Trump's Mass Purge Of Federal Workers Has Begun, Following Project 2025 Blueprint
The Trump Admin has instructed federal agencies to begin firing most of an estimated 200,000 probationary employees. This isn't about cutting costs. It's about engineering loyalty.
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This week, the Trump Administration escalated its assault on the federal bureaucracy and effort to twist the federal government into a tool of the far right.
On Thursday, a mass purge of federal workers began, with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) instructing federal agencies to begin firing most of their estimated 200,000 employees in a probationary status.
Already, thousands of employees have received termination notices across at least seven federal agencies, according to Politico. These employees are federal workers who were hired within the past 1-2 years and are in a probationary status, meaning they don’t have the typical robust civil servant protections and can be fired at will.
After just over 75,000 federal employees accepted the Trump Administration’s deferred resignation offer, Trump’s team is now ramping up firings to hit closer to the 10% churn of the workforce they’re aiming for. There are about 2.4 million federal employees in total.
The mass layoffs are impacting agencies across the federal government, including the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the General Services Administration (GSA).
It’s not clear exactly how many federal employees have received termination notices so far, but multiple news outlets are reporting numbers ranging from hundreds to thousands per agency. Some critical staffers have already been targeted.
ABC News reported that 1,300 federal workers at the CDC have been fired, 1/10 of its workforce. CBS News reported that “about 14% of US staff who safeguard nuclear weapons were let go just ahead of the Russian military flying an exploding drone into the Chernobyl sarcophagus.”
Reuters reported that at the CFPB in particular, there have been dozens of non-probationary, full-time employees being fired. All reports indicate White House officials are saying the purge will continue to escalate in the coming days and weeks.
These firings come after Trump signed an executive action on Tuesday, with Elon Musk hovering over him, that ordered a large-scale reduction in the federal workforce. On January 20, OPM issued a memo instructing agencies to provide a list of probationary employees; now it appears they’re purging that list.
President Trump also reinstated “Schedule F,” an executive order that reclassifies thousands of federal workers as “at-will” employees, making them easier to fire for no cause. This is straight from the Project 2025 playbook.
This is all occurring in the context of President Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team ignoring laws, unilaterally attempting to dismantle agencies, accessing sensitive data, sidelining civil servants, and testing the limits of executive power. Musk’s efforts go beyond oligarchy. Even Putin doesn’t let his oligarchs have this much influence over his government. This is a co-presidency, as I outlined on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle on Wednesday night.
On top of the firings, the Trump Administration is also installing surveillance software to more closely monitor the behavior of federal employees, Politico reported:
“As the firings ramp up, the administration is also rolling out surveillance measures for the workers who remain, according to a person granted anonymity to speak freely about internal agency matters. The scope of the additional monitoring is unclear but the new measures are raising concerns among federal employees that they could be used to justify further firings.
At the SBA, the administration installed new employee monitoring software designed to track keystrokes and remotely activate computer cameras and microphones, according to the same person familiar with the agency.”
This surveillance of federal employees is incredibly disturbing and raises concerns they may be monitored for loyalty.
It’s important to be clear here that the Trump Administration isn’t simply dismantling agencies and gutting the federal workforce to reduce costs. The federal workforce is a small percentage of the overall budget. What they’re doing is trying to gut the federal workforce so it can be staffed with loyalists.
Trump has also fired prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases, fired independent Inspectors General across the federal government, and is screening new hires for loyalty.
This is about twisting the federal government into a tool of the far-right, just as Project 2025 outlines.
Those of us who have been paying attention have been warning about how Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47 call for a purging of civil servants so loyalists can be installed to do Trump’s bidding.
Donald Trump and his allies want to avoid what happened in Trump’s first term. Civil servants and members of Trump’s Cabinet pushed back on Trump’s unlawful actions. This term, they’re going agency by agency and carving out any pockets of independence.
Trump blames the chaos of his first term not on himself but on career civil servants who kept the government running. Trump has for years been talking about how he wants to “dismantle the Administrative State” or “dismantle the Deep State,” as Trump described it in his Agenda 47 platform. Both Trump’s plan and Project 2025 called for the purging of federal workers.
In October 2020, during the final months of his presidency, Trump signed a Schedule F executive order that reclassified tens of thousands of federal workers as “at-will” employees, making them easier to fire for no cause. Non-political federal workers usually have civil service protections that prevent them from being directly fired by the president. This protection prevented Trump from purging vast swaths of federal workers who, at times, questioned or refused to implement some of his often illegal proposals. President Biden rolled that executive order back when he took office.
Now, Trump has reinstated Schedule F, and he’s also going after federal employees who don’t have civil service protections as low-hanging fruit to target. Starting with probationary employees would draw the fewest legal challenges.
The next part of the plan after the purge, as Project 2025 outlines, is to replace these thousands of civil servants with loyalists. Project 2025 has a detailed plan for how to accomplish this quickly. That is why they created their database of conservatives eager to serve in the federal government. They spent the past year recruiting and training thousands of right-wing professionals so they’d be ready for this moment. I discussed this recruitment effort in October on MSNBC.
I outline all this to say President Trump is using Project 2025 like a checklist.
This breakdown to rebuild model is also exactly what Elon Musk did to Twitter. Musk bought Twitter, purged it of employees who disagreed with him, and then twisted the platform into his personal tool that boosts the far-right.
Now, Trump, Musk, and the DOGE team are doing that same thing to the federal government and executing Project 2025’s playbook. These moves aren’t coming without pushback, of course.
As I wrote earlier this week, the Trump Administration’s unlawful moves have faced about a dozen legal setbacks in court, with DOGE, in particular, racking up losses.
On Thursday, 14 Attorneys General filed a lawsuit challenging the unchecked authority that Musk’s DOGE is operating under. Eight of the Inspectors General who were purged from federal agencies have also filed a lawsuit challenging their firings as “unlawful.”
More lawsuits are likely to be filed in the wake of this round of mass firings, but the Trump Administration is still inflicting a lot of damage, outpacing the speed of the legal system.
Journalists should be clear when covering these developments that this isn’t just a bureaucratic shuffle—it’s a transformation of the federal government into an unaccountable, far-right apparatus. The Trump Administration isn’t just firing federal workers—they’re eliminating the guardrails that kept his worst impulses in check.
Every purge of independent civil servants, every installation of a loyalist, and every agency brought under Trump and Musk’s direct control pushes America closer to a government that serves these two men rather than the people.
The surge in lawsuits is good to see. Let’s hope that they continue with more ferocity. Since the Republican-controlled Congress won’t check this out-of-control executive, it’s up to the judiciary.
So much to keep up with, Ahmed. Thank you for making it somewhat easier for me. Knowledge is power.