Gastonia, NC
The question asks about buyouts, freezes, and return-to-office. Those are the three things that were announced. They are not the three things that happened.
The buyout happened and produced about seventy-five thousand acceptances — roughly three percent of the civilian workforce, against a stated hope of five to ten percent. The freeze happened. The return-to-office order happened.
Then, starting on the thirteenth, something else happened that was not in the announcement: mass termination of probationary employees. Tens of thousands of them, across the IRS, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal Aviation Administration.
I read copy for a living and this distinction is not pedantry. It is the whole argument.
A buyout is voluntary. The people who leave are the ones who chose to, which skews toward people with somewhere else to go, and that is a real problem in its own right. A freeze is passive — it shrinks by attrition and touches nobody currently working.
A probationary termination is neither. It is a firing, it is involuntary, and the selection criterion is length of service in the position. Not function, not performance, not whether the job is a watch floor or a newsletter. Time in seat.
That is the blunt instrument the second half of this question is worried about, and it is blunter than anything the question contemplates, because it does not even ask what the person does.
So the answer I would give is that the first three instruments are defensible and the fourth one — the one that is actually running as of this week — is a different thing entirely and was never announced or argued for.
Argue about the instrument that is being used.
Owatonna, MN
Minnesota school boards know the freeze-and-buyout move and I was prepared to defend it. What began on the thirteenth is a different instrument and it has a property nobody has noticed, so let me spend my answer on it.
A probationary employee is someone in the first year or two in a position. During that window a federal employee has almost no appeal rights — the agency can terminate on notice, with a performance rationale, and there is very little the person can do about it. That is why this route was chosen. It is fast and it is nearly frictionless.
Now ask who the probationary employees are.
They are the most recently hired. And the most recently hired are concentrated, disproportionately and by design, in exactly the functions that have been expanded in the last two years to fix problems the public complained about.
Air traffic control, which has been hiring hard because the controller shortage was a national story. Veterans’ claims processing, which was expanded to attack the backlog. Nuclear security engineers. Food safety inspectors. Disease surveillance. Every one of those is a function that grew recently, which means every one of them has an unusually high share of people inside the probationary window.
Meanwhile a headquarters communications shop that has been fully staffed at the same size for fifteen years has almost no probationary employees at all.
So the instrument being used is not merely blunt. It is inversely targeted. It preferentially removes people from the functions that were recently reinforced and preferentially protects the offices that have been static longest.
That is precisely the opposite of the ring fence this Forum has been asking for. We wanted the watch floors protected and the coordinators cut. Selection by tenure delivers the reverse, automatically, without anybody intending it.
I want to be fair about the alternative. A reduction in force done properly — the actual statutory RIF process — takes months, involves retention registers, veterans’ preference, performance ratings, and bumping rights, and the people who survive it are frequently not the people you wanted to keep either. Nobody who has run one describes it as a precision instrument. The order of the eleventh directing agencies to prepare large-scale RIFs will produce its own version of this argument in a few months.
But the choice was not between a fast blunt tool and a slow precise one. It was between a fast tool that selects by tenure and a slow tool that at least asks what the job is.
So my answer is that the first cut was legitimate as announced and the instrument actually deployed this week is not the one that was defended, and its selection rule works against the very fence this Forum asked for.
Prescott Valley, AZ
You thin a herd from the default rather than by the animal’s own request. That was my position and it still is, and the thing worth teaching here is what the actual selection rule turned out to be.
The rule is length of service. Probationary employees — people in their first year or two in a position — can be terminated with minimal process, and that is who has been let go since the thirteenth.
Set that beside what this Forum said it wanted. We wanted the controllers, the claims examiners, the inspectors, the watch floors protected, and the coordinators of coordinators cut.
Now ask a class which group has more people in their first two years: the function that was expanded last year to fix a backlog everyone was angry about, or the headquarters office that has been the same size since 2010.
They will get it immediately. Selection by tenure hits the recently reinforced and spares the long static, which is the exact inverse of the design we asked for.
That is not a claim about anybody’s motives. It is arithmetic about who happens to be inside a legal window.
I taught for a long time and this is the kind of thing worth putting in front of students because it recurs everywhere. When an organisation needs to move fast, it reaches for whatever category has the fewest procedural protections, and that category is almost never the same as the category you actually wanted to reduce. The protections and the priorities were designed by different people for different reasons and they do not line up.
So: legitimate first cut in principle, and the instrument in use has a selection rule nobody chose on the merits. It was chosen because it was available.
The fix is not complicated and it is late. Before the next round, publish which functions are exempt and why. That converts an available rule into a chosen one, and a chosen rule can be defended.
Dayton, OH
A plant that is fat starts with a freeze and a voluntary exit. I said that would be the right first move and I stand by it. What I want to talk about is what happened on Thursday and Friday, because the ring fence I asked for was tested immediately and it failed on the two clearest watch floors in the federal government.
The National Nuclear Security Administration. Several hundred probationary employees terminated on the thirteenth and fourteenth. These are the people who work on the nuclear stockpile. The agency attempted to reverse the terminations within about a day and had trouble reaching some of the affected employees because their government email had already been cut off.
The Federal Aviation Administration. Several hundred probationary employees terminated in the same window — roughly two weeks after a midair collision over the Potomac killed sixty-seven people and put controller staffing on every front page in the country.
Those are not marginal cases. If you asked a hundred people to name the two federal functions that must not be touched by a blunt instrument, you would get nuclear weapons and air traffic, in some order, from nearly all of them.
In process terms this is not a targeting error. It is the absence of a targeting step.
Here is how you would do it in a plant, and it is not sophisticated. Before any reduction, you produce a list of positions whose absence creates an immediate safety or mission failure. That list is short — a few percent of the workforce — and it is produced by the people who run the line, not by headquarters. Everything on it is exempt from the default. Everything else is subject.
That takes about two weeks and it is the difference between a blunt instrument and a stupid one.
It was not done. The evidence that it was not done is that the NNSA firings had to be reversed the next day, which means nobody checked what those people did before terminating them. You cannot reverse a decision within twenty-four hours on new information if any information was consulted the first time.
So my answer to the question is unchanged in principle and changed in grade. Buyouts, freezes and presence requirements are a legitimate first pass. What ran this week was a fourth instrument with no exemption list attached, and the two functions it hit hardest in its first forty-eight hours were the nuclear stockpile and the air traffic system.
I asked for smart-blunt. This was blunt with the exemption step deleted, and the deletion is not a philosophical position. It is a fortnight of work somebody decided to skip.
Wheeling, WV
I want to explain what a probationary employee actually is, because most people hearing that word this week think it means somebody on probation for doing something wrong.
It does not. It means new in the job. First year, sometimes first two. A twenty-five-year federal veteran who took a promotion into a different position last spring is a probationary employee. So is somebody who transferred agencies. So is the controller who finished the academy in June.
They can be let go with almost no process. That is why they were the ones let go.
Thirty years in labor taught me exactly what that category is for. Probation exists so an employer can correct a hiring mistake without a three-month arbitration. It is a reasonable thing and every contract I ever worked under had a version of it.
What it was never for is workforce reduction. Using it that way is legal and it is also the oldest trick in the book, and every steward in America recognises it on sight: you do not fight the people you want gone, you fight the people you can move cheaply, and then you call the result a reduction.
Two things happened Thursday and Friday that ought to settle this for anybody still arguing.
Several hundred people at the nuclear weapons agency were fired and the agency tried to unfire them the next day — and could not reach some of them, because their email had been shut off. And several hundred people at the FAA were let go two weeks after a midair collision over Washington killed sixty-seven.
You do not reverse a decision in a day unless nobody looked the first time.
I have said in this file that a first cut should be blunt and that the newsletter shops should go before the watch floors. I meant it. What ran this week did not distinguish between them at all, because the rule it used cannot see the difference. It sees a hire date.
Tyler, TX
East Texas thins a payroll with a freeze and a check, then sees who still shows. So let me price what the check actually bought.
About seventy-five thousand people took the deferred resignation. That is roughly three percent of the civilian workforce, against a stated hope of five to ten. So the voluntary instrument returned about half of the low end of its own target.
Now the part nobody has priced, and it is the kind of thing that gets a claim denied in my business.
The offer promised pay through the thirtieth of September. Appropriations currently run to the fourteenth of March. So the government made a seven-month payment commitment to seventy-five thousand people against funding that expires in four weeks.
That may be fine. Agencies have salary accounts and continuing resolutions get extended and nobody is suggesting anyone goes unpaid. But it is a commitment written past the authority that funds it, and if it had been written by a private employer against a line of credit expiring in March, an underwriter would flag it in about four seconds.
I raise it because this Forum has spent five questions demanding that somebody count. Counting cuts both ways. If we want a leak table, we do not get to skip the arithmetic on the instrument we approve of.
On the substance: freeze and buyout are legitimate and I would run them again. The probationary terminations that started Thursday are a different instrument with a different selection rule, and the rule is hire date rather than function, which is why the nuclear agency spent Friday trying to rehire people it had let go on Thursday.
Legitimate first cut, yes. What is running now is not the first cut anybody described, and the people who defended the first cut are being asked to defend a second one they never saw.
Long Island, NY
I draft reduction plans, so let me set out the four instruments in play, because they are legally distinct and the argument has been conducted as though they were one.
The hiring freeze, by executive order of January 20. Touches nobody currently employed, shrinks by attrition, exempts military, immigration enforcement, national security and public safety. The least contentious instrument available and the slowest.
The deferred resignation offer, issued January 28. Voluntary separation with pay through September. Roughly seventy-five thousand acceptances, about three percent. Legally novel — the authority for a seven-month paid non-work period is not obvious and litigation over it was disposed of on standing grounds rather than on the merits, which means the underlying question is unresolved.
The return-to-office requirement. A management prerogative, contested only where collective bargaining agreements say otherwise, and largely a filter rather than a reduction: it produces departures without selecting which.
Probationary termination, beginning February 13. Distinct from all three. A probationary employee — generally within one year of appointment or of moving into a new position — may be separated with minimal procedural protection. It is fast because it is unprotected.
The order of February 11 directs agencies to prepare large-scale reductions in force. That is a fifth instrument and it has not begun. When it does it will run under the statutory RIF process — retention registers, veterans’ preference, performance, bumping rights — and it will take months and produce its own controversies.
Now the analytical point, which I have not seen made and which governs the whole question.
Each instrument has a different selection rule and none of them selects on function.
The freeze selects by who happens to retire. The buyout selects by who has an alternative. The presence requirement selects by who can relocate or commute. Probationary termination selects by hire date. The statutory RIF selects by tenure group, veterans’ preference and performance rating.
Not one of them asks whether the position is essential.
The exemption list is the only mechanism that introduces function into any of this, and it must be built separately, in advance, by people who know what the positions do. The freeze order contains a rough version — national security, public safety, immigration enforcement. Nothing comparable appears to have governed the terminations that began Thursday, which is the most economical explanation for why the nuclear security agency attempted to rescind several hundred separations within a day.
So the answer is: the first cut is legitimate, the instruments are lawful, and the design failure is not bluntness. It is that five different tools were deployed with five different selection rules and one shared omission.
Write the exemption list. It is a fortnight of work, it should have preceded all of this, and it is still the cheapest available correction before the reductions in force begin.
Cheyenne, WY
I keep books, so let me post what each instrument actually did rather than argue about the category.
Freeze, January 20. Shrinks by attrition. Nobody fired. Exemptions written into the order.
Deferred resignation, January 28. Seventy-five thousand acceptances, about three percent, against a hoped-for five to ten. Pay promised through September against appropriations that run to March 14.
Return to office. A filter. Produces departures, selects nothing.
Probationary terminations, beginning February 13. Tens of thousands. Selection rule: time in position.
Now the entries from the last four days, and they are the ones that matter.
The nuclear weapons agency terminated several hundred people and attempted to reverse it the next day, and had difficulty reaching some of them because their email had already been shut off.
The FAA terminated several hundred, about two weeks after a midair collision over Washington killed sixty-seven people.
You do not reverse a decision inside a day on new information unless there was no information the first time.
So the ledger reads: three announced instruments, all defensible, all modest in yield. One unannounced instrument, fast, large, and selecting on hire date. And no exemption list, which we know because the exemptions had to be applied retroactively by telephone on Friday.
I said in an earlier session that blunt is allowed and stupid-blunt is not, and that the fence around the watch floors was the only concession I would make to the second half of this question.
The fence did not exist. That is the entry, and it is not a difference of opinion — it is what Friday demonstrated.
