I saw that yesterday OPM issued orders to all agencies to fire all probationary employees. Now for those of you who don’t know, all employees hired by the federal government are on probation for two years. After that they have the full complement of employee rights but in the first two years they can basically be fired at will. I had to certify that they were good before the end of the probation period.

(As an aside because I had over two years of federal employment because of my Co-Op engineering employment, I was already past probation when I was hired by the agency I worked at for almost thirty years and so they were stuck with me.)

Now this is one way to reduce the federal government but it is not the best way. The problem is that once again it fires people indiscriminately without regard to competency. Some of these new hires maybe the wiz kids we need. What we need to eliminate is the numerous senior employees who are worthless and just getting by like labor union members on seniority.

I love DOGE but I want to see a more targeted approach to firing federal employees. Now if you eliminate entire agencies or functions and then you have to go no matter how competent you are because you are doing things that don’t need to be done.