The Trump administration is pushing for federal agencies to carry out a massive slashing of the federal workforce, demanding plans for hundreds of thousands of possible cuts within weeks.
A White House memo gave officials until 13 March to submit a plan identifying “agency components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or regulation who are not typically designated as essential” during government shutdowns.
Recent shutdowns have hit as many as 800,000 workers. The White House was contacted for comment.
“This is … dangerous to Americans,” said Suzanne Summerlin, a labor attorney and federal labor relations expert.
Federal agencies “are created by Congress, historically in response to some harm that has befallen Americans”, she added, citing examples such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, founded in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash that led to the Great Depression, and the Food and Drug Administration, created in 1904 in response to Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, which exposed dangerous conditions in meatpacking plants.
“Each of these agencies exists because bad actors, whether corporations, financial institutions or government negligence, put the public at large at risk,” Summerlin said. “Dismantling them means repeating the same history of harm.”
The Trump administration’s latest memo, issued on Wednesday, was sent by Russell Vought, director of the office of management and budget, and an author of Project 2025. The federal civilian workforce of about 2 million people has already been roiled by funding freezes, contract cuts, firings and employees placed on administrative leave.
“Most of these changes are not only going to harm federal employees, but also everyone else who lives in the US,” said a current federal employee in the National Archives in Washington DC who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “Cutting federal employees is not going to make inflation magically go down or their eggs become cheaper.”
There will be “a domino effect” with increasingly tangible impacts, they warned. “It’s going to severely interrupt operations like getting tax returns, serving healthcare to veterans, receiving subsidies that often benefit people who run farms and so much more.”
“This administration has targeted every single federal worker and does not seem to care how much turmoil they cause for either the employees or the American public. The chaos is the point,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “What it will not do is result in any discernible savings for taxpayers – in fact, taxpayers likely will end up paying more as the essential work our government does is sold off to private, for-profit contractors.”
Mal Loungway, an equal opportunity specialist with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in Minnesota since 2013, spent years working at the agency to improve resources for marginalized groups and people with disabilities, including under Trump’s first administration.
But as soon as Trump took office for a second term, they were placed on administrative leave following Trump’s executive order targeting diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and accessibility in the federal government, along with several other colleagues. USCIS did not respond to requests for comment.
“Everything that this president has been complaining about is already codified into the law, and required agencies are supposed to be doing things to ensure that the federal government reflects the diversity of the country,” Loungway said. “He is destroying lives.”
Documents obtained by the Washington Post revealed that the so-called “department of government efficiency” plans on firing any federal workers in jobs it deems as DEI related. The Department of Defense has also issued a memo to fire all transgender members of the military, which transgender rights advocates estimated could be as many as 15,000.
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“These are scary times we’re living in that this man [Trump] just willfully does whatever he wants,” said Loungway. “And the fact is, he essentially gets to because the supreme court said that he could. That is where I think this is going to run into a lot of issues, because he’s just going to keep pointing back to ‘Oh well, my bad. But I have immunity.’”
Nearly 25,000 probationary employees have been fired out of more than 220,000, though the office of special counsel (OSC) has deemed some of the firings as unlawful. The Merit Systems Protection Board agreed to pause for 45 days the firing of six workers as the OSC is seeking ways to include more workers without filing individual cases.
Scott Gagnon, regional director at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for six states in the New England region, was terminated on 14 February as a probationary employee.
“I think it’s a real loss for the country to have us looking for jobs instead of doing the jobs we were hired to do,” said Gagnon. “Now states won’t have that go-to person when they’re running into any barriers or challenges implementing addiction and mental health services with federal funds in their region.”
The hiring freezes enacted by the Trump administration have also affected workers who had already applied, interviewed and accepted job offers with federal agencies. Federal hiring under Trump’s first administration typically ranged from about 30,000 to 40,000 workers monthly.
At the National Park Service, an employee currently at another federal agency had interviewed and accepted a job offer in environmental policy. But the offer was rescinded after Trump froze federal hiring on his first day in office.
“The supervisor, who had been so kind throughout the process, sent me an email expressing his heartbreak, but he had no control over the decision,” they said. “I had worked so hard to get here, to finally feel like I was making a meaningful contribution, and now all of that had been ripped away without even a second thought.
“The helplessness I felt was suffocating. This wasn’t just the loss of a job. This was the loss of everything I had worked for, everything that had shaped my identity and my purpose.”
