WASHINGTON — For all the unpredictability of President Trump’s second administration, he has turned one expression of chaos into a ritual so consistent that Washington can set its collective watch to it every week.
Every Friday of his presidency so far — once the sun sinks low in the sky and quitting time rolls around in the nation’s capital — Trump gets busy firing people.
Four-star generals, senior agency officials, rank-and-file federal employees — all have found themselves handed pink slips by the president or his deputies near the close of business in Washington on Friday, or sometimes well past it.
In his first term, Trump made liberal use of the “Friday night news dump,’’ the bipartisan Washington tradition of quietly disclosing bad or unflattering news at the end of the week in hopes of minimizing the damage. Of course, the heart of the workweek sees a now-common avalanche of news from this White House.
But as Trump gleefully takes a wrecking ball to Washington, his moves seem more intended to emphasize that his administration’s aggressive effort to upend the federal government does not observe normal business hours.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The trend began right off on Jan. 24, the first Friday of Trump’s term. That evening, inspectors general at 13 federal agencies — who serve as independent watchdogs for waste and misconduct — received an email from the White House stating they were “terminated’’ effective immediately.
On the next Friday, Jan. 31, news outlets reported just before 7 p.m. that the Department of Justice had abruptly fired 15 federal prosecutors who had handled cases related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Feb. 7 saw many heads roll: Colleen Shogan, the archivist of the United States, posted on LinkedIn that Trump had fired her that evening. Later, Trump, via his Truth Social platform, announced he was terminating “multiple individuals’’ from the board of the Kennedy Center in Washington, including its chair, billionaire David Rubenstein. “We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!’’ the president said.
One of the most high-profile firings of Trump’s term landed after Washington politicos might have already drained their first, or second, end-of-week cocktail. On Feb. 21, at 7:30 p.m., the president posted on Truth Social that he was firing General Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking officer in the armed forces.
Minutes later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he had fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Joint Chiefs representative from the Navy, whom he had previously called a “DEI hire’’; the vice chief of the Air Force; and several other top military officials.
On each of those Fridays, many lower-profile federal employees from across the government were told they were out of a job.
On Feb. 14, staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were being contacted well after 5 p.m. to be told they were being fired, CNN reported. That same night, employees for the US Digital Service — which became the vehicle for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project — were informed they, too, were being terminated, according to The New York Times.
And just this past Friday, the Justice Department was the scene of yet another shakeup, most notably the transfer of senior officials in the National Security Division in what multiple news accounts reported amounted to a gutting of an office that handles highly sensitive intelligence matters.
Republican officials have generally not raised many concerns about the timing or nature of the firings, as they face considerable pressure to get behind the DOGE project. Others praised the moves: Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, for instance, welcomed the abrupt Pentagon shakeup on Feb. 21, telling the Associated Press that “the folks from [the Biden] era just need to go away’’ and arguing “we need a clean slate’’ at the Department of Defense.
According to Ken Spain, a longtime Republican strategist, the aggressive approach may have limited resonance outside Trump’s base.
“Many of these firings aren’t individually the most headline-grabbing events to your average voter,’’ he said. “When you take it in its totality, they’ve certainly left an imprint in the minds of voters. They are occurring at an aggressive pace and with a tone that has potentially turned some people off.’’
Democrats, meanwhile, see the moves as consistent with Trump’s and his lieutenants’ antagonistic attitude toward many federal officials and workers, as well as Musk’s vision of bringing about change in government by being maximally disruptive.
Many of the federal officials who were fired on the past seven Fridays had no idea their pink slips were coming.
Shogan, for instance, knew Trump wanted to replace her as the top official at the National Archives, but was shocked when she got the notice late Feb. 7, according to CNN. The inspectors general, meanwhile, might have had a similar inkling, but the president is required to give Congress a 30-day notice of intent to ax those independent watchdogs. Trump’s failure to heed that rule is partially the basis of a lawsuit filed by some of the inspectors general.
Representative Gabe Amo, a Rhode Island Democrat who himself worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said his experience with those presidents was that “communication with employees was a very thoughtful exercise, was not haphazard — substance, style, timing all matter.’’
With Trump, “it’s very clear that they don’t have an appreciation or value for federal employees,’’ Amo said. “The cruelty is the point.’’
The emerging Washington witching hour has not only been associated with firings. On the first Friday of the administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio notified all US diplomats that the administration would be freezing all foreign aid effective immediately. On Feb. 7, at 7:15 p.m., Trump announced on Truth Social that he was revoking former president Joe Biden’s access to classified information, a privilege that is customarily extended to former commanders-in-chief.
Before Trump’s first term, the Friday night news dump out of the White House or key congressional offices looked a bit quaint by comparison.
A 2014 roundup of Friday news dumps from National Journal awarded the worst offender to the post-6 p.m. disclosure, on the start of Labor Day weekend, of the resignation of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff.
But then Trump began his first term by unloading news of his administration’s ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries late on a Friday.
Some of Trump’s most controversial pardons in his first term, like that of the Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his ally Roger Stone, happened on Friday evenings.
Thanks in large part to Musk and DOGE, the significance of the Friday news in this term registers on a completely different scale.
On Feb. 21, for instance, the Pentagon announced plans to ultimately lay off 5 to 8 percent of its civilian workforce — which could represent more than 60,000 people — and said it had already axed 5,400 workers.
Unlike in the first term, said Spain, the GOP strategist, Trump and his team came into the second term “knowing where the keys to the ignition were.’’
“They came in with a plan, they knew what the mission was, and they were prepared to execute on day one knowing that every day counts, and that might mean working 24/7 in the first 100 days and the first year,’’ he said.
More broadly, focusing on Trump’s Friday moves only captures some of the crucial story of his second administration, Amo argued.
“As much as I wish it were contained to only Friday night, nearly every day I’m hearing from someone who is saying one of the following,’’ Amo said. “One, ‘I’ve been fired.’ Two, ‘They told me that I’m likely to be fired.’ Three, ‘No one has told me, but everybody I work with presumes they are going to be fired soon.’ Or four, ‘I need to get ahead of this.’’’
“That’s not hyperbole,’’ said Amo.
Sam Brodey can be reached at sam.brodey@globe.com. Follow him @sambrodey.
