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Did they focus on probationary employees, or employees in probationary positions? I've heard a lot of claims that there are employees who got a probationary promotion, but the probationary status of "depending on performance the promotion might become permanent or you might be returned to your old job" was just replaced by "you don't have any job now".
It's interesting to ponder the selection effects, if that's true. We'd be keeping the "so obviously capable that we can't imagine undoing their promotion" employees, but also the "so obviously incapable that we wouldn't even offer a probationary promotion" ones, while hollowing out the middle a bit.
In the government, you are typically in a probationary status in three situations:
When you are first hired. Most agencies have a probationary period of 1 year (some are 2). The reason for this being that it's statutorily harder to fire civil servants who have tenure, so you want to make sure someone is a suitable employee before making them permanent. In theory, probationary employees can be let go at any time for substandard performance, though most agencies have rules about how much notification and opportunity to improve probies must be given. (Even more so than with private companies, the onboarding and training period is expensive so it's really not cost effective to be casually churning employees.) DOGE is discarding the "theory" and just mandating that all probationary (i.e, can be legally fired at will) employees be cut.
When you switch agencies. This is what's biting a lot of long-term government employees. You might have 15 years in civil service, but for whatever reason you switch from one agency to another. You are once again in a probationary period in your new agency. Usually this is a formality, but suddenly people who recently switched agencies are being cut just like new employees.
When you are elevated to the Senior Executive Service. This isn't a regular promotion in the GS levels; SESs are division chiefs or VP equivalents. They're senior decision makers, and again, they are put in a probationary period in their new position. Previously, a senior who failed probation for whatever reason (which is, unsurprisingly, rare) would just be returned to a GS15 position, but now DOGE is taking advantage of their "probationary" status to summarily fire them too.
I'm barely following this whole DOGE saga, but you make it sound like they're purely trying to maximize the number of people fired, with no consideration for merit or political allegiance. Is this the case?
That appears to be the case, yes. What they want to do is simply fire everyone from every agency they don't think should exist. The law doesn't actually allow them to do that, so instead they're firing all the employees they believe can be legally terminated without process.
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Sort of yes. They think with technology they can make enough efficiency gains that even if they fire the more competent people the efficiency gains will offset the productivity lost from the fired employees. So basically the thesis is we can cut government costs (eg payroll) without cutting government productivity.
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