The Trump administration is cooking up new regulations that could dramatically reshape how federal employees are laid off.
The Office of Personnel Management is crafting a pair of rules that could change how agencies handle a reduction in force, or RIF, otherwise known as layoffs in the federal workplace. The RIF was seen as a last resort in government, pushing out staff due to sparse budgets, but it has fast become a common tool by the Trump administration to meet the president’s campaign pledge of slashing the federal payroll.
John Logan, professor and chair of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, warned political loyalty could become part of the federal layoff process under the proposals.
“Today, if performance rather than seniority were the standard, there would be no way to prove that someone was being fired for not being sufficiently loyal to the Trump administration versus not being a good worker,” Logan said.
