OPM eases plans to target all federal workers on probation

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is instructing agencies that they do not have to fire all federal employees still on probation but is encouraging them to remove any low performers.

The direction, confirmed by a source familiar, comes after the OPM asked agencies across government to turn over lists of employees hired within the last year or two.

The probationary period lasts one or two years, depending on the agency, a status that makes some 200,000 federal employees slightly easier to fire.

“The Trump Administration is encouraging agencies to use the probationary period as it was intended: as a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment in the D.C. swamp,” an OPM spokesperson said in a statement.

CBS News first reported the development.

It was not immediately clear which employees still on probation might be targeted under the instructions. Agency grading scales place employees in various tiers, and it was unclear what criteria were passed to agencies.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Friday penned a letter to House and Senate leaders asking them to investigate potential plans to mass fire employees still in their probationary period.

“We respectfully urge that you investigate the Administration’s rationale and legal basis for these planned layoffs. … Mass layoffs of federal employees of the sort that have been reported to be under consideration are presumptively and inherently illegal,” the ACLU wrote to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The ACLU argued the law requires reviewing each employee’s performance on a case-by-case basis, while any large-scale firings would have to follow existing law for shrinking the workforce.

Despite their probationary status, the employees are still afforded much of the same protections as the broader federal workforce, meaning they must be informed of “inadequacies” in their performance before being fired.

“While the law allows for the termination of probationary employees for performance or conduct reasons, a mass firing on this scale without any sort of individualized assessment or following of Reduction in Force (RIF) procedures raises serious legal concerns,” the ACLU wrote.

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