This post first appeared on Government Executive. Read the original article.
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President Trump will institute a government hiring freeze that will include some exceptions, his team announced just after his swearing in.
The order is expected to take effect immediately after Trump signs it Monday, his first day in office, and mirrors action Trump took upon taking office in 2017. The president will exempt “essential areas” from the freeze, according to a summary of his Day 1 plans, though the document did not detail the nature of those exceptions. Trump is expected to allow hiring to continue at immigration-related agencies and areas of national security.
“The president will usher a Golden Age for America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people,” the White House said in its memorandum. “He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid DEI activists buried into the federal workforce.”
The White House said it is implementing the freeze as part of the president’s “drain the swamp” agenda. Trump is also pausing all regulatory efforts currently underway, a standard move for incoming presidents. He will take other actions to reshape federal civil service laws, the details of which are forthcoming.
The first Trump administration instituted a 79-day hiring freeze across the federal government ahead of an ambitious plan by then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney to reorganize agencies to be more efficient and run with fewer employees. Trump at that time offered exemptions to the freeze for roles performing national security or public safety responsibilities.
The impact of Trump’s first freeze was felt in agencies long after it ended in April 2017, when Mulvaney issued a memorandum to agencies tasking them with developing short and long-term plans to cut their rolls. By the end of Trump’s term, most agency leaders wound up publicly stating they had undertaken efforts to rebuild their workforces. Still, virtually all of them ended his administration with a smaller footprint than they maintained just before Trump took office.
The State Department went further, extending its hiring freeze another 13 months as workforce numbers soon dwindled.
A former Trump administration official involved in federal personnel policy recently told Government Executive that other administration officials eventually made clear after their initial months in office they were not interested in taking a “logical, rational approach” to reducing federal workforce rolls. Some of the officials who drove those efforts in Trump’s first term, such as Office of Management and Budget Director-designate Russ Vought and Domestic Policy Council advisor James Sherk, are slated to return to the fold this time around.
Trump will also stand up the Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire businessman and confidante of the president Elon Musk, as a non-governmental entity that will seek to reduce the federal workforce and otherwise slash federal spending. The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union, along with watchdog groups, sued the efficiency commission immediately after Trump’s inauguration saying it does not comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
“AFGE will not stand idly by as a secretive group of ultra-wealthy individuals with major conflicts of interest attempt to deregulate themselves and give their own companies sweetheart government contracts while firing civil servants and dismantling the institutions designed to serve the American people,” AFGE President Everett Kelly said. “Federal employees are not the problem—they are the solution.”
Trump in his Inaugural Address said DOGE would “restore competence and effectiveness” in the federal government.
Trump is not unique in wanting to pause federal hiring upon taking office. Presidents Carter and Reagan both instituted hiring freezes, with the former halting recruitment three times in a four-year term.
The Government Accountability Office raised concerns about the impact of Trump’s and previous hiring freezes, saying they were not effective and exacerbate existing workforce problems. Such freezes, GAO said, cause agencies to hire contractors and temporary staff.
“If you want to reduce the workforce, you have to reduce the functions they’re doing,” GAO chief Gene Dodaro told Congress in 2017. “And you have to be able to realign the workforce.”
GAO also found that agencies with exceptions, such as the Veterans Affairs Department that allowed the hiring of doctors and nurses to continue, still experienced fallout as they suffered from a lack of support staff.
When Trump ended the freeze, he tasked agencies to create plans to reshape themselves. Few of those plans were ever brought into effect as they ran headlong into congressional resistance. White House officials later refuted that the overall plans were intended to reduce federal workforce personnel.
Some federal agencies have already implemented hiring restrictions due to budget caps and the short-term funding mechanism under which they are currently operating.
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