More than 9,500 employees have been laid off from government agencies in the US. This has happened as part of a campaign to cut down the US bureaucracy by US President Donald Trump and his advisor Elon Musk. According to Reuters, the people who lost their jobs handled everything from managing federal lands to taking care of military veterans.
Employees have been laid off at the departments of Interior, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Health and Human Resources. The layoffs have so far largely targeted probationary employees who are in their first year of employment. Sources familiar with the job cuts have told Reuters that about half of the probationary employees at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and employees at the National Institutes of Health are being forced out.
The US Forest Service is laying off about 3,400 recently hired employees, while the National Park Service is laying off about 1,000 workers. The tax collector Internal Revenue Service is preparing to lay off thousands of employees next week. It is also reported that federal programs have stopped hiring seasonal firefighters and have stopped removing fire hazards such as dead wood from forests.
About 1,200 to 2,000 employees have been laid off at the Department of Energy. This also includes 325 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration. However, according to Reuters, one of the sources said that the layoffs have been partially canceled to retain essential nuclear security workers. It is not clear how many of the 325 employees were called back.
75,000 employees accepted the proposal to leave the job voluntarily
Reuters reported that according to the White House, these layoffs are in addition to the approximately 75,000 employees who have accepted an offer from Trump and Musk to leave their jobs voluntarily. Trump says that the federal government has too many employees and too much money is lost in waste and fraud. The government has a debt of about $36 trillion. There was a deficit of $1.8 trillion last year and there is a bipartisan agreement on the need for reform. But Democrats in Congress say that Trump is encroaching on the constitutional right of the legislature on federal spending. At the same time, his fellow Republicans have largely supported this move.
Apart from job cuts, Trump-Musk are also taking these steps
In addition to the job cuts, Trump and Musk have tried to eliminate civil-service protections for workers, halt most U.S. foreign aid and seek to nearly completely shut down some government agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.
