The Trump administration has quietly clarified a directive that spurred the firing of tens of thousands of government workers, after the lay-offs sowed chaos across the country.
The move came in the form of a short update to a memo first circulated hours after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, asking government departments to compile a list of staff who had been employed for less than a year and justify their retention. As of May last year, this encompassed at least 200,000 federal workers.
The memo from the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, which has become a main vehicle for billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive, was interpreted by many agencies as a directive to let go of probationary employees, resulting in at least 20,000 lay-offs.