In a memo sent out to employees on Monday morning, Howard Lutnick’s Commerce Department demonstrated a fun new approach to making sure no one would ever proactively want to work there. The memo, viewed by Splinter, changes the official policy surrounding probationary employees, flipping the script on how the end of a probationary period will generally go. If you were a potential employee, well, you might not be now.
“If not terminated sooner, the appointment of an employee serving a probationary or trial period terminates [emphasis theirs throughout] before the end of the tour of duty on the last day of his/her probationary or trial period,” the memo states, “unless the appropriate DOC management official certifies that finalizing his/her appointment advances the public interest.“
This policy, which explicitly overrides previous probationary policy, takes effect July 23. The memo, sent from Acting Chief Human Capital Officer and Director of Human Resources Travis Hoadley, notes that previously the exact opposite was true: in the past the completion of a probationary period meant the employee automatically “continued their federal service without the need for DOC intervention.” Now, the automatic thing is “separation” from the government instead.
And where before the obvious thing letting new employees simply keep doing their jobs was their ability to do so, now the employee’s “performance and conduct” is only one part of the consideration at hand. Now, a “Deciding Official” will need to evaluate whether the employee is advancing “the needs and interests of the agency,” “whether the employee’s continued employment would advance organizational goals of the DOC or the Federal Government” as well as “the efficiency of service.”
Each operating unit inside Commerce — which houses NOAA and the NWS, of course, along with other targeted agencies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Patent and Trademark Office — must offer up a member of the Senior Executive Service to make these decisions. But they’re not really the last word — each Deciding Official “will ensure that any decisions they render have been coordinated with—and reflect the concurrence of—the operating unit/bureau’s most senior political appointee.”
There is a caveat of note included, given the probationary shenanigans seen across the government earlier this year: employees who are in such a period not because they are a new hire but because they were promoted or transferred to supervisory or managerial positions are not included. So there’s that.
But for anyone considering a job, what you have now is a department already trying to murder some of its critical constituent pieces, consequences be damned, now insisting that every single new hire’s continued existence is dependent on the whims of political appointees who at best do not understand what those jobs are really for and at worst hold the jobs and the people in them in complete contempt. Simply firing people for no reason turned out to be something of a legal challenge; necessity really is the mother of invention.
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