some of these cuts are going to be painful," he told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo during an appearance on Sunday Morning Futures, "this is not something that we're looking forward to, but the Democrats have dealt us a pretty difficult set of cards."
He's talking about the likely firing of more federal employees; Democrats are known for championing federal employees and especially their unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees, which between the two of them have nearly a million members (about 930,000).
The Trump administration revealed this weekend that more than 4,000 federal workers are already being fired from a cross-section of agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some people, including some in the news media, use the term "layoff" when discussing a government shutdown, when what they actually is, a mean a temporary absence from work because they're excused, which is really a "furlough." A layoff means you're fired. When Vice President Vance says job "cuts" could be coming, he means firings.
That's in addition to a special government program offered earlier this year called "deferred resignation," in which two million federal workers -- nearly the entire federal workforce -- were invited to take paid administrative leave as early as February of this year, with all pay and benefits until the end of the federal fiscal year, October 1st.
About 150,000 took advantage of the offer, with 100,000 of them having left their jobs the first of October.