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CNN warns that intelligence employees who get the axe are valuable — and that those same employees will sell national secrets if fired. Which is it?Blaze News investigates: Critics say Trump's mass firings of probationary bureaucrats are unlawful. They're wrong.
President Donald Trump faced a variety of obstacles when attempting to advance the MAGA agenda in his first term.
While Democratic lawmakers, some members of his own party, and leftist groups worked hard to impede the execution of the president's will, the federal bureaucracy also played a significant role, particularly those identifying with the so-called "resistance."
Although the GOP is now largely on board, the Democratic Party is greatly weakened, and leftist groups are on the back foot, Trump appears unwilling to take any chances regarding those charged with executing his agenda.
In the name of addressing government bloat and maximizing efficiency but also clearly seeking to oust Biden loyalists and other obstructionists, the second Trump administration has worked to shake up the federal workforce.
As part of this shake-up, the White House has instructed agencies to fire probationary federal workers.
Democratic lawmakers and advocates for fired and soon-to-be-fired bureaucrats claim the terminations are unlawful. The Trump administration maintains that the firings are not only lawful but aimed at ensuring that the federal workforce comprises "qualified, high-performing individuals who support the mission of federal agencies."
Experts with penetrating insights into presidential authority and the workings of the federal government suggested to Blaze New that when it comes to canning probationers, the Trump administration stands on firm legal ground. Accordingly, the recent sound and fury from Democratic lawmakers and deep-staters largely signify nothing.
Housecleaning
Trump wasted no time kicking various career agency employees and political appointees to the curb. For instance, in his first week in office, he fired the inspectors general from at least 17 federal agencies.
While the Trump administration has been ousting and replacing senior bureaucrats and political appointees across the federal government, it appears especially keen on addressing the submerged portion of the bureaucratic iceberg — on shrinking and optimizing the federal workforce, which the White House indicated exceeds 2.4 million people, excluding active-duty military and Postal Service employees.
To move the needle forward, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management offered buyouts to millions of full-time federal employees last month. Even though the offer has faced legal challenges, roughly 75,000 have reportedly taken the deal.
While the Trump administration has both greased some workers' exits and fired numerous low-performing bureaucrats in non-critical roles, the White House has also set its sights on federal employees on probationary periods, which could apparently impact over 200,000 workers.
'Performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency.'
Probationary workers are recent agency hires or employees moved or promoted into new positions who generally do not have rights to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board over suspensions, demotions, and removals. An OPM spokesman noted in a statement to Blaze News that "the probationary period is a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment."
Charles Ezell, the acting director of the OPM, asked agency heads in a Jan. 20 memo to identify all probationary employees who have served less than a year in a competitive service appointment or who have served less than two years in an excepted service appointment.
After initially instructing agencies to fire the poor performers among their probationary employees, the OPM issued a directive on Feb. 13 to commence firing the remainder of their probationers.
Between the time of the order and Feb. 20, various agencies followed through or were in the process of doing so. For instance, over 1,000 probationary employees were fired at the Department of Veterans Affairs; around 400 were reportedly fired at the Department of Homeland Security; nearly 1,300 were given the boot at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; thousands were reportedly dismissed from the Interior Department; 3,400 were canned at the U.S. Forest Service; and 168 were fired at the National Science Foundation.
A source said to be familiar with the agency's plans told CBS News that the Internal Revenue Service was expected to can over 6,000 employees by Feb. 21.
Probationers were in some cases told in their termination letters that they were "not fit for continued employment because [their] ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the agency's current needs" and that their "performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency," reported CNN.
When asked about the significance of the firings, Mitch Sollenberger, professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, told Blaze News, "The breadth of these actions in such a limited amount of time (30 days or so) is unprecedented and seems to demonstrate the level of sophistication the second-term Trump administration has over the first-term version. Really I can't recall a prior presidential administration so aggressively and thoroughly using the central tenets of the unitary executive theory to take command of the executive branch."
"It is these types of actions that are important because they aren't really 'ends' to themselves," continued Sollenberger. "Trump viewed the 'deep' state as being a problem during his first term in office. Taking action as he's doing seems to be about serving his longer-term policy goals (whatever they are)."
Challenging the broom
Democratic lawmakers and other champions of the deep state have condemned the mass firings. Federal worker unions have begun filing legal challenges, and multiple law firms are advancing class-action complaints.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested after a Delta Air Lines jet crash-landed in Canada that layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration were "making our skies less and less safe."
'This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree.'
On Wednesday, 90 House Democrats decried the firing of probationers at Veterans Affairs, suggesting that contrary to Secretary Doug Collins' insistence that the firings "will not negatively impact VA health care, benefits, or beneficiaries," the affected positions were somehow "critical to health care, benefits, and research."
While Democrats are trying to paint the firings as a threat to government function, unions are leaning on the notion that the firings are somehow illegal in a desperate attempt to protect prospective dues-paying members.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union for civilian federal employees, vowed to "fight these firings every step of the way."
"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.
"These firings are not about poor performance — there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants. They are about power," continued Kelley. "They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence."
The AFGE was among the unions that filed a lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking to block the mass firings.
'President Trump is on solid legal ground.'
In their complaint, the unions, which are represented by a leftist group that frequently fights Republican election integrity initiatives, alleged that the OPM "lacks the constitutional, statutory, or regulatory authority to order federal agencies to terminate employees in this fashion" and that the firings were both made on false pretenses and unlawful.
The idea that the firings were somehow improper was also advanced in a complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel made on behalf of probationers who were allegedly fired across nine federal agencies on the basis of their probationary status, not because of performance or conduct.
Lawyers from Democracy Forward — a legal outfit established by Democratic Party operatives whose board chair is Marc Elias — and a private firm claimed in the complaint that probationers must be assessed individually and on their performance, reported USA Today.
The complaint suggests that "mass indiscriminate terminations are, by definition, not based on the performance of the individual employee."
Clean sweep
While critics of Trump's efforts to shrink the federal bureaucracy might prove successful in combatting the removal of select full-time employees, it appears their battle over probationers is a lost cause.
John Malcolm, vice president of the Heritage Foundation's Institute for Constitutional Government and director of the think tank's Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told Blaze News, "So far as I am aware, and as a former federal executive branch employee myself, civil service protection laws (assuming those are constitutional to begin with) do not kick in until after someone passes the probationary period."
"Therefore, I believe that President Trump is on solid legal ground when it comes to terminating probationary employees," added Malcolm, who served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004.
Sollenberger similarly figures the "Trump administration stands on a bit firmer grounds firing probation employees."
Blaze News reached out to the AFGE for comment but did not receive a response by deadline.
A 2005 Merit Systems Protection Board report to the president and Congress underscored that "until the probationary period has been completed, a probationer is still an applicant for an appointment, with the burden to demonstrate why it is in the public interest for the Government to finalize an appointment to the civil service for this particular individual."
Prior the finalization of employment, "a probationer has only limited job protections."
D.C. labor attorney Suzanne Summerlin told NPR that probationers are entitled to written letters or termination notices stating the reason for their firing but in most cases can't do anything about it — unless they were canned due to discrimination based on their sex, race, disability, or whistleblower status.
'President Trump deserves a lot of credit for turning such talk into action.'
When asked whether it makes a difference whether the Trump administration terminates probationary employees en masse or on an individual basis, Malcolm said it shouldn't make a difference but could prove to be an issue.
Nevertheless, he noted that "courts will typically cut the president more slack when it comes to making programmatic shifts as opposed to individual employment decisions which someone might challenge as having been done for an improper purpose, such as firing somebody because of their race, age, or disability."
"I'm not at all certain that the challenges will be successful if they are raising section 2302 concerns (prohibited personnel practices) unless the argument is that the 'mission-critical' rationale the Trump administration is using is pretextual and the true motive is really about something else that violates the rights of these employees," Sollenberger told Blaze News.
Section 2302 of the U.S. Code prohibits discrimination against any employee or applicant for employment on the basis of race, sex, national origin, marital status, and political affiliation.
Malcolm said that while it is presently difficult to assess the political and institutional significance of the firings under way, it is clear that "the firing of probationary employees is only a small part of the overall restructuring and downsizing of the federal bureaucracy that is currently being undertaken by President Trump, with the assistance, of course, of Elon Musk and DOGE, and the process has just begun."
"Reining in the administrative state and returning more power to the states and to individuals has long been touted as a goal, and a laudable one at that, of the Republican Party," continued Malcolm. "President Trump deserves a lot of credit for turning such talk into action."
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Sean Spicer tells Glenn Beck how Biden unwittingly helped Trump fire 'anyone he wants'
President Donald Trump cleaned house last week at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation's capital. Trump fired all 18 board members who were appointed by Democratic presidents, then appointed MAGA allies, who ultimately made him their chairman.
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on Tuesday that the turfing of Biden loyalists at the Kennedy Center and other appointees throughout the government was made possible by a strategic blunder on the part of the previous administration.
Spicer indicated that after he exited the role of White House press secretary in July 2017, Trump appointed him to the U.S. Naval Academy board of visitors for a three-year term, which would expire on Dec. 30, 2021.
Although Spicer had time left in his term, he received an email on Sept. 8, 2021, from the Biden White House demanding that he resign by 6 p.m. that day. The letter indicated that should he fail to comply, his "position with the Board will be terminated."
Spicer indicated that he didn't resign and was fired.
Recalling his reaction, Spicer told Beck, "I was like, 'You couldn't just wait 60 days just to have it for free?'"
"So it turns out he fired everybody," said Spicer. "Myself, from the Naval Academy board. Russ Vought from the Naval Academy board. And then a guy named [Ret. Gen. H.R.] McMaster from the West Point board."
Spicer told Beck he was approached shortly thereafter by White House adviser Stephen Miller and his legal outfit, America First Legal, who proposed suing Biden to force him to "argue that he has the absolute authority to fire anybody."
The complaint they ultimately filed stated that Biden "has no authority to terminate Mr. Spicer's and Mr. Vought's appointments to the Board" and lacked the "constitutional authority under Article II to terminate Mr. Spicer's and Mr. Vought's appointments to the Board because it is a purely advisory nonpartisan entity that does not wield any executive power."
U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled in 2022 that neither Spicer nor Vought were insulated from removal, suggesting that doing so "would raise serious constitutional issues, as Board members are executive officials whose 'only role ... is to advise the President on the performance of a quintessentially executive function.'"
'Joe Biden was so petty.'
Spicer and Vought appealed Friedrich's decision but dropped their appeal after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in a separate case regarding another Trump appointee's removal from the board of a federal agency that as a general rule, the president "may freely remove his subordinates."
Spicer told Beck that in the wake of his apparent legal defeat, "the media started calling, Glenn, and said, 'You lost the case.' And I said at the time, 'Did I?'"
Poetic justice would have it that Biden's supposed victories in court paved the way for Trump to remove Katherine Petrelius — the woman who emailed Spicer in September 2021, telling him to resign — and other Democratic appointees from the Kennedy Center board earlier this month.
A spokesman for the center told the Washington Post that the organization didn't fight Trump's takeover on account of the precedent set in Spicer's case.
"Never in the history of the United States has any president ever removed somebody from a service academy board prior to their term being done for anything less than malfeasance. And even that, we can't find an example. Never!" Spicer told Beck. "Joe Biden was so petty."
Upon learning that Biden's pettiness "has given President Trump the authority to fire anyone he wants," Spicer said he was "ecstatic."
"I think it's absolutely fantastic," said Beck. "I thank you for what you did. And, you know, the only thing that would make it better is if you or I were on the board of the Kennedy Center and we could announce that Lee Greenwood's residency was taking place at the Kennedy Center."
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Deep-staters compare government efficiency push to 9/11, Holocaust on Reddit
The Trump administration is working diligently to eliminate bureaucratic bloat and save taxpayers money.
According to individuals identifying as bureaucrats in Reddit's top haunts for American federal workers, these efforts — long championed by a democratically elected president who presently enjoys record-high approval ratings — are apparently comparable to the Holocaust, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, and to a "coup." One user stated in a post, again without a trace of irony, "We're at war."
Besides affording the American public a window into the kinds of derangement and delusion that plague elements of the federal workforce, the increasingly popular Reddit community r/fednews has furnished left-wing publications with supposed evidence of deep-staters' "fighting spirit" as well as with the hope that the "resistance" that undermined the first Trump administration is back.
It is clear from a closer look at the users, engagements, rhetoric, and strategy that appear on r/fednews — which at the time of publication had over 375,000 members — that if reflective of a broader resistance movement, the Trump administration likely has little to worry about this time around.
Cleaning house
President Donald Trump has expressed a desire for nearly a decade to "drain the swamp" in Washington. He revisited and campaigned on the proposal ahead of an election he won handily and is now delivering the goods.
Upon retaking office, Trump ended remote work for federal employees, which is expected to ultimately prompt a great many voluntary exits; took an ax to the federal DEI regime, shuttering race-obsessive offices nationwide and putting multitudes of bureaucrats on administrative leave; ordered a freeze on the hiring of federal civilian employees; and reinstated his 2020 executive order establishing the Schedule F employment category for federal employees, which makes it easier to remove insubordinate and useless bureaucrats from an estimated pool of 50,000 eligible candidates.
These steps alone had bureaucrats, Democratic lawmakers, and other establishmentarians throwing a conniption, but then the administration went a step further and offered buyouts to millions of federal workers in an effort to expedite the downsizing process.
Even though a Clinton-appointed federal judge recently imposed a restraining order against the buyout — which approximately 3% of the federal workforce reportedly had accepted by Feb. 10 — bureaucrats know that the writing is on the wall.
When pressed on how the administration is presently faring in its efforts to address bureaucratic bloat and inefficacy, Donald Devine, senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies and former director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the Reagan administration, told Blaze News, "I think they are doing very well in the first phase, letting the employees know who is in charge."
Weeping and gnashing of teeth
While bureaucrats may not want to admit who is in charge, they appear to at the very least understand that it's no longer them. That has not, however, stopped federal workers from trying to undermine the Trump administration at every turn.
Some bureaucrats have begun plotting petty ways to impede the work undertaken by the Trump administration, particularly by members of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency.
The Washington Post reported, for instance, that General Services Administration staffers created an encrypted chat where together they could scheme how to hide sensitive defense data. Other federal workers reportedly marked emails from the Trump administration as spam "just to piss them off."
Meanwhile, at r/fednews and r/feddiscussion, where paranoia about infiltrators and spies is rampant, there have been calls to:
- "hold the line" and reject buyout packages;
- kick theDOGE requests and orders up to senior management and then waste time waiting for approvals in writing;
- "develop" medical conditions to get around return-to-work orders;
- defecate in chairs;
- shield probationary personnel from accountability or termination;
- slow-walk communications and tasks; and
- seek involvement in lawsuits challenging Trump's policies.
Other commentators who have taken the governmental house cleaning personally have proposed targeting Elon Musk and others in Trump's orbit with boycotts in hopes of teaching them a lesson.
For instance, one user who goes by Oldschoolfool22, a top commenter on the subreddit, implored his fellow travelers to abandon X, sell their Teslas or let them "self drive off a cliff," sell off Crypto, and avoid watching SpaceX videos "unless it is a crash."
'Punch the s*** out of their f***ing f*** faces.'
Another top commenter, Doubledsmcgee, indicated that she cannot sell off her Tesla but in an act of defiance put a small sticker on its back window condemning Elon Musk.
Doubledsmcgee appears to be one among a great number self-identified bureaucrats on the subreddit primarily outraged over the mandated return to work.
According to the user's comment history, she started work for the Department of the Interior as a grant specialist around 2022. The trouble is that she lives in California, thousands of miles away from her Virginia office where there is now an expectation she'll turn up.
While angry over a matter of personal inconvenience, Doubledsmcgee, like others on the subreddit, suggested that her fight to avoid leaving home is really about honor, stating, "We'll fight for our place because we know the service we provide and the steadfast dedication that we do it with. Civil service isn't always glamorous but it will forever be more respectable and honorable than what [M]usk, Trump and his supporters will ever do in life. Keep the faith."
'Most administrations give in too easily.'
A self-identified Internal Revenue Service employee and Kamala Harris voter who goes by titaniumlid is similarly upset about the return to work. While he alternatively suggested that he can manage the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute commute that it'll take to try to keep his job, he "will absolutely put up any and all posters / propaganda I can to fight this bulls*** if they make me come back and sit at my desk."
Not all self-identified feds on the subreddit appear to think of resistance in terms of poster campaigns and petty schemes.
A frequent poster in the bureaucratic haunt, Informal-Fig-7116, has referenced violent fantasies. When responding to a post by an apparent non-straight fed telling people not to quit, Informal-Fig-7116 wrote, "I'm ready to go back into the closet to sharpen my knife."
On another occasion, the user suggested that they put pictures of Elon Musk and "Comrade Amanda," a possible reference to Amanda Scales, the new chief of staff at the OPM, on a boxing bag "so I can punch the s*** out of their f***ing f*** faces."
Lawsuits, not Reddit fantasies
When asked about the prospect of another "resistance" and presented with some of the suggestions on r/fednews, Donald Devine, who helped cut 100,000 bureaucratic jobs while at the OPM and co-authored the Project 2025 "Mandate for Leadership" chapter on how to manage the bureaucracy, told Blaze News, "It is nothing new and Reagan faced as much and kept up the pressure."
"Most administrations give in too easily. Trump, Musk, [Office of Management and Budget Director Russell] Vought, the agency heads and the rest are proving they are the exception so far," added Devine.
Devine indicated that the greatest challenges in the weeks and the months ahead will be for the administration to "keep up the initial pressure," adding that the "unions are the biggest problem and they need a plan to confront them."
Thousands of bureaucrats have rushed to join the American Federation of Government Employees and other unions in recent weeks with the hope of securing some modicum of protection against accountability. Brimming with new members, the AFGE and other unions have filed lawsuits, trying to hamstring the Trump administration's efficiency push and corresponding policies.
In fact, the AFGE was among the unions whose lawsuit prompted U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr.'s restraining order against the federal buyout.
'Such behavior undermines democracy, as it enables government power to be wielded without accountability.'
Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, said in a statement to Blaze News, "Slashing waste, fraud, and abuse, and becoming better stewards of the American taxpayer's hard-earned dollars might be a crime to Democrats, but it's not a crime in a court of law."
While the Trump administration has its fair share of court battles to fight, it continues to press forward on other fronts.
The OPM formally submitted draft regulations on Monday that will reportedly make it easier to can bureaucrats who push back against presidential orders.
"It is well documented that many career federal employees use their positions to advance their personal political or policy preferences instead of implementing the elected President’s agenda," said a copy of the draft text obtained by Politico. "Such behavior undermines democracy, as it enables government power to be wielded without accountability to the voters or their elected representatives."
The draft regulation would reportedly also strike at the heart of former President Joe Biden's efforts to shield deep-staters from losing their civil service protections should their positions be switched to an exempt category.
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