The Office of Personnel Management, with Elon Musk’s fingerprints all over it, began its purge of probationary federal employees on Thursday. Notices started coming in to multiple agencies, and reports suggest that hundreds of thousands of people hired within the last one or two years may be on the chopping block. This is a burgeoning dictatorship trying to break the functioning of the administrative state.
Sources inside the Department of Agriculture, Commerce, and Health and Human Services have told Splinter about either executed or pending mass firings. In some cases the firing notices have come straight from OPM rather than going through the agencies themselves, and one source said that they alleged that the targets were being terminated for poor performance “despite records of performance that show no such thing.” Supervisors, in some cases, found out at the same time as the fired employees.
A source inside the US Forest Service, which is part of the USDA, said that the mass firing including “schedule A” employees, a system that helps hire people with disabilities. Though there are theoretically exceptions across agencies for things like public safety, another source at USDA said the firings included military veterans with wildland firefighting experience. “Fire season is going to be BAD because of Musk and Trump… bullshit,” the source said. A source at the Environmental Protection Agency added that some EPA probationary employees are currently deployed to help with wildfire response in southern California following the devastating Los Angeles fires; there is an expectation that they too will be fired shortly.
Everett Kelley, the national president of the largest union representing federal workers, the AFGE, said they would fight the firings vigorously. “These firings are not about poor performance — there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants,” he said in a statement. “They are about power. They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”
On Friday, a source inside the Commerce Department told Splinter that probationary firings were coming for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration next, though details were not yet clear. Another at HHS said their department was apparently next after the USDA firings came down. This will undoubtedly spread everywhere, and even if the supposed exceptions are followed it will kneecap so much of the government’s function that everyone and everything will suffer. That is the point.
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