US government agency heads have been given a 13 March deadline to produce a plan for drastically slashing the federal workforce as Donald Trump reinforced warnings that workers who failed to account for what they do could be fired.
A White House memo issued on Wednesday directed bosses to provide details of their workforce reduction plans in the most specific instruction yet to managers to cut stuff who are deemed unnecessary or inefficient.
“The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt,” reads the seven-page, acronym-laden document, jointly written by Russ Vought, the newly installed director of the White House’s office of management and budget, and Charles Ezell, acting director of the office of personnel management (OPM).
“Tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens.”
As a remedy, it adds specific guidance to an executive order issued by Trump this month mandating large-scale “reductions in force” across government department and agencies.
It calls for the elimination of “agency components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or regulation who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations”.
“Agencies should focus on the maximum elimination of functions that are not statutorily mandated while driving the highest-quality, most efficient delivery of their statutorily-required functions,” the memo states.
“Each agency will submit a Phase 1 ARRPs [agency reductions in force and reorganization plans] … for review and approval no later than March 13, 2025.”
The dryly bureaucratic language was hardened by Trump at his first cabinet meeting in the White House on Wednesday, during which he said he spoke with the Environmental Protection Agency secretary, Lee Zeldin, about cutting “65 or so per cent” from the agency.
Trump’s ally Elon Musk, head of the self-styled “department of government efficiency” unit that is spearheading the search for spending cuts, said he would send a second email asking federal workers to detail what they achieved at work.
More than 1 million members of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce have not replied to Musk’s initial demand that they describe their previous week’s work in five bullet points. Several of Trump’s cabinet members – including the FBI director, Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, director of the office of national intelligence – instructed staff not to answer because of the risks of revealing classified information.
“Those million people that haven’t responded, they are on the bubble,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t say that we’re thrilled about it. Maybe they don’t exist. Maybe we’re paying people that don’t exist. [But] a lot of those people who have not responded …it’s possible those people will be fired.”
