Trump administration officials have directed senior staff members at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to make plans to cut 70 percent of the agency’s workforce.
During an internal meeting on Friday, senior staff members were directed to make initial plans for a 30 percent staff cut by today, Feb. 3.
“People are in the hallways crying … because they are being treated like criminals,” a source told MeriTalk about what the agency was like on Friday.
The cuts align with the Trump administration’s plan to reduce the size of the Federal workforce. On Jan. 28, OPM issued a memo offering most Federal government employees the opportunity to take part in a “deferred resignation” program.
The memo indicates that employees choosing to participate in the program – by a current deadline of Feb. 6 – will transition to administrative leave at some point prior to Sept. 30.
The announcement of major staff cuts at OPM comes as reports say that aides to Elon Musk have locked career civil servants out of OPM computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of Federal employees.
According to reporting from Reuters, officials at OPM “can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the Federal workforce.”
Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., the ranking member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, slammed Musk’s “hostile takeover” of OPM in a Jan. 31 statement.
“Since Trump handed Musk the keys to our government, it’s been reported that Musk has set up private servers that risk a cybersecurity nightmare, sent out unsanctioned and untrustworthy resignation offers, and locked career officials out of agency systems,” Rep. Connolly said.
“And that’s just in the past few days. The actions of Co-Presidents Musk and Trump will have disastrous consequences not just for the civil servants whose lives they are upending, but for the American people who will suffer as a result,” the congressman added.
