Update on Ever-Changing Employee Situation

I am not covering this because I have any unique insights. I am just trying to piece together what I’ve heard from various news outlets including The Hotshot Wakeup. Here’s what seems to be happening. Again, I’m only covering this because of its importance to employees, not because I have any good independent sources of information.

Employees in their probationary period are being let go, with exceptions.

1. The New Admin is terminating employees in their probationary period in the Forest Service.
2. This is happening in all agencies.
3. Public safety hires are exempt (at the FS), which definitely means Fire and law enforcement, and also some engineers who are involved with public safety.

It appears to be simply because probationary employees are easier to fire, based on the regulations, for people in the Admin who want to reduce employee numbers. They are the equivalent of “low-hanging fruit”. RIFs are more complicated. I don’t think that this reduction, (removing employees during their probationary period) has happened before, but I could be wrong. Certainly RIFs have.

I was just hearing about the Forest Service, but it appears in this Government Executive article to be government-wide and focused on employees during their probationary period.

The Office of Personnel Management has instructed agencies across government to terminate employees in their probationary periods—typically those who were hired into government for within the last one or two years, depending on their hiring mechanism—while allowing for limited exceptions, according to a source familiar with the directive. OPM previously asked agencies to compile lists of their probationary period employees and in some cases federal offices sent warnings that firings may be imminent.

I thought this was interesting.

The Veterans Affairs Department announced Thursday evening it had dismissed 1,000 probationers, though it said it exempted those directly providing care and benefits to veterans and the number was just a fraction of its 43,000 employees in their trial periods.

and

The probationary period employee actions are not layoffs, or RIFs, which initiate unique procedures, but regular, for-cause employment terminations. As of May 2024, federal data maintained by OPM showed agencies employed more than 200,000 employees hired within the last year. Probationers can still appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board if they allege the firings took place for partisan political reasons.

Then there’s this story also in Gov Exec :

On Tuesday evening, however, OPM convened a call with federal agencies’ general counsels and instructed them not to pursue widespread firings of probationary period workers. Instead, OPM said, they should terminate only such workers that they have deemed poor performers. The call was first reported by CBS News.

“The Trump Administration is encouraging agencies to use the probationary period as it was intended: as a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment,” an OPM spokesperson said.

If OPM said that Tuesday night..???? All very confusing.

Propublica has an article with the incendiary (so to speak) title, “How Trump’s federal funding and hiring freezes are leaving America vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire.”

The reality is supervisors are guessing how to interpret the White House’s commands, and a “huge leadership vacuum” has resulted in conflicting orders, according to Ben McLane, captain of a federal handcrew, which constructs fireline around an active blaze.

A national firefighting leadership training program that McLane was set to attend was canceled on short notice, he said. McLane acknowledged that federal firefighting agencies need a major overhaul, noting that his crew was downsized 30% by pre-Trump administration cuts. But the current confusion could further impact public safety because of the lack of clear leadership and the disrupted preparations for wildfire season.

Again, it seems like someone above the handcrew supervisor level should be “guessing how to interpret the White House’s commands.” Now, I am not blaming anyone anywhere, in HR, or “leadership”; it’s just confusing. If USDA couldn’t get the message in the Tuesday phone call from OPM, how likely is it that a consistent message can make it, what six or seven direct layers down to a field crew. At least HR is centralized, so there should be less confusion. Yes, it’s OK to feel empathy for Albuquerque folks, as well as anyone involved in what appears to be a cluster.

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I’m going to dig into the “who is doing what work” angle. In the Propublica article.

Then came the Forest Service’s attempts last year to close a budget shortfall worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The agency stopped hiring seasonal workers outside the fire program.

“The reality’s setting in — they still don’t have the budget under control,” one Forest Service firefighter said. Even though firefighting positions were exempted, personnel who do other jobs often assist with fires. And a lack of support staff could force firefighters to do additional work such as maintaining recreational trails, taking them away from fire-related duties.

Much of the force is hired seasonally or switches between crews and agencies at different times of the year. But the increased uncertainty has prompted once-reliable seasonal hires to take other jobs that offer more stability.

“We’re the only ones left,” the Forest Service firefighter said of the hiring freezes.

Would firefighters really be asked to do trails because they are the only ones left?

But in the E&E News article (not by our usual reporters):

The cuts would reduce the agency’s workforce — a total of 35,000 employees — by about 10 percent, potentially making it harder for the federal government to address increasingly intense wildfires and manage millions of acres of federal forests and grasslands. Forest Service employees in probationary periods are more likely to be the ones doing field work, such as moving timber sales and helping to mitigate wildfires, than their more senior counterparts.

I don’t know, it seems to me that much of the fieldwork is done by temporaries, and sometimes new folks are still learning how to do complicated procedures like timber sales, NEPA or contracting.

Another “I’m not so sure” statement, this time in the Propublica story.

Additionally, the workforce has been stressed by Trump’s executive orders calling for programs relating to the topics of diversity, equity and inclusion to be shuttered, including employee support groups and seminars on topics such as women in the wildfire community. Government websites have already been scrubbed of information lauding progress in diversifying the male-dominated federal firefighting force, ProPublica found.

So, having reviewed the FOIAs we received from various regions, we found that funding was obligated to Keystones for folks to do much fieldwork and contracting, including prescribed burning. But what we don’t know if if that funding is still sitting at the Keystone NGOs, so that work will be going forward (and they could conceivably hire the former FS temps) or it has been clawed back. I guess I’ll give the Press Office a try.