As dusk falls in Washington on Fridays, the firings begin

Mary Glantz was in her room at a Hampton Inn in Columbia, South Carolina, last Friday night during a trip visiting friends when her phone began pinging furiously with messages at 9:30 p.m. They were from panicked colleagues at the US Institute of Peace, an independent, congressionally funded organization in Washington that had found itself in the crosshairs of billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE employees had forced their way into the building, past protesting USIP staffers, with the aid of local police on March 17. Now Glantz, who had been a senior adviser at the institute, was being told that mass layoffs had begun.

At 10:09 p.m., Glantz’s own termination notice arrived in an email telling her she was being fired, effective immediately. Most of USIP’s 300 staff were laid off that night. “I wasn’t expecting it,” said Glantz, who shared her termination notice with Reuters. “It was shocking,” she said, because she had just been told her leadership was working on a briefing to DOGE justifying their work. Glantz and her colleagues are not the only government workers who have been fired late on a Friday night since US President Donald Trump and Musk launched their fast-moving effort to cut the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy.

While thousands of workers have been fired in the overhaul throughout the work week, Friday nights have become some of the most nerve-racking times for civil servants. Mass firings have taken place on seven of the 10 Fridays that Trump has been in office since being sworn in on January 20, affecting hundreds of government workers, a Reuters review of the pattern of dismissals found.

April 4 marks his 11th Friday in office, but it was not immediately clear if he would fire any more government workers after nightfall. The majority of these bureaucrats include people Trump has deemed opponents or potential impediments to his agenda. The frequency and scale of the Friday night layoffs are unprecedented, say legal experts and historians. Previous Republican and Democratic administrations have used Friday nights to bury bad news or announce controversial policies but rarely to fire someone.

Targeting federal employees for termination late on a Friday appears designed to minimize media coverage and make it more difficult for them to get immediate legal help, because law offices and the courts are shut, said Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. “This is about getting rid of or intimidating anyone perceived as insufficiently loyal, and doing this late on a Friday makes it as difficult as possible for people to respond effectively,” Brooks said. Asked why so many dismissals had taken place on Friday evenings, a White House official said: “These decisions are purely logistical and security-related.” The official did not explain what he meant by “security-related.”

DOGE did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump and Musk say the U.S. government is bloated and that cuts to the workforce are necessary to help eliminate waste and fraud and to save U.S. taxpayers money.

The Friday night firings began late on January 24 when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed a swath of inspectors general - official government watchdogs - at 17 federal agencies, including at the departments of Defense, State and Veterans Affairs.

The inspectors general were told in a letter by Sergio Gor, director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, that they were being fired effective immediately because of “changing priorities.”

Since then eight FBI officials who worked on cases related to the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump’s supporters on the U.S. Capitol were ordered to resign or be fired on a Friday night. Late on February 21, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of U.S. military leadership.

A Justice Department prosecutor involved in investigations into the January 6 attack was in a bar in the U.S. capital’s Chinatown and had just finished a Manhattan cocktail when he was fired on Friday, January 31.

The prosecutor, who asked not to be named, said he and more than a dozen other prosecutors gathered in the bar after DOJ leaders sent an email that afternoon saying certain employees involved in the investigations into January 6 rioters would be terminated.

They suspected their names would be on the list. As one of his first acts as president, Trump had pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of the January 6 rioters, fulfilling an election campaign promise.

At 7:14 p.m., the prosecutor’s termination letter arrived in his inbox. Around the same time, his colleagues received theirs. Some laughed at what they saw as an absurdity — firing a group of prosecutors for doing their jobs.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said at the time that Trump characterized their work on the prosecutions of his supporters as “a grave national injustice.”

The prosecutor said, “We would do it again, even knowing that we would end up getting fired.” Employment lawyers said the use of Friday night dismissals was more common in the private sector. It prevents a fired employee from downloading sensitive materials before they leave, and gives IT staff time to deactivate their access badges so they cannot re-enter the building on Monday morning.

Some workers have compared the Friday night purges to former Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” when he sought to remove the special prosecutor investigating his role in the Watergate scandal.

“The Saturday Night Massacre involved efforts to fire one man,” said historian Timothy Naftali, a former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California.

“There is no precedent for the mass firings of federal employees at any time, whether on a Friday night or any other day of the week,” he said. Other late Friday layoffs have targeted teams at federal agencies in charge of computer systems, which Musk and his DOGE team say they want to access in order to streamline them, eliminate fraud and waste, and make them more efficient.

Around 6 p.m. last Friday at least three dozen IT staff at the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service received emails placing them on administrative leave with pay, often the precursor to an outright dismissal, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The emails — all addressed to “Dear Employee” — gave notice that their system access was suspended and directed them “not to perform any work-related tasks.” No reason was given for their dismissal.