United States: The Trump administration pushed forward its substantial program to reduce federal employment numbers by pushing agencies to eliminate almost every new employee who hadn’t earned civil service rights – impacting numerous thousands of workers.
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The workforce in certain agencies received notices about forthcoming substantial personnel reductions within their departments.
The Office of Personnel Management, which functions as the Human Resources unit of the federal government, decided to terminate newly hired employees who have worked for less than twelve months.
A source with first-hand knowledge disclosed this information about the notification to the public despite lacking authorization to make such statements, AP News reported.
The personnel officers themselves did not escape job termination when dozens of probationary staff at OPM received a mass telephone dismissal followed by instructions to exit the premises within half an hour, according to another anonymous source.
Future job cuts anticipated
Workers can anticipate future job cuts to serve as an initial wave before major staff reductions take place.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order through which he instructed agency administrators to determine the plan for substantial workforce reductions.
During an interview with President Trump, Elon Musk asked for the complete elimination of government agencies using his authority as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.
According to Musk, who stated via a video at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, “I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leaving a lot of them behind,” and “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
What more are the experts stating?
As per Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees representing federal workers, the administration “abused” the probation status of workers “to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance but because they were hired before Trump took office,” AP News reported.
The latest instructions from OPM extended their initial notice to agencies where new employees required dismissal when they failed to reach their performance goals.
Official statistics do not show current data regarding probationary workers. The latest available data from OPM reveals that 220,000 government employees started working within less than one year, according to their maintained figures during March 2024.