More than 100,000 federal workers are to formally resign on Tuesday, the largest such mass event in US history, as part of a Trump administration program designed to make sweeping cuts to the federal workforce.
With Congress facing a deadline of Tuesday to authorize more funding or spark a government shutdown, the White House has also ordered federal agencies to draw up plans for large-scale firings of workers if the partisan fight fails to yield a deal.
Workers preparing to leave the government have described how months of “fear and intimidation” left them feeling like they had no choice but to depart.
“Federal workers stay for the mission. When that mission is taken away, when they’re scapegoated, when their job security is uncertain, and when their tiny semblance of work-life balance is stripped away, they leave,” a longtime employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) told the Guardian. “That’s why I left.”
Here are the key stories at a glance.
Trump to meet with US congressional leaders in last-ditch effort to avoid shutdown
Donald Trump has reversed course and is purportedly planning to host a bipartisan gathering of the top four US congressional leaders at the White House on Monday afternoon in a last-ditch effort to avoid a looming government shutdown, the House speaker and the US president’s fellow Republican, Mike Johnson, said on Sunday.
Read the full story
Ex-Trump lawyer says president using Comey indictment to conceal being ‘criminal’
The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is part of a concerted effort by Donald Trump to “rewrite history” in his favor, a former senior White House lawyer claimed on Sunday as he warned of more retribution to come for the president’s political opponents.
Read the full story
Eric Adams drops out of New York City mayoral race
The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, announced on Sunday that he was abandoning his faltering bid to win re-election, just over a month before election day. Adams, who was trailing in the polls, was elected as a Democrat but ran for re-election as an independent after he was indicted on federal corruption charges, which were then dropped by the Trump administration in exchange for his cooperation on immigration raids.
Read the full story
Children left short of clean water and sleep amid ‘prolonged’ detention by Ice, watchdogs allege
Children, including the very young, have been spending weeks or months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in a remote part of Texas where outside monitors have heard accounts of shortages of clean drinking water, chronic sleep deprivation and kids struggling for hygiene supplies and prompt medical attention, as revealed in a stark new court filing.
Read the full story
What else happened today:
-
Settled legal precedent in the US is not “gospel” and in some instances may have been “something somebody dreamt up and others went along with”, the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has said.
-
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, has settled a long-running defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over lies he told about the result of the 2020 presidential election.
-
Democratic US senator Dick Durbin on Sunday renewed demands to meet with Trump administration immigration officials after days of clashes between federal officers and protesters at an immigration jail in his home state of Illinois.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on Saturday 27 September.
