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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

Judging by how many people DOGE has gotten fired, it doesn't seem that hard

As of April 1, 2025, approximately 60,000 federal employees have been forcibly terminated or laid off as part of the Trump administration's workforce reduction efforts. These terminations primarily targeted probationary employees—those hired, promoted, or transferred within the last year—who lack full civil service protections.

There are about 3m employees so this is about 2%.

This is pretty normal course of business for most organizations. Meta laid off 13% of workers in 2022-2023 and an additional 5% in 2025. Other tech companies did similar numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mas...

The issue is, probationary in Gov doesn't mean what it means in Corporate speak. They do actually have most of the same protections which he ignored illegally.

Yes and no – nearly half federal government's actual workforce is contractors, and contracts have been cancelled en masse. Here is data from 2017 -- the percentage is nearly 40%.

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/contractors-and-true-size-of-g...

"promoted, or transferred within the last year"

You normally want to keep the people you promote. You also normally want to keep the people you transferred to that new important project you spun up.

They reason they fired this specific classification is because it was easier to, not because there was any justification to fire them. I thought above you said it's hard to fire people without reason?

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