Trump, Musk's latest moves to shrink the federal workforce explained
President Trump and right-hand man Elon Musk have rolled out a series of moves to cull the federal workforce, forging ahead with numerous methods to fire employees that have already sparked legal challenges.
The latest actions come as the Trump administration closed out its government buyout program — an offer that came with a warning that “the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force.”
Agencies are now seeing that in real time, with thousands of people already let go and additional plans to boot employees underway.
“The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk said in an Oval Office meeting alongside Trump this week.
The Trump administration has turned to three different tools to shrink the workforce.
Probationary firings
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Thursday directed agencies across government to terminate government employees still on probation.
It’s a group that includes those hired in the last year or two years, depending on their agency — a group as large as 200,000 employees.
The move started with probationary employees hired by the OPM itself — and they’ve been creeping up since.
On Friday, the Department of the Interior fired 2,300 employees, the Department of Veterans Affairs fired 1,000, while Health and Human Services
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