Anger, chaos and confusion take hold as federal workers face mass layoffs

NEW YORK (AP) — Workers across the country responded with anger and confusion Friday as they grappled with the Trump administration ‘s aggressive effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce by ordering agencies to lay off probationary employees who have yet to qualify for civil service protections.

While much of the administration’s attention was focused on disrupting bureaucracy in Washington, the broad-based effort to slash the government workforce was impacting a far wider swath of workers. As layoff notices were sent out agency by agency, federal employees from Michigan to Florida were left reeling from being told that their services were no longer needed.

In a sign of how chaotic the firings have been, some who received layoff notices had already accepted the administration’s deferred resignation offer, under which they were supposed to be paid until Sept. 30 if they agreed to quit, raising questions about whether others who signed the deal would nonetheless be fired. On Friday evening, the Office of Personnel Management, which serves as a human resources department for the federal government, acknowledged that some employees may have received termination notices in error and said the buyouts agreements would be honored.

“This has been slash and burn,” said Nicholas Detter, who had been working in Kansas as a natural resource specialist, helping farmers reduce soil and water erosion, until he was fired by email late Thursday night. He said there seemed to be little thought about how employees and the farmers and ranchers he helped would be impacted.

“None of this has been done thoughtfully or carefully,” he said.

The White House and OPM declined to say Friday how many probationary workers, who generally have less than a year on the job, have so far been dismissed. According to government data maintained by OPM, 220,000 workers had less than a year on the job as of March 2024.

OPM has given agencies until 8 p.m. Tuesday to issue layoff notices, according to a person familiar with the plan who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The probationary layoffs are the latest salvo in the new administration’s sweeping efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, which are being led by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Trump, in an executive order Tuesday, told agency leaders to plan for “large-scale reductions” after their initial attempt to downsize the workforce — the voluntary buyout – was accepted by only 75,000 workers.

The layoffs begin

On Thursday night, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced the dismissal of more than 1,000 employees who had served for less than two years. That included researchers working on cancer treatment, opioid addiction, prosthetics and burn pit exposure, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, said Thursday.

Dozens were fired from the Education Department, including special education specialists and student aid officials, according to a union that represents agency workers.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1,300 probationary employees — roughly one-tenth of the agency’s total workforce — are being forced out. The Atlanta-based agency’s leadership was notified of the decision Friday morning, according to a federal official who was at the meeting and was not authorized to discuss the orders and requested anonymity.

The new Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Friday that her agency had invited Musk’s DOGE team with “open arms” and that layoffs “will be forthcoming.”

“Clearly, it’s a new day,” Rollins said at the White House. “I think the American people spoke on November 5th, that they believe that government was too big.”

Workers impacted

Andrew Lennox, a 10-year Marine veteran, was part of a new supervisor training program at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He said he received an email “out of the blue” Thursday evening informing him that he was being terminated.

“In order to help veterans, you just fired a veteran,” said Lennox, 35, a former USMC infantryman who was deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Lennox had been working as an administrative officer at the VA since mid-December and said he “would love nothing more” than to keep working.

“This is my family, and I would like to do this forever,” he said.

In a post on its website, the VA announced the dismissal of more than 1,000 employees, saying the personnel moves “will save the department more than $98 million per year” and be better equipped to help vets.

“I was like: ‘What about this one?’” Lennox said

David Rice, a disabled Army paratrooper who has been on probation since joining the U.S. Department of Energy in September, also learned Thursday night that he had lost his job.

Rice, who has been working as a foreign affairs specialist on health matters relating to radiation exposure, said he’d been led to believe that his job would likely be safe. But on Thursday night, when he logged into his computer for a meeting with Japanese representatives, he saw an email saying he’d been fired.

“It’s just been chaos,” said Rice, 50, who had just bought a house in Melbourne, Florida, after he got the job.

Rice said he agrees with the Trump administration’s goal of making the government more efficient, but objects to the random, scattershot approach being taken.

Fired despite agreeing to the buyout

Some of those impacted had already signed the buyout agreements offered by the administration that were supposed to protect them from dismissal.

Detter, 25, who had worked for the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, said he had accepted the buyout because he knew that, as a probationary employee, he’d likely be first on the chopping block if he didn’t accept.

But late Thursday night, Detter received an email saying he had been laid off effective immediately, even though he had received “completely positive” evaluations during his time on the job.

He said the decision left him feeling “disrespected” and a “a little bit helpless.”

“You’re just kind of a pawn in a much bigger struggle that Elon Musk — in particular, I feel like — is his kind of battle he’s decided to take on to shrink the government,” Detter said.

Detter said two of the four employees in the Kansas county where he worked were laid off even though they were already struggling with their workload helping farmers manage their land to prevent soil erosion and water pollution, a program that was created in the wake of the 1930s Dust Bowl to help keep America’s farmland healthy and productive.

Challenging the administration

The National Treasury Employees Union and a group of other unions filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging what they call unlawful terminations.

Terminating probationary employees who have gone through extensive training “will have a devastating impact on agency missions and government operations,” NTEU President Doreen Greenwald wrote in a Thursday letter to union members. She said many federal agencies are already “severely understaffed due to years of frozen or slashed budgets that prevented them from replacing retiring employees.”

On Friday evening, the advocacy group Democracy Forward filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, the federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, asking for an investigation into whether the mass firings violated federal personnel practices and asking that they be halted while the inquiry is being conducted.

Labor activists and government workers rallied outside the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington Friday morning, to protest the cuts.

“They’re picking us off, one by one,” said one federal contractor who has not yet lost her job, but who, like others, declined to identify herself for fear of reprisal. “First, it’s the probationary workers, then we’re next,” she said.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, issued a statement Friday evening on X, formerly Twitter, saying, in part, “indiscriminate workforce cuts aren’t efficient and won’t fix the federal budget.”

She said her office has attempted to get answers from various agencies, but “the response so far has been evasive and inadequate.”

Will the cuts reduce the deficit?

The layoffs are unlikely to yield significant deficit savings. The government spends about $270 billion annually compensating civilian federal workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office, with about 60% going to workers at the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.

Even if the government cut all of those workers, it would still run a deficit of over $1 trillion.

But Trump’s mass layoffs of federal workers could come back to bite him in economic data. The monthly jobs reports could start to show a slowdown in hiring, if not turn negative at some point after the February numbers are released.

The last time the economy lost jobs was in December 2020, when the United States was still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.

“Given everything that is happening in the federal government, it is very plausible that job growth could turn negative at some point,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University. She noted that employers that rely on government grants and contracts would also show declines.

Those who have been fired say the people they serve will soon feel the impact, too. Rice, the disabled paratrooper working on radiation exposure at the Department of Energy, said the work he was doing made a difference.

“We’re just out here trying to do something that we actually believe in, that matters,” he said. “I really believe that we’re actually out there helping people.”

___ Colvin and Price reported from New York, Witte from Annapolis, Maryland, and Householder from Detroit. Associated Press writers Fatima Hussein, Josh Boak, Will Weissert and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington and Mike Stobbe in New York contributed to this report.

Jill Colvin, Brian Witte, Mike Householder And Michelle L. Price, The Associated Press