The Trump administration has dispensed with the government’s feedstock

Tom Temin: Well, do you have any sense of the quantity of people? How many people have actually been let go? There’s numbers all over the place, but the partnership’s pretty good at counting these things.

Michelle Amante: We are trying to track down that number as well. We were actually looking at it this morning and it’s difficult because there’s different reports coming in from different agencies. What we do know is that based on the latest fed scope data, there’s 250,000 federal employees that are eligible to be on or that are on this probationary period. So that’s kind of the scope of what we’re looking at. As to how many have been let go so far, we don’t know at this point.

Tom Temin: Sure. And then the quality or the kind of jobs they worked in varies all over the place because the government is always bringing people in and they’re not necessarily just the young ones, but it seems to be mostly them from what we’ve heard.

Michelle Amante: Yeah. So our estimates are about 27% of their probationary employees are under the age of 30, which exacerbates this problem that, as you know, the partnership has been elevating for a long time that only about 7% of the current federal workforce was under the age of 30. And now you’ve got this probationary period, your scope of employees, it’s 27%, which is going to just, again, make the problem even larger.

Tom Temin: And probationary also includes maybe people that have more experience, but just switch to a new agency or to a different job within their agency and you’re automatically on probation when you change jobs.

Michelle Amante: Yes, in some cases. So it depends on the kind of appointment, the kind of hiring authority that is used. With some employees, they have to start a new probationary period and with others they do not. It’s really based on the individual appointment.

Tom Temin: And when you enter the Senior Executive Service, I think you’re on probationary.

Michelle Amante: Correct.

Tom Temin: So in other words, the danger is the most senior, the most experienced people with the most knowledge and the most idealistic or the most technically capable or scientifically capable coming in. That seems to be like the two ends of the barbell.

Michelle Amante: That’s right. And we saw there was such a big push towards the end of the last administration to hire health care workers and cyber and AI employees, that these critical skills that we need in government. And that’s really the shame here, is that we’re seeing this push to bring in these critical skills that now these employees are being let go. And it’s not an efficient way to downsize government, right? When you take all of the new employees that you’re hiring in these critical skill categories and simply eliminate their positions because they are new and we know it costs about 5 to $10,000. That’s about the estimates to hire a new federal employee. So you think about all of the money that has been wasted hiring all these new folks that will then be let go. And eventually some of these skills will have to be replaced. Look, you have to have health care workers at the VA. So it will come to a point where they’re going to have to reconsider their workforce and the makeup of their workforce.

Tom Temin: And the question becomes, I guess, in my mind and probably in the partnerships and in yours following this so closely. If someone was under 30 and they were let go and suppose the job opens up again, most under 30 that I know would say, ‘Well, screw that, I’m not going back to that place.’

Michelle Amante: It’s right. I mean, and even before there was the, I would say, the kind of the attack on probationary period employees, just the stability of government as a whole with the fork in the road email and just like the questioning of the stability of federal civil service will have long lasting effects on the government’s ability to recruit the best and the brightest, something that they already struggled with. But the partnership knows from our extensive experience working with college-aged students that the thing that they looked at the most for the federal government was stability. They had watched their parents go through the Great Recession and they and they wanted that stability and their jobs. That is no longer true for the federal government. So where they already were struggling, they’re going to struggle more.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Michelle Amante, the vice president for federal workforce programs at the Partnership for Public Service. And other things that are ancillary to the main federal employee are also being curtailed. Some of the internship programs, the Presidential Fellows Program, that seems particularly damaging. And even if you have a different political point of view than your predecessor, I would think you’d want to bring in people that want to work for your administration because they have some perhaps political bent you’d want them in.

Michelle Amante: Absolutely. I think that the Presidential Management Fellowship was particularly devastating for a lot of people. There are a lot of government employees that have come up through that program. It is about attracting the very best in public administration and public policy to government roles. It has lasted across multiple administrations. So to see that program dismantled, I think has been particularly, again, devastating for so many folks who’ve really grown up in federal government.

Tom Temin: And has there been any contact between the partnership and the administration because nobody coming to work in Washington very long will not have heard of the partnership?

Michelle Amante: Yeah. So we’ve been working with legislators on the Hill, trying to educate them on our reform agenda and really see these specific issues and making sure they have the broader perspective and context. And so that’s where we’ve been focusing right now.

Tom Temin: And I haven’t heard anything and have you about the future of the Presidential Rank Awards program that has had a checkered history under both parties’ administrations, frankly.

Michelle Amante: Right. We have not heard one way or the other about the Rank Awards. But as you know, recognition is something that is severely lacking in federal government. It’s one of the reasons why the partnership has the Service to American Medals because we want to recognize like the very best in federal service. And the Rank Awards was another way to do that and so I think it is very much at risk, even though we have not heard one way or the other.

Tom Temin: And that brings me to my next question, which is the Sammies. And I’m presuming the partnership will go ahead with the Sammies. Not that many weeks off, really, to start announcing the finalists. And my question is do you have plans to doubly promote it and kind of hold it up in front of the White House with a big banner and say, ‘Look at these people?’

Michelle Amante: Yeah, absolutely. And Public Service Recognition Week is coming up soon too. So these are opportunities for us to really continue to highlight civil service, the importance of it and how these folks like continue to keep our country safe and protect us every single day. So we will be doubling down on sharing stories both through PSRW and during our Sammies period.

Tom Temin: And a lot of people have been citing the years of the Clinton administration, which I remember in the National Partnership for the Reinventing of Government. The partnership included the federal bureaucracy itself and political appointees working visibly with the career staff. But that did result in, I don’t know what the numbers are. I’ve heard anything from a quarter of 1 million to 400,000 federal employee reduction over some time. Is anyone looking carefully at that, making comparisons, and what do you recall lessons learned might be for any administration wants to reduce the federal bureaucracy or the size of government?

Michelle Amante: Well, interestingly enough, that was the last time a big reduction in force happened in government. And it has been challenging for human capital professionals because a lot of them were not working at the time. And the partnership has been trying to bring together some technical experts that weren’t around during the Clinton administration to help support during a larger reduction in force. There were a lot of lessons learned and there were a lot of unintended consequences from downsizing during that period. So I think leaning in on research that the partnership has done, NAPA and other organizations, it would be very helpful. I think the challenge right now is that what we’re hoping is that there was a more systematic and intentional way to downsize government. The partnership has never taken a position on whether government should be large or small. That is very much a political decision. But what we do want is that for lawmakers and policymakers to be thoughtful about how you downsize, right? So getting rid of every probationary period employee is not a thoughtful way to downsize, right? You’re losing all these critical skills. And so like leaning in on lessons learned and talking to organizations like ours who researched this topic and who work on it every day. We hope that we will be able to engage in those conversations and help current policymakers on how to do this a little bit better.