The ‘break stuff’ agenda for the federal workforce isn’t stopping—not one bit. Multiple agencies have been slashed. The Environmental Protection Agency is cutting hundreds of staffers, with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Agriculture bracing for their layoff orders. The Trump administration has instructed the Office of Personnel Management to put all probationary federal workers on the chopping block; these workers have yet to acquire workplace protections that usually kick in after a couple of years.
Around 400 Department of Homeland Security staffers in this category were let go last week. Now, it’s the senior staffers who aren’t onboard with the Trump administration’s directives that will be targeted next (via NBC News):
The Trump administration is preparing to fire hundreds of high-level Department of Homeland Security employees this week as part of a move to rid the country’s third-largest agency of people deemed to be misaligned with the administration’s goals, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The sources said the Trump administration has a “centralized plan” and a list of people in high-level positions across every component of DHS who are to be targeted this week.
The firings will come on top of hundreds of more general cuts that began across DHS on Friday night, which targeted the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Those firings were the latest in a governmentwide effort to reduce the federal workforce.
This week, the three sources told NBC News, career employees at high managerial levels, namely Senior Executive Service and General Schedule 15 employees, may be removed from agencies across DHS — not to reduce the size of the workforce but to remove employees whom the administration sees as potentially standing in the way of goals the Trump administration has for the agency.
DHS, which includes Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is the primary agency tasked with enforcing U.S. immigration law.
Kudos to Trump for not wanting to have a repeat of ‘holdover’ cancer, which ended up damaging his first presidency, especially at the Department of Justice. He kept too many Obama folks around, staffers who helped manufacture and disseminate the Russian collusion hoax and block his executive order on immigration that the media erroneously called the Muslim ban. He had to fire acting Attorney General Sally Yates over that order, as she refused to defend it.
There are two tribes here. If you’re not on Team MAGA, you’re gone.