The Energy Department fired a grants officer without giving his manager a heads up. The IRS tried to fire thousands of employees, but an email glitch kept many in the dark. The Environmental Protection Agency locked an attorney out of his office before he could pick up his law school diploma.

Terminated federal workers across the government describe a haphazard and disorganized effort to slash the size of the federal government.

That chaos is the result of President Donald Trump’s disordered demand to cut as many as 200,000 recent hires at federal agencies. The mass firings have reached nearly 30,000 federal employees from coast to coast, according to an analysis of news reports by Bloomberg Law. The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR division, declined to provide its own count on the record.

Those remaining wonder whether they’re next.

Firing probationary workers — new hires — allows the Trump administration to cut workers who don’t have the stronger job protections reserved for longer-serving employees.

“The intent of these terminations is not ‘you’re not a good fit’ on an individual basis,” said Michael Vogelsang, a federal-sector attorney at the Employment Law Group. “It is ‘we need to cut heads,’ and this is just the easiest way to do it.”

[…]

Federal employees hired within the past year largely can’t dispute their firing to the Merit Systems Protection Board, the panel that mediates disputes between agencies and their workers. Probationary employees can appeal if they think partisan politics fueled their termination, Vogelsang said.

Staffers on the taxpayers wage bill were sent an ultimatum by Elon Musk and his new government department over the weekend, and while thousands worry for their jobs, an employment lawyer has weighed into problem.

Taking to Twitter on Saturday (February 22), the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) issued an email to all federal workers asking for them to list five things they did last week or face the axe.

[…]

But should federal workers be worried? Well, according to R. Scott Oswald, managing principal of The Employment Law Group, there are three major problems with the tech-mogul’s demands.

“So, everything about this reeks of an extra legal effort here to please the president,” Oswald explained.

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“So the first problem is that this email is coming from someone who is not in any employee supervisory chain, unless we’re talking about people at the Office of Personnel Management.”

So, for those employees that may have missed the deadline for whatever reason, your job could actually still be protected.

Oswald continued: “The second problem with the email is that it likely is going to elicit information from at least some employees that is unlawful.”

He went on to explain that many employees have agreements in place with their employer, wherein they commit to keep certain information confidential.

Included in these roles are law enforcement officials, as well as other types of positions like lawyers, doctors, and nurses.

“So the instruction likely would require individuals to disclose information that would violate their covenants that they’ve made, separate, but usually to a security office or to another chain of command.”

While the final issue relates to differing advice employees will have heard from whichever agency they work for.

“The last problem with it is that we’ve got agencies that are giving conflicting advice. Some are saying you should respond, others are saying you shouldn’t respond, so we don’t have an unequivocal instruction.”

A judge has ruled in favor of a government watchdog whose job is to expose ‘unethical and unlawful practises’ federal employees, after President Donald Trump illegally fired him.

Hampton Dellinger was axed in his role as head of the Office of Special Counsel by Trump over email last month, as part of his and Elon Musk’s ambition to streamline the US government through plans to axe thousands of jobs and drastically reduce the wage bill.

I should point out that the Tesla CEO, and Trump’s ‘first buddy’, is heading up the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – despite not being democratically voted in by the public.

On Saturday (March 1) however, the pair hit a roadblock in the form of US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson who found that the president fired the well-respected attorney unlawfully.

“The Special Counsel’s job is to look into and expose unethical or unlawful practices directed at federal civil servants, and to help ensure that whistleblowers who disclose fraud, waste, and abuse on the part of government agencies can do so without suffering reprisals,” she wrote in her ruling.

“It would be ironic, to say the least, and inimical to the ends furthered by the statute if the Special Counsel himself could be chilled in his work by fear of arbitrary or partisan removal.”

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However, according to specialist R. Scott Oswald, managing principal of The Employment Law Group, there are major issues with the tech-mogul’s demands.

Explaining one of which, he said: “There are a number of different problems with the email itself. The primary problem with it is that it’s coming from the Office of Personnel Management rather than the individual supervisory chain.

“So generally, federal government employees, like all employees, are required to follow instructions that their supervisors give, so long as those instructions are lawful and unequivocal, but they must come from somebody in the supervisory chain.”