Federal employees still in their probation periods who had served in the military were to be exempted from the Interior Department’s mass terminations of staff, according to four people inside the department who spoke with POLITICO’s E&E News.
Interior has fired as many as 2,300 people from its ranks since Friday, according to an internal message viewed by E&E News, as part of the Trump administration’s effort to drastically reduce the size of federal institutions. The department targeted employees within a federal probationary period — usually one to two years from their hiring date, as those staffers have fewer protections from being fired without cause.
But department supervisors have said they expected Interior to exempt employees who had served in the U.S. armed forces, a sizeable tranche of the federal workforce due to federal hiring preferences for veterans, according to four Interior employees briefed on the layoff plans. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the staff reductions.
About 30 percent of the federal workforce as of Sept. 2021 were veterans, according to the Office of Personnel Management, including 17.5 percent of Interior’s staff.
