Feb. 15 (UPI) — Workers hired within the past two years are among the likeliest to lose their jobs as the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies began downsizing.
About 5,200 employees who are on probationary status at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies were slated to receive termination letters on Thursday and Friday afternoon, STAT, NBC News and NPR reported.
About 1,300 workers at the CDC and 1,500 at the NIH received termination notices, NPR reported. The number of workers fired at the CDC is equal to about 10% of its workforce of 13,000.
HHS had 81,300 employees as of 2023, according to USA Facts.
There have been more 10,000 terminated federal workers across multiple agencies as part of its “large-scale reductions” in the government workforce. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday seeking a significant reduction in the size of the government.
The initial firings were mainly those in their first year of their federal job, as they lack the ability to appeal their terminations. There are about 220,000 first-year employees, as of March 2024, according to the most recently publicly available data from the Office of Personnel Management.
In all there are about 3 million federal employees. In addition, the government has contractors.
Federal offices with the most personnel in 2023 the Defense Department with 775,100 civilians, the Department of Veterans Affairs with 433,700 and the Department of Homeland Security with 212,000.
There are 2 million troops but they include reserves.
Dozens of National Nuclear Security Administration workers received termination notices on Friday, USA Today reported.
The workers were probationary employees who mostly held clerical and administrative roles at the agency that monitors nuclear weapons manufacturing and storage in the United States.
The NNSA sought an exemption to the downsizing due to national security interest but was denied.
Officials on Friday attempted to notify some terminated employees they are now due to be reinstated but they struggled to find them, NBC News reported.
“The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”
They lost access to their federal government email accounts.
The fired federal workers at all agencies will be paid for a month and no longer had access to their respective work systems by the end of the day Friday.
Some workers were given two hours to gather their belongings and leave before they would be escorted from respective federal buildings, NBC reported.
Officials with the American Federation of Government Employees condemned the mass firings.
“This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said Friday in a prepared statement.
“These firings are not about poor performance — there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants. 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,” Kelley said.
He promised to fight the firings “every step of the way.”
“Employees were given no notice, no due process and no opportunity to defend themselves in a blatant violation of the principles of fairness and merit that are supposed to govern federal employment,” Kelley said.
“Agencies have spent years recruiting and developing the next generation of public servants. By firing them en masse, this administration is throwing away the very talent that agencies need to function effectively in the years ahead.”
The firings are part of President Donald Trump’s plan to “downsize the federal bureaucracy and eliminate waste, bloat and insularity, which includes ordering agencies to hire no more than one person for every four employees who leave” according to a White House news release shared with UPI on Friday.
The Trump administration said it has secured the resignations of more than 75,000 federal employees representing 3.75% of the federal government’s workforce “in an effort to eliminate inefficiency at taxpayer expense.” It’s a buyout program to pay eight months salary plus benefits.
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