The Trump administration fired federal employees in California on Friday after the president said he would use the ongoing government shutdown to reduce the size of the federal workforce.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development informed a federal employee union representing federal workers in California that it would layoff workers involved in programs “not in alignment with the President’s Management Agenda or the Administration’s priorities.”

According to a recent court filing, at least 442 HUD employees received layoff notices but it’s not clear where those employees were based. According to a federal employee database, over 500 HUD employees work in California.

Roberta Beggs, president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1450, which represents HUD employees in California and several other states, said that 20 employees represented by her labor group received reduction-in-force notices this week.

The notices informed workers that they would be out of a job by Dec. 9. Of those Local 1450 workers who received notices, one just had a baby and another was recovering from a stroke, Beggs said.

Beggs said the union received notice of the layoffs on Friday, the same day employees were informed, which she said is a violation of NFFE’s labor agreement with the federal government. Agencies are required to inform the union 15 days before issuing reduction-in-force notices to employees, she said.

“The whole workforce has been pretty traumatized for the past nine months,” Beggs said. “This is just a continuation.”

Shutting down ‘Democrat Agencies’

Earlier this month, Trump said on social media that he planned to use the shutdown to cut “Democrat Agencies,” though he did not specify which federal departments he was referring to.

“HUD is implementing a reduction in force to align our programs with the Administration’s priorities and the appropriations available to the department,” an unnamed spokesperson for HUD said in a Friday statement.

It appeared that the agency was making cuts based on the Trump administration’s perceived function of a program, not its actual purpose, Beggs said.

“It’s very clear that from the way they rolled it out, it had nothing to do with performance,” Beggs said of how the housing department selected which employees to let go. Beggs called the layoffs a “hatchet job,” similar to how Elon Musk attempted to lay off employees through the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year.

Mass layoffs have not previously been a feature of previous government shutdowns.

California is home to roughly 150,000 federal civilian employees, according to recent numbers from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Many of those employees are working without pay or furloughed while waiting for Congress to pass a new budget.

Thousands informed of layoffs Friday

It’s not clear exactly how many federal employees were affected by the layoffs Friday, but according to recent court filings agencies at least 4,100 workers were sent notices.

The court filings were part of an ongoing federal lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Government Employees, which the federal employee union filed earlier this month in the Northern District of California challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to fire government workers.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service both confirmed that they had issued layoff notices. But none of the contacted agencies responded to questions about how many reduction-in-force notices were sent to employees.

“HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy, growing its budget by 38% and its workforce by 17%. All HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions,” department spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement. “HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”

Max Alonzo, national secretary-treasurer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, said the actions of Trump and Russell Vought, the White House Office of Management and Budget director, are illegal. Conducting a reduction-in-force requires federal funding and new appropriations for these actions have not been issued by Congress since the federal government shutdown on Oct. 1.

Democrats in Congress similarly made this argument when they sent letters to 24 agency leaders earlier this month warning them that issuing layoff notices during the shutdown violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits departments from spending money that Congress hasn’t appropriated.

Alonzo said the Trump administration’s actions showed a “complete disregard for the law. And they know it but they don’t care.”