At least 7,000 federal workers filed for unemployment benefits since shutdown began

More than 7,200 federal workers filed initial jobless claims last week, according to data posted on an obscure Labor Department website.

The site shows 7,224 federal workers filed claims with the Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees program for the week ending Oct. 11.

The numbers, which were first reported by Bloomberg News, are released on a one-week delay.

According to the program’s fact sheet, “The UCFE program provides unemployment compensation for Federal employees who lost their employment through no fault of their own.”

The timing of the surge of claims lines up with the first full week of the government shutdown and the Trump administration’s announcement of layoffs at numerous government agencies.

Data shows there were about 3,300 claims the preceding week, when the shutdown began. For the week ending Sept. 26, there were about 600 claims.

White House budget director Russ Vought told “The Charlie Kirk Show” this week that more than 10,000 employees could have their jobs eliminated in “reduction in force” actions.

Trump told reporters last week there “will be a lot” of job cuts “and it will be Democrat-oriented because we figured, you know, they started this thing.”

A federal judge in California on Wednesday issued a temporary restraining order barring the layoffs from continuing.

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U.S. District Judge Susan Yvonne Illston said the way the layoffs were being carried out were “contrary to laws.”

The judge said the administration had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like.”

In her ruling, Illston noted that some employees might not even know they’ve been laid off because “the RIF notices were sent to government e-mail accounts, and furloughed employees may not access their work e-mail during a shutdown.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that the president “does have the ability and the legal authority to fire people from the federal government” and that Illston, a Bill Clinton nominee, “is another far left partisan judge.”

“We are 100% confident we will win this on the merit,” Leavitt said.