'None of This Is About Saving Money': Fury Over Trump-Musk Purge of Federal Workers

The Trump administration intensified its large-scale purge of the federal government on Thursday by moving to fire potentially hundreds of thousands of probationary employees, an effort that one leading union condemned as a power grab aimed at forcing agencies to capitulate to the whims of a lawless president.

The new flurry of terminations impacted workers across at least seven federal agencies, from the Department of Veterans Affairs—which said it fired 1,000 employees—to the Forest Service, Department of Education, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees—a union that represents more than 750,000 federal workers—said no one should fall for the Trump administration's claim that the mass firings are about federal employees' performance or enhancing government "efficiency."

"This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office," Kelley said in a statement Thursday. "These firings are not about poor performance—there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants. They are about power. They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence."

Vowing to "fight these firings every step of the way," Kelley said terminated employees were "given no notice, no due process, and no opportunity to defend themselves in a blatant violation of the principles of fairness and merit that are supposed to govern federal employment."

"We will stand with every impacted employee, pursue every legal challenge available, and hold this administration accountable for its reckless actions," said Kelley. "Federal employees are not disposable, and we will not allow the government to treat them as such."

"None of this is about saving money, it is about Musk and Trump enriching themselves and their wealthy friends while making huge cuts to services Americans depend on."

The new purge targeting more recently hired government employees marks the latest salvo in the Trump administration's far-reaching assault on federal agencies, an effort spearheaded by unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. President Donald Trump has given the advisory commission unprecedented authority over federal hiring, effectively installing Musk as the leader of a shadow government in Washington, D.C.

The Washington Postnoted that "the latest data shows there were more than 220,000 federal employees within their one-year probationary period as of last March."

"These workers typically have little protection from being fired without cause," the Post observed.

In addition to firing rank-and-file workers, Trump has removed independent inspectors general, top federal prosecutors, National Labor Relations Board officials, and the head of the Office of Government Ethics, among others.

The new administration's sweeping attacks on the federal workforce, which have drawn union-led legal challenges, have left career civil servants confused, demoralized, and fearful of the future—music to the ears of far-right officials like Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who has expressed his desire to leave government employees "traumatically affected."

An anonymous OPM employee wrote for Slate last week that agency workers "are just as frustrated, confused, and traumatized as the rest of America."

"When I started my job at OPM, I swore an oath to the Constitution, and to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic, making it especially awful that the threat to our government is coming from inside my own office building," the worker wrote. "The villains here aren't the civil servants working to serve the American people."

A purge of the federal workforce and wholesale dismantling of government departments were central goals of the far-right Project 2025 agenda authored by Vought and others in Trump's orbit. The playbook called on the new administration to disempower career civil servants and "fill its ranks with political appointees."

In addition to leading OMB, Vought is serving as acting director of the CFPB, an agency hit particularly hard by Thursday's purge. Reuters reported that "a new category of employees" at the consumer agency "received termination notices on Thursday... in a sign that the Trump administration was going beyond probationary employees as it looks to fire federal staff."

"Notices to dozens of so-called 'term employees,' full-time workers on contracts with end dates, began arriving Thursday evening, letting them know they were being terminated the same day," Reuters reported. "Some staff discovered they had lost access to the agency's IT systems before receiving their termination letters."

The sloppy and chaotic nature of the purge underscored what critics say is a reckless evisceration of government in service of a far-right ideological project.

The Post reported that the Small Business Association (SBA) "listed a paralegal phone number for laid-off employees to appeal their terminations. The number was an automated line for an apartment building."

According toAxios, one SBA worker "received two different firing emails with attachments... each with a different reason they were being let go."

"The first one said they were being let go because 'you have failed to demonstrate fitness for continued federal employment," Axios reported. "The second one hedged on the reason: '[Y]ou are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge, and skills do not fit the agency's current needs and/or your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency."

Wiredreported that workers at the CFPB "were informed that they had been fired with a frenetic email" in which "some affected employees were addressed as [EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName], [Job Title], [Division]."

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who represents a large swath of federal workers, said in a statement earlier this week that "the Musk-Trump administration's purge of the federal civil service is illegal, terrible for the country, and paves the way for increased corruption."

"While Musk and Trump are distracting their followers with supposed 'savings' from these mass layoffs, which my Republican colleagues correctly note are a tiny fraction of all federal spending, they are preparing to enact tax cuts that will shower hundreds of times as much money on the rich," said Beyer. "None of this is about saving money, it is about Musk and Trump enriching themselves and their wealthy friends while making huge cuts to services Americans depend on."