Trump moves to ease firing of recently-hired federal workers

By Daniel Wiessner

April 25 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has made it more difficult for federal employees to keep their jobs after an initial trial period, his latest effort to reshape the U.S. government workforce and rein in dissent from his agenda.

Trump in an executive order on Thursday said that government workers will get to keep their jobs after the probationary period, which is typically a year or two depending on the job, only if the agencies they work for review their performance and approve it.

Until now, probationary workers had automatically attained full status after the trial period unless they were fired. Many of them are longtime government employees in new roles.

"As a result of this failure to remove poor performers, agencies have often retained and given tenure to underperforming employees who should have been screened out during their probationary period," Trump said in the order.

The Trump administration fired about 25,000 probationary employees in February, initially claiming they were terminated for poor performance. Most of the workers were ordered to be reinstated by federal judges, but those rulings were paused pending appeals and many of them have since been fired.

Probationary employees have fewer job protections and legal rights against termination than other federal workers, though agencies are generally required to state performance-related reasons for firing them.

Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser heading a government efficiency initiative, have moved to drastically shrink the federal workforce, and make it easier to fire government workers and replace them with political loyalists. That includes reclassifying an estimated 50,000 workers with policy-making roles to strip them of protections against being fired.

Many of those efforts have drawn legal challenges from unions, nonprofits and Democrat-led states.

In the order on Thursday, Trump said agencies have not been using probationary periods as effectively as they could to remove workers whose continued employment is not in public interest.

Trump said the Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department for federal agencies, will adopt a rule within 30 days requiring agencies to affirmatively determine whether probationary workers should keep their jobs. That will include an individualized review process and an appeal process for workers who are fired, according to the order.

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