Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images
A tarp blocks out the signage at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The fog of war is a good analogy for what has transpired the past few days in the federal workforce.
After getting a favorable ruling to move forward, the so-called “deferred resignation” program closed Wednesday night, with 75,000 workers signing up. This represents about 3 percent of federal employees, short of the administration’s goal of 5 to 10 percent. Some agencies saw higher pickup, like the 8 percent of staff at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation who opted for it. But some IRS employees who took the offer were then told they had to stay until May 15 because their jobs were “essential” to tax filing season. It’s the first documented shenanigan of a program that is still being challenged in court.
The end of deferred resignation triggered the next hack at the workforce, targeting “probationary” employees who have been at their jobs for a short period (between one and two years) and lack many civil service protections. The layoffs came rolling in like waves: There were 70 cut at the Office of Personnel Management, “dozens” at the Department of Education, more than 1,000 at the Department of Veterans Affairs, 2,300 at the Interior Department, 3,400 at the U.S. Forest Service (a month after deadly wildfires in Los Angeles), close to 3,600 at the FBI, up to 5,200 at the Department of Health and Human Services, and as many as 9,000 at the IRS.
The HHS cuts revealed the random nature of the whole thing, which is only being done in this fashion because it’s easier legally, not because of any policy priority. The National Cancer Institute is losing 330 employees; cancer didn’t suddenly become a trifling public-health problem. ARPA-H, an agency tasked with finding medical breakthroughs, was initiated in 2022. Almost all of its workers are less than two years in and therefore probationary, so that initiative is basically gone. I guess we don’t need medical breakthroughs anymore. The Epidemic Intelligence Service, a training program administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), always has people in it with under two years of service. So that entire program is going away, despite being called a “crown jewel of global public health.” You might have heard there’s an out-of-control epidemic of avian flu right now.
Confusion abounded. Some of the layoff notices went to people who already took the deferred resignation offer. The Environmental Protection Agency first said 497 probationary workers were fired and then revised it to 388. The Small Business Administration told workers they were fired, then told them the notices were a mistake, and then told them they were fired again. The SBA workers were given a phone number to appeal their terminations; it was an automated number for an apartment building.
The Energy Department fired 300 probationary employees at the agency that manages the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, then realized that managing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile is kind of important, and started rolling back the terminations, desperately reaching out to the fired workers. According to reports, the Energy Department didn’t know that particular agency had anything to do with building nuclear weapons.
In the end, OPM said the cuts didn’t amount to all 200,000 probationary employees, claiming only “low performers” were fired. But many who received notices had never received a negative performance report in their career in government. And “probationary” applied to longtime workers who recently undertook a job switch, which could be illegal.
The probationary worker purge was a prelude to a much larger plan for reductions in force, outlined in an executive order that gave full commissar power to Elon Musk, with his DOGE project having primary power to hire and fire. The target is for 30 to 40 percent reductions in agency budgets across government, primarily from personnel. Rebuilding this capacity will be impossible over the next four years; for every worker hired, four will have to be fired, per the executive order. Some of the cuts are happening so fast that agencies are scrambling to stop them; “too many key people” are out at the General Services Administration, prompting agency leaders to slow the pace.
The reduction in force order is completely separate from the wholesale attempt to cancel entire agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There, firings have not only hit probationary employees but so-called “term” employees, who have all civil service protections but an end date on their time in government service. The Trump administration has been ordered to stop terminating any CFPB employee other than for cause, preventing any reduction in force order until a hearing on March 3. But those who have already received layoff notices will have to fight them in court separately.
And all of that doesn’t encapsulate the widespread and ongoing political firings of various agency leaders of dubious legality, including at (deep breath): the FBI, the CDC, the Federal Election Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Office of Special Counsel, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Government Ethics, the Merit Systems Protection Board, four military Boards of Visitors, inspectors general at over a dozen agencies, and the section of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that deals with elections.
So it’s been a lot.
THE ALLEGED RATIONALE FOR ALL OF THIS is to shrink the size and scope of government, but culling the workforce won’t do that. If you eliminate half of all federal employee jobs, you will have reduced the federal budget by exactly 2 percent. The only thing you reduce when you fire federal workers is that hallowed goal of government efficiency. Help lines will go unanswered; businesses will go uninspected; scientific advancements will go unmade; procurement will go unmonitored; and in all likelihood, contractors will get hired at a greater cost to the government, counteracting even the puny savings from the effort.
So that’s not the reason for this. Is it a reordering of the government’s priorities? Not at all. The orders have been haphazard, not targeted at any alleged fat in the bureaucracy. If it just depends on who has the fewest civil service protections and who takes a fake buyout offer, you’re going to trim deeply in one place and not in another, with no coherence to the process.
Is it revenge? Not against these workers. It’s not like probationary employees as a group defied Donald Trump. But this is closer to the truth. Trump and Musk desire to control the bureaucracy, to force it into submission and loyalty. The political firings are a version of the ancient hordes who put heads of the leadership on pikes for the villagers to see.
And some of those firings were very clear. The inspector general of the U.S. Agency for International Development put out a report savaging the implications of pauses on foreign aid; he was fired the next day. The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved scheduled payments for migrant shelters in New York City; he and three subordinates were immediately sacked. There’s apparently a “DEI Watch List” with names and personal information of mostly Black federal health workers; not only might they be fired but targeted by individuals outside the government.
So the firings aren’t necessarily about those who have been laid off, but those who are left behind. Get out of line and you’ll join your colleagues on the unemployment line. “Out of line” could mean disobeying illegal orders to cancel spending appropriated by Congress, or to rat on your fellow workers. It could mean getting crosswise of Musk and his DOGE team in any possible direction. It’s essentially a reign of terror in the federal workforce, a demand for fealty to the king.
The government’s output over the next four years as a result is going to be abysmal. Government is routinely criticized for being too deliberate, too outmanned, too inattentive. Now it’s going to be more outmanned and more inattentive, and the things it will do quickly will be frequently wrong, and reversed after the damage is done. On top of that, workers will be demoralized and angry, unmotivated and paralyzed in the face of crisis, for fear of putting their head up and getting noticed.
There are some private-sector businesses like this, which move fast and break things and rule by fear. When they screw up, their websites crash for a few days. When government screws up, people die.
“The efforts that are currently underway are going to be catastrophic to our very way of life as U.S. citizens,” said one federal worker who recently left the government in an op-ed in the Federal News Network. “It is my sincere hope that when the dust settles from the Thanos-snap that is DOGE’s impact to the federal government, that whoever is left can pick up the pieces and rebuild. I just know I won’t be around to see it.”
