This week, the mass firings of federal employees picked up steam and began impacting the U.S. Department of Labor and numerous other federal agencies. The sweeping job cuts include approximately 6,700 IRS employees as the tax filing season gets underway.
Significant job cuts are planned even at national security agencies, like the Central Intelligence Agency and throughout the Department of Defense, as well as at safety-related agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. While the pace of terminations is picking up, the haphazard nature of the job cuts is becoming apparent as the Trump Administration is frantically working to hire back over 300 employees fired last week from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) after bipartisan fury from Congress over the national security implications of the terminations. The fired employees included NNSA staff with the highest level security clearances who work at facilities where nuclear weapons are built, who oversee contractors who build nuclear weapons, and who are responsible for inspecting those weapons.
The Trump Agriculture Department is similarly scrambling to rescind termination notices sent to several employees working on avian flu response planning after Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control during Trump’s first term, criticized the cuts and warned that the COVID pandemic “was a minor epidemic compared to the epidemic that’s coming—which is a bird flu pandemic.”