Dan Bishop, the nominee to be deputy director for budget at the Office of Management and Budget, is pushing back against the idea that the firing of probationary employees was indiscriminate.
The former North Carolina Congressman told Senate lawmakers yesterday during his nomination hearing that there are good reasons for agencies to let go of these employees.
“The folks who are advising the President have made points about believing that the federal employee workforce is not at the right size. It needs to be right sized,” Bishop said in a response to questions from Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) during the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.
“The President spoken directly to that or spokespeople for the President have that in the course of making changes, you may find that you need to then move in the other direction to make an adjustment after you’ve after you’ve made the first change, in my view, Senator, that doesn’t make it indiscriminate.”
Democrat lawmakers disagreed with that notion.
Kim said the firing and then rehiring of employees who work at the National Nuclear Security Administration seems to indicate the Trump administration is firing employees indiscriminately.
“They realized, ‘hey, look, that actually probably the nuclear functions the United States is important. I mean we’re seeing just the level in which this is happening,” he said.
The question of whether the Trump administration lawfully terminate probationary employees remains in question. The Merit Systems Protection Board issued a ruling yesterday that six probationary federal workers who were fired will get their positions back — at least for the time being. MSPB found that there’s a credible argument that their firings were unlawful.
The debate over the firing of thousands of federal employees who were still in their probationary period came up time and again during the nomination hearing for Bishop and Troy Edgar, who is slated to be the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department.
Same as in the private sector
Democrat lawmakers pressed both of them to better explain the decision by the Trump administration to terminate these employees.
Edgar, however, did say he would look more closely, if confirmed as deputy secretary, at FEMA and the data behind the reason for firing someone.
But Edgar didn’t disagree with the approach to focus on probationary employees.
“If you look at this outside of federal government, the process that you’re talking about whether we’re being indiscriminate or not, this is something that all Fortune, 500 companies do,” he said. “To me, this does not seem out of the norm, and you would normally go to reflect on more junior people, especially if you had to make a head cut reduction and you needed to be able to go through a process to be able to get to that. So to me, this seemed totally logical.”
But Democrat committee members had a different view of why they believe these were indiscriminate firings.
‘Scaring the crap out of people’
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said she is hearing a lot from her constituents who are concerned about the current efforts by the Trump administration to impact federal services.
“It’s not about red America or blue America, or any of those things. I’m from a purple state. It’s that people watch this chaotic cutting, and let’s just be fair, you fire people and then hire them the next week. That’s indiscriminate. That’s acknowledging you’ve made a mistake. That’s not some review that normal private sector companies would do. I don’t know what damn private sector company that would fire someone on Friday and hire them back on Monday, because, whoops, they made a mistake, but let’s just be honest that this approach is scaring the crap out of people on the benefits they’ve worked their entire life for,” she said.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) brought up a specific issue specifically to Edgar around FEMA, but it’s one every agencies if facing that it’s unclear if the Trump administration is considering or even cares about.
“I’m a former governor too. I’ve worked with FEMA closely, and I’ve had this discussion with the secretary whose nomination I supported. It is really important to understand that when you say a local government should do it, I have 2-3-4 towns in New Hampshire, some of them are fewer than 1,000 people. They don’t have the staff or the budget to handle major disasters. So it is going to be really important that, if you are all talking about right-sizing FEMA and making sure that it can do its work, that the investments in resilience continues so that we don’t have the same natural disasters impacting the same infrastructure, over and over again, and it’s going to be important that we have people on the ground who can do the mission of working hand in hand, as they do with local governments,” she said. “So I look forward to trying to work up with you on that, but I hope very much that you will find out what actually happens and works with FEMA, come to us with concrete plans and actually do some analysis before you start firing people because it’s really destabilizing, and it’s going to take a hard it’s going to be hard for the agency to recover, because who’s going to want to go work there?”
Fired probationary employees speak up
Probationary employees also say their firing is only based on one factor, the fact that they were new to their position. Several who submitted comments to Federal News Network said they were told they were fired for performance issues, but didn’t receive any evidence or explanation.
“My agency had as little to say about me specifically as they could. Their exact words went into detail on the nature of probationary employees, and how I had ‘the burden’ of proving my value as an employee to them. Simply, that I had NOT provided to my agency the proof of my qualifications, work performance, etc. It truly was not specific to me in my position, or specific to my park site. Indeed, if it had been, that would’ve only underlaid the lie of it,” wrote one former National Park Service employee. “Arguably, there is only one reason I could THINK of that I would’ve been removed from this park site, with my qualifications or my performance as a reason: that we had not posted my Expanded Professional Associates Program (EPAP) in time. My Evaluation of Performance was [incoming], but had been one task out of many my supervisor had to worry about every day… because the work I was doing was essentially that of 2 people, she was having to pare down that ePAP before proper submission. That, to my knowledge, would be the only possible way that my performance would’ve been determined as inefficient… through insufficient data.”
A former Agriculture Department employee said they received only good performance evaluations during their career.
“Both emails cited performance issues. I have had nothing but good performance records at my previous duty station, and my current duty station has not had the opportunity to evaluate me. Despite this, performance was cited as the reason for my termination,” the person wrote.
And a third former employee, this one from the Department of Veterans Affairs, had a similar experience.
“’The agency finds, based on your performance that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest.’ This statement is also false. For fiscal year 2024, I received an outstanding performance appraisal to include additional awards as well as in 2024 I received a quality step increase (QSI) for my outstanding performance. Clearly my past performance indicates I have done a phenomenal a job, as I took my position seriously with pride, and enjoyed helping our nation’s veterans,” the person wrote.
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