Thousands of Federal Employees Fired
A Valentine's Day massacre.
WaPo (“Trump administration directs agency heads to fire most probationary staff“):
The Trump administration on Thursday moved swiftly to fire thousands of workers and directed agency heads to terminate most trial and probationary staff — a move that could affect as many as 200,000 employees, according to four people familiar with internal conversations who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
It was not immediately clear how many of those hired by the federal government within the last two years would be affected. One person familiar with the matter said some employees, such as those working on public safety and law enforcement issues, would be spared, and agency heads could exempt others.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers, said in a statement his union would “fight these firings every step of the way,” including by pursuing “every legal challenge available.”
“Employees were given no notice, no due process, and no opportunity to defend themselves in a blatant violation of the principles of fairness and merit that are supposed to govern federal employment,” Kelley said.
Agencies appeared to move quickly on Thursday to carry out the directive, according to interviews with dozens of federal employees and records obtained by The Washington Post. Thousands of workers were laid off in messages delivered through prerecorded videos and on group calls. Some were ordered to leave the building within 30 minutes. Others were told they would be formally fired by emails, which never arrived.
The latest data shows there were more than 220,000 federal employees within their one-year probationary period as of last March, according to Fedscope. These workers typically have little protection from being fired without cause.
“It’s stripping out, likely, a whole new generation of talent for our government, who are targeted not because of evidence of poor performance but because they are easier to get rid of,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on improving government.
Regardless of whether it’s wise to get rid of essentially every new employee in the Federal government regardless of talent level, it’s likely legal.
An information sheet from the US Merit Systems Protection Board notes,
Probationary employees do not have a statutory right to appeal their termination to the Board. If you are a preference eligible in the excepted service and you have not completed 1 year or more of current, continuous service in the same or similar position, you may not appeal your termination to the Board.
Further, there are very few due process rights:
If the agency terminates you for unsatisfactory performance or conduct during your probationary period, you are entitled to a written notice why you are being separated and the effective date of the separation. The agency must, at a minimum, state its conclusions as to the inadequacies in your performance or conduct. 5 C.F.R. §315.804. You may appeal your termination (if it was not required by statute) only if you allege it was based on partisan political reasons or marital status. 5 C.F.R. § 315.806(b).
While the President is a partisan actor, the across-the-board nature of the firings would seem to obviate that challenge.
OPM does advise supervisors of probationary employees
The process to terminate a probationer usually does not require giving them advanced notice or a right to respond, and their appeal rights afterward are limited, but you do need to follow the rules for how to separate a particular probationer.
and
Communicate expectations for performance and conduct.
If your employees don’t understand what is expected, it will be very hard, if not impossible, for them to meet those expectations. Providing clear expectations doesn’t necessarily require you to lay out precisely written, detailed instructions on conduct or every performance component. Generally, the question you should ask yourself is: “Would a reasonable person understand what was expected?”
Provide regular and frequent feedback.
Feedback, both positive and corrective, whether given in regularly scheduled meetings or in unscheduled discussions, is crucial to ensuring that expectations are understood. Probationers should receive closer supervision and instruction, as needed during the first year of their employment. Managers and supervisors are advised to view this provided time period as an opportunity to potentially course correct with capable employees. These measures aid in preserving the investment the agency has made in the probationer. They also give probationers a fair opportunity to demonstrate why it is in the public interest to finalize an appointment to the Federal service.
But I doubt this has any legal force; it’s just common-sense advice for leaders.
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I suspect this is, in fact, legal. It is also cruel and stupid. What an era we are living in.
Joseph Bottini and James Goeke still employed by the DOJ.
Judge Reverses Suspensions of Prosecutors in Stevens Case
Welp, so glad I packed up my life two months ago, sold my house, and moved 750 miles on my own dime for this.
I’m going to start looking for something new this weekend whether or not I’m one of the lucky ones who doesn’t get caught up in the trawler nets. Even if I escape this round, there’s no reason to think I’ll escape the next. If I had any notable skin in the game with a leave balance and FERS / TSP, that would be one thing, but I don’t see any reason to spend the next four years one inch away from a fight or flight response on a daily basis.
Likely legal. Undoubtedly stupid.
@Steven L. Taylor:
100% this. It doesn’t help that the Federal Probationary period for new hires is absurdly long: usually 12 months, sometimes longer.
As an aside, the length of time is most likely tied to how difficult it can be to terminate an employee after they pass out of probation. However, the better solution for that is to change the disciplinary rules (and to bargain harder on that issue) rather than to make the probationary period so long.
Again, this is deeply shortsighted thinking that will come back to harm not only the US in general, but MAGA voters in particular.
As someone working at the USPTO this is mind-boggingly stupid. Training for our positions takes 9 months. The rest of the time is needed to see if you are able to carry out the work with the required mindset because it is definitely not for everyone.
And no, our work is not able to be farmed out to the private sector because we are the only people who are investigating the patentability as Examiners.
Meritocracy, check. Eventually, I would think (perhaps, naively) that there will be some government functions that even Trumpistanians, whether the corporate rich or the grievance laden middle class, will want to function. Is there some army of vetted loyalists (without regard to merit, check) who can actually get those functions to work. Who is going to issue the passports, let alone the patents? I mean someone’s got to be a the DOJ to investigate all of Trump’s enemies.
This will definitely lower the price of eggs.
@Daryl:
And ensure those cheap eggs give you salmonella.
BTW, when does the DC area residential housing market crash?
@Mikey:
It’s Biden’s fault.
@Joe: “BTW, when does the DC area residential housing market crash?”
Forgive my ever-increasing cynicism, but methinks that is a feature, not a bug, to those in the White House and their supporters (no pun intended). See also, “Cruelty Is The Point.”
Any explanation for the article saying “within the last two years”?
@Fortune:
A year equals 365 days. Two years equals 730 days.
@Joe:
The thing is the Trumpistanians want it ALL to function and to function well at no cost to them as taxpayers. They’ve been sold a bill of goods by Trump and the Republicans that all the government services they use are provided by magic elves, so expertise and appropriate staffing levels aren’t important. And of course, the government services they don’t use are rife with waste and fraud.
I think (most certainly naively) that some of the extraordinary things our advanced civil government provides that we now take for granted will get the credit they are due. I hope some “don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” lies ahead.
@Fortune:
Can you give a longer quote and some context for what your question is asking? If its any help, in some agencies the probationary period is 2 years, in most agencies its one.
Overall, very dumb and disruptive. It’s also stupid to announce this action but not have an exceptions policy in place. It’s also not clear what happens to those who, for example, get a probationary period after moving up to a supervisory role (anmong other reasons). These aren’t new employees. Do they get fired? Demoted to their previous role? Something else? Not clear.
@Fortune:
Most federal employees have a one year probationary period, but some have a two-year period (As an excepted service employee in an intelligence job, my probation was two years). Presumably that’s what the two year reference is talking about.
@Fortune:
While most federal positions have a probationary period of 12 months, many more senior positions have 24 month probationary periods.
@Neil Hudelson:
I assume Fortune is asking about this quote. Why is it not uniformly one year? I think you answered it.
@Grumpy realist:
Which also underscores that this is a waste of resources and is, indeed, the opposite of cutting waste and increasing efficiency.
@Andy:
I didn’t realize that promotions could trigger probationary periods as well. While I get the idea, that doesn’t seem productive if it eliminates the protection of tenure.
@Andy:
I’m sure I can’t extrapolate from one anecdote, but my friend is in that situation at the VA – probationary from being promoted to supervisor. She was not fired this morning. Or if she has been fired she’s unaware of it yet, since apparently there have been issues with communicating properly who has or has not been fired (shocking, I know).
@Joe:
Thanks. I scanned the post again before replying to Fortune but for some reason didn’t see that line.
@Matt Bernius:
There are a few ways to trigger a new probationary period besides going from a non-supervisory to supervisory position. Ones that I’m aware of include changing agencies (not always the case- this is agency dependent), switching between excepted and competitive service, & having a break in service of as little as 30 days (agency dependent). There may be others that I’m not aware of and things may have changed since I left government service, so don’t take my comments as authoritative.
@DrDaveT:
Or a three-year probationary period for some including Cyber Excepted Service, according to what I’ve read.
To make an omelet you have to break some eggs. Why are there baby chickens in my eggs? Chickens come from eggs? What, we just broke all the eggs for the next batch of laying hens (making the egg shortage from Avian Flu even worse!)? The devil is in the details.
I’m acquainted with a cybersecurity expert for the VA who may have already left, if not he would have certainly jumped on the buyout offer as he was already preparing for retirement and had moved from the Puget Sound to Arkansas. The return to office part made no sense as he is part of a small team that deploys to VA facilities that have a security breech, then works long hours, and was already mostly remote before COVID. He definitely works well more than the standard 40 hour work weeks over the course of the year. And now they want him in the office when not deployed?
I hope you aren’t planning on visiting any Federal Lands this summer. Over half the staff at the Western National Parks that get snow are seasonal employees, and no hiring of seasonal employees (I bet a waiver is coming but significant delays and the well has been poisoned). Many of these folks are very experienced and return year after year. That back country (hiking) Ranger at Yellowstone or Glacier National Parks, mostly seasonal (many work at ski resorts in the Winter so this will screw up the ski resorts the elites hang out next Winter). The nature guide at the visitor’s center, a school teacher on summer break, etc.
A friend accelerated his transfer in January (from CO to AK) to a new job (higher GS-level so promotion) in Forestry because he feared the hiring freeze would also stop him taking a different job in the same Department. Nothing like moving to Alaska in January.
I’m running out of cliches, but I’ll leave you with Penny wise and Dollar foolish.
I’m going to go with, I don’t think this is quite legal. I understand that probationary employees have less to no rights, especially on this, but it’s not ZERO.
Everything I’ve seen just relies on the “magic words” kind of lawyering that is frustrating and stupid (and the kind that I have laughed in the faces of judges on the bench for using. I got papers thrown at me and I laughed harder. ) Just because someone uses the magic words “unsatisfactory performance or conduct” doesn’t mean that’s reflective of reality. This is all pretextual all the way to the top. It’s also nakedly “partisan political reasons”. I think it’s way too small to think that refers solely to being fired because you are a Dem. The Republicans have decided that their partisan preference is that the government shouldn’t function, so they are just firing everyone to make it not function.
That being said, yeah, it’s going to take forever to wind through the courts and in the meantime everyone has to get new jobs, a generation of talent goes up in smoke, and the government gets closer to collapse.
One of the reasons we are leave is that I don’t think most people understand how bad it can get here. So many people have been convinced that the government not only doesn’t work, it works against them. Wait until measles kills their kid, or more likely, they can’t send their autistic or special needs kid to school cause no one will pay for that. This is going to be collapse by a million cuts if we’re lucky; if we’re unlucky, something important is randomly going to fail and that’s going to cascade across the country. I suspect that Musk in particular wants that, but there is an unstated desire for that across both the right and the kind of regular people who “don’t like politics”.
@Neil Hudelson:
Update on that anecdote. She hasn’t been fired as far as she knows, but at noon she and others under probation at the VA lost access to their email, so not a good sign…
I received a phishing phone call today on my personal phone. Considering that we federal employees are constantly under a barrage of attempted phishing attempts I wonder if this is due to release of my PPI from a government database.
Am refusing to interact with any entity that doesn’t communicate with me by snail mail.
@Matt Bernius:
You have to remember that the federal government doesn’t really have much in the way of “promotions” in the corporate sense. If you want to move from (say) a non-managerial position to a managerial one, you are in essence applying for a new job, and quitting your old one when you get it. The GS system assumes that you are already qualified for a position when you are hired into it, and that you will continue doing those duties forever.
@Gromitt Gunn: I received notice that I – and the rest of the probationary employees in my area – need to report to my direct supervisor’s office on Tuesday morning.
I believe that I have mentioned this before, but in case I haven’t: my place on our org chart was vacant for eight years before I applied to a repost of a repost of a repost.
Without giving away too much, I will just say that more than one Federal agency operates public education on behalf of specific populations. Imagine if your local district was instructed to fire every single first-year teacher. In February.
@Gromitt Gunn:
Oh, I’m expecting that. Trump’s Department of Re-education will announce a freeze on federal funds to school districts that don’t comply with (1) teacher firings, and (2) curricula vetted by the junta. It’s the logical conclusion of GOP attacks on education since at least Reagan.
If you’re wondering how all this is going down in MAGA world, here’s the “best” comment on a New York Post story:
If your priors are that (a) the federal public service is a nest of lazy bludgers and incompetents, and (b) every word Musk and his apologists have uttered is true, then of course you’re cheering him on. They’re even heaping praise on the “twenty-something tech geniuses” who are running the government.
@Matt Bernius:
But otherwise the Peter Principle means tenured supervisors who aren’t good at supervising. But, yes, being fired from a supervisory gig during the probationary period should give you preferential hiring for a non-supervisory gig at your previous grade.