Office of personnel management orders agencies to dismiss workers who had not yet gained civil service protection. The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, the country’s largest employer, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection – potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
In addition, workers at some agencies were warned that large workplace cuts would be coming. The decision on probationary workers, who generally have less than a year on the job, came from the office of personnel management (OPM), which serves as a human resources department for the federal government. The notification was confirmed by a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
It’s expected to be the first step in sweeping layoffs. Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that told agency leaders to plan for “large-scale reductions in force”. Elon Musk, whom the president has given wide leeway to slash government spending with his so-called “department of government efficiency”, called on Thursday for the elimination of whole agencies. “I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” Musk said via a videocall to the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”.
Paul Light, an expert on the federal government and professor emeritus of public service at New York University, said it seemed like the administration was “inventing new methods for destroying government capacity”. “You’re basically harassing your own workforce at the end of the day,” he said. “You’re undermining the engine that you want to run.”. Layoffs are unlikely to yield significant deficit savings. When the Congressional Budget Office looked at the issue, it found the government spent $271bn annually compensating civilian federal workers, with about 60% of that total going to workers employed by the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.
The government could, in theory, have cut all those workers and still run a deficit of over $1tn that would continue to grow as tax revenues are needed to keep up with the growing costs of social security and Medicare. Thursday’s order was an expansion of previous directions from OPM, which told agencies earlier this week that probationary employees should be fired if they weren’t meeting high standards. It’s not clear how many workers are currently in a probationary period. According to government data maintained by OPM, as of March 2024, 220,000 workers had less than a year on the job – the most recent data available.
The firing of probationary employees began earlier this week and has included Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education workers. At least 39 were fired from the education department on Wednesday, according to a union that represents agency workers, including civil rights workers, special education specialists and student aid officials. The layoffs also hit Department of Veterans Affairs researchers working on cancer treatment, opioid addiction, prosthetics and burn pit exposure, US senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, said on Thursday.
“I’m hearing from longtime VA researchers in my home state of Washington who are right now being told to immediately stop their research and pack their bags,” Murray said in a statement, “not because their work isn’t desperately needed, but because Trump and Elon have decided to fire these researchers on a whim.”. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), a group that defends government workers, said the agriculture department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service would be hit especially hard by laying off probationary employees because it has trouble recruiting inspectors required to be present at all times at most slaughterhouses.
“Firing any probationary employees would be a big kick in the gut to those that do very grueling and difficult work,” Peer’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, said. “It would make our food system less safe and cause consumer confidence in the safety of our food supply to dip.”. The civilian federal workforce, not including military personnel and postal workers, is made up of about 2.4m people. While about 20% of the workers are in Washington DC and the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, more than 80% live outside the Capitol region.
Trump’s initial attempt to downsize the workforce was the deferred resignation program, commonly described as a buyout, which offered to pay people until 30 September if they agreed to quit. The White House said 75,000 people signed up, and a federal judge cleared a legal roadblock for the program on Wednesday. However, the number of workers who took the offer was less than the administration’s target, and Trump has made it clear he would take further steps.
