The Trump administration is proposing a new rule on how the government conducts mass layoffs after last year’s cuts led by Trump adviser Elon Musk were mired in legal challenges and confusion.
The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR arm, published a proposed rule Thursday that it says will streamline the layoff process and put a new emphasis on job performance rankings rather than seniority. The new proposal will now undergo a 60-day comment period and has already faced pushback from the largest federal workers’ union, which has argued that the performance review system has been manipulated to cap how many employees receive high rankings.
If finalized, the proposed rule would require agencies to sort employees with a rubric that prioritizes their three most recent ratings, with a preference for veterans.
The proposed rule also would exclude probationary employees from layoffs, after the Trump administration had conducted a massive purge of those employees last year. That round of layoffs was reversed by courts. At several agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Affairs and National Weather Service, the dismissals of probationary employees, who are classified as having been hired within a year, had led to short-staffed offices and confusion.
The federal union has argued the proposed changes would remove protections that are in place to prevent “politically motivated layoffs.”
The proposal to change how layoffs are decided is similar to what the first Trump administration had proposed in 2020, though the Biden administration later withdrew it. The administration said the new system would make it easier for agencies to retain the employees who are the highest performing.
“OPM is proposing these changes to improve the efficiency of the [reduction in force] process to effect better outcomes with less burden on agencies invoking these rules, and to increase the focus on merit in determining retention standing,” the proposed rule reads, referring to the layoff process.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workforce union, slammed the proposed rule as the next step in the administration’s efforts to “dismantle the non-partisan civil service.” The union has previously challenged the administration’s layoffs and firings in court, with several cases still ongoing.
“By gutting seniority protections and handing agencies sweeping new discretion over who stays and who goes, OPM is making it easier to conduct politically motivated layoffs dressed up as ‘performance-based’ decisions,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.
The administration has also proposed transferring responsibility for reviewing federal employee appeals of proposed layoffs. The rule would move that job from an independent panel that reviews challenges, called the Merit Systems Protection Board, to OPM, giving the administration more control over the appeals process.
OPM said the change would speed up the process after MSPB has seen a growing backlog in cases. The backlog grew last year after the board lost its quorum when President Donald Trump fired its Democratic members.
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