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In the latest installment of the Trump’s administration’s federal overhaul, thousands of government employees were dismissed across several different agencies over the weekend.
The terminations primarily targeted probationary workers who had been in their roles for a limited amount of time. But as these workers opened their termination letters, many were surprised to find out that they were being let go for their poor performance, and that their employment was no longer “in the public interest,” the Washington Post reported. The catch? Many had recently received glowing evaluations, or had yet to receive one at all.
We are now several weeks into unprecedented mass terminations aimed at federal workers. But an emphasis on citing performance reviews to cull workers, even with no evidence, is a new twist we haven’t seen yet. And it echoes a private-sector trend particularly prevalent in the tech sector that has become all too familiar over the past few years.
Meta laid off 3,600 of the company’s “lowest performers” last week. But former workers paint a different picture, with one now-departed content manager expressing on LinkedIn that she received positive reviews up until her termination.
“What I do know is this: I am not a low performer,” Kaila Curry, the ex-employee wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I am an adaptive hard worker who thrives in work that I can be passionate about.” Other former employees shared similar remarks.
In 2022, Google asked managers to identify 6% of employees who they believed to be their lowest performers, an increase from a previous quota of 2%. That was a warning sign to employees at the time that they should buckle up for layoffs, which came just a few months later. In 2022, Amazon also dramatically increased the number of employees it put on performance improvement plans, before laying off tens of thousands of workers.
Robert Hinckley, an attorney at law firm Buchalter, said the latest federal worker terminations seemed like a “shotgun approach,” and in line with recent private sector trends. “It does track along with what particularly the tech industry is doing when it comes to trimming the fat, so to speak,” he tells Fortune.
Unsurprisingly, federal worker unions, which have already filed lawsuits against the Trump administration for its previous mass resignation offer, are less than thrilled by this latest move.
“This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley in a statement. He added that federal unions will “pursue every legal challenge available.”
“When the reasons for firing someone are arbitrary and patently false, or when there were no reasons given at all, those are legitimate grounds for challenging what went on,” says James Brudney, labor and employment law chair at Fordham University School of Law.
Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com
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Watercooler
Everything you need to know from Fortune.
Who’s in control? The White House says Elon Musk isn’t leading the Department of Government Efficiency and claims he’s not even an employee. —Alena Botros
Silencing workers. A vendor of Alphabet AI allegedly had a policy that illegally prohibited employees from talking about pay in its online internal forums. —Josh Eidelson and Bloomberg
An unprecedented layoff. Southwest Airlines is eliminating 1,750 jobs, or 15% of its corporate workforce, in the first major layoffs in the company’s more than 50 years in business. —Alex Veiga and The Associated Press