>According to sources, about 750 employees at NASA accepted the "fork in the road" offer to take deferred resignation from the space agency later this year. This sounds like a lot of people, but generally about 1,000 people leave the agency every year, so effectively, many of these people might just be getting paid to leave jobs they were already planning to exit from.
The culling of "probationary" employees will be more impactful. As it has done at other federal agencies, the Trump administration is generally firing federal employees who are in the "probationary" period of their employment, which includes new hires within the last one or two years or long-time employees who have moved into or been promoted into a new position. About 1,000 or slightly more employees at NASA were impacted by these cuts.
Just in case anyone thinks this could tighten up performance, the layoffs are being targeted at the most mobile and the best.
The normal approach is to go through the agency’s programs, look at each one’s performance, and to cancel the things that aren’t working out.
Among other things, that gets rid of stuff that’s dominated by low performers.
Firing only the people that can find another job or that were recently hired does the opposite, which is why this is both illegal and unprecedentedly stupid.
They can lay off people legally - Clinton laid off hundreds of thousands of federal employees over 8 years - it's just that laying off non-probationary employees takes time and effort and they don't want to spend the time. And, unlike probationary employees, if they choose to save time when firing people by breaking the law, the non-probationary employees have legal recourse.
They can't legally do what they're doing now, they are just counting on the fact that it's very difficult for probationary employees to appeal the illegal firings. Probationary employees can be terminated for performance, but the government legally has to actually show how it concluded that the employee was underperforming. They are not doing this - they are firing people regardless of whether they had good or bad performance reviews or even if they weren't around long enough to have a performance review at all. However, probationary employees have very limited rights to appeal (they can only appeal to MSPB if they allege they were fired for partisan political reasons or for merit status) and Trump now controls MSPB anyway, so they are just counting on the employees not having a way to actually get legal redress even though the firings were illegal.
The culling of "probationary" employees will be more impactful. As it has done at other federal agencies, the Trump administration is generally firing federal employees who are in the "probationary" period of their employment, which includes new hires within the last one or two years or long-time employees who have moved into or been promoted into a new position. About 1,000 or slightly more employees at NASA were impacted by these cuts.
Just in case anyone thinks this could tighten up performance, the layoffs are being targeted at the most mobile and the best.