The pause comes after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed the military services to identify $50 billion in programs that could be cut next year.

I’m going to editorialize a bit here. The DoD was ready to fire every probationary employee today. An AF Lieutenant General came to tears yesterday breaking the news to staff. And this is not just first year employees as the media keeps pointing out- this changed this to two years in 2015 for the DoD. For many excepted employees, it actually takes three years to leave the probationary period. Doing rough math (3 years out of a 30 year career- that’s 10% of that particular population). It took “woke” CNN to point out the law that you can’t just fire ~6% of the workforce without first determining what will break.

Too bad this wasn’t law for the IRS and other agencies.

  • talEnglish
    111·
    24 hours ago

    I believe that this is just temporary. If I remember correctly from skimming the Reddit FedNews subreddit where a lot of people are talking about this, there’s some legal requirement about layoffs where the Secretary of Defense has to perform some review first to see if the layoffs are problematic, which apparently was not done. The SecDef is Pete Hegseth, who is quite happy to do the layoffs, so…

    kagis

    Okay, here’s a reference to it:

    https://fox28savannah.com/news/nation-world/pentagon-halts-mass-firings-of-civilian-employees-pending-review-of-mission-impact-department-of-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-military-services-cuts-legality-title-10-section-129a-doge

    Pentagon lawyers reportedly started reviewing the legality of the planned firings after CNN reported it could conflict with Title 10 section 129a of the US Code.

    According to the law, the secretary of defense “may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis” to ensure the impact on mission effectiveness is considered.

    An analysis had not been carried out before military leaders were ordered to list the employees who would be fired, according to a senior defense official.

    So I imagine that he’s just gonna do whatever the legal minimum requirement is here and then they’re going to proceed.

    • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
      4·
      23 hours ago

      That’s what a competent person would do to achieve their goal… Solid chance they just try to force it through anyways