Good.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, the nation’s largest employer, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection — potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
In addition, workers at some agencies were warned that large workplace cuts would be coming.
[…]
Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees representing federal workers, said the administration “abused” the probation status of workers “to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office.”
The comment from the union hack is idiotic. Almost every federal employee was hired before Trump took office.
To the wider point, this is what shrinking government looks like. Perhaps I am a bit jaded because I work in the private sector and we see this all the time. Literally… All. The. Time. When a company needs to reduce costs for budgetary reason (the federal government runs a massive deficit), they cut people. A lot of people. Many of those people are doing their jobs well and are good, loyal, smart employees. It doesn’t matter. If a business is running well, it should have many people who can be cut for performance reasons. They are cut as a matter of running a good business. But when you need to do a wider layoff, it naturally means that good people doing good work are going to get cut too. I don’t cheer it, but I understand it.
In a macroeconomic sense, these purges are good and healthy – even though they suck for the people impacted. But these hundreds of thousands of presumably good workers are entering the private sector. It will help address the labor shortages in other industries and some of them will start new ventures, thus perpetuating the engine of economic creation. It sucks for those people getting fired. It really does. But those of us in the private sector who pay the bills have gone through this many times. They should not, and for the moment, are not, immune.