Team Trump Set to Drop the Hammer on Federal Workforce
They’ve tried asking for volunteers. They’ve tried firing employees still in their probationary periods. They’ve even tried that time-tested tactic used by employers everywhere to make their underlings miserable: Bury them in paperwork about what they did last week.
But President Donald Trump still wants Elon Musk to extract more cuts from the 2.4 million civilian federal workforce. Over the weekend, he told the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a “special government employee” overseeing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, that he needs to get “more aggressive.”
And so today, federal workers got their first look at how — and when — the next hammer will fall.
A joint memo from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management told federal workers where they stand in stark terms.
They are part of a “bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy,” OMB Director Russ Vought and acting OPM Director Charles Ezell said in the memo. They work for an organization that is “not producing results for the American public,” working on “unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens.”
And so by March 13, agencies must give the White House detailed plans on which employees will be fired. The starting point will be any federal workers not deemed “essential” during the 2018-2019 government shutdown — that’s about four in 10 federal workers. Anyone not working on a program explicitly authorized by Congress also is endangered.
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