White House says federal firings have begun as government shutdown drags on

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine's president, at a news conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulated President Donald Trump for his “outstanding achievement” in securing a ceasefire in Gaza during a “very positive and productive” phone call.

Zelensky said that “if a war can be stopped in one region, then surely other wars can be stopped as well—including the Russian war.”

The pair also discussed Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system and ways to bolster the country’s air defenses, Zelensky said in a post in X, “as well as concrete agreements that we are working on to ensure this.”

“There needs to be readiness on the Russian side to engage in real diplomacy - this can be achieved through strength. Thank you, Mr. President!” he said.

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.

GOP leaders will not step in to prevent missed paychecks to the military. It’s the most dramatic step yet by Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson to attempt to force Democrats to end the government shutdown, even as they realize their party will, too, face political pain for the move.

And it comes at a high-stakes moment for both parties: This will be the first time in recent history that active-duty military service members will miss a paycheck on a large scale during a shutdown.

As the shutdown drags into its third week, tensions are rising in the GOP with no clear way out. Lawmakers are angry at each other for getting into now-viral hallway confrontations with Democrats or doing high-profile interviews where they blame their own party for the lapse. Some are angry at GOP leadership for failing to address the military pay issue from the start, or for the optics of keeping the House out of session for weeks on end. But those CNN spoke with expressed an acute anger at Senate Democrats.

Thune and Johnson are publicly resolute in their position and the party remains in lockstep on big-picture strategy: Republicans will make no guarantee on Affordable Care Act subsidies and the only way out of a shutdown is for Senate Democrats to retreat, despite any political pain that the GOP will feel in the coming days and weeks over the missed paychecks, according to interviews with two dozen lawmakers and senior aides. It underscores the depth of Congress’ ugly stalemate, with Democrats equally dug in.

Read more about the current state — and high stakes — of the shutdown.

The main campus of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention is seen on April 1 in Atlanta.

Staffers in numerous divisions of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received reduction in force notifications late yesterday, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Notices went out to some workers in the following CDC offices:

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House on Friday.

President Donald Trump said yesterday that he plans to fire “a lot” of federal workers in retaliation for the government shutdown, vowing to target those deemed to be aligned with the Democratic Party.

“It’ll be a lot of people,” he said from the Oval Office. “I must tell you, a lot of them happen to be Democrat-oriented.”

Trump did not specify how many workers would be laid off as part of the reduction in force that his administration announced earlier in the day, nor did he provide details on what qualified them as “Democrat-oriented.”

The Trump administration revealed in a court filing yesterday evening that more than 4,000 federal employees were laid off.

Trump blamed Democratic lawmakers for the cuts, arguing that their refusal to reopen the government forced his administration’s hand.

More than 4,000 federal employees received layoff notices Friday as part of the Trump administration’s broad effort to reshape the government while it remains shutdown, according to a court filing Friday.

The filing provides greater insight into an announcement from President Donald Trump’s budget chief earlier in the day that the administration had begun government-wide reductions in force that had been anticipated since federal funding lapsed on October 1.

“The RIFs have begun,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought posted on X, without elaborating on how many federal workers had received RIF — or reduction in force — notices.

As of Friday evening, RIF notices had gone out to employees at the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury, according to department spokespeople, union representatives and sources directly impacted.

Treasury and HHS saw the highest number of reductions, with more than 1,000 workers laid off at each department, according to the filing in a lawsuit brought by two federal employee unions seeking to stop the layoffs.