President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on November 13. The Biden administration has taken steps to protect federal jobs, but Trump campaigned on a promise to cut the federal workforce. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
By means of Kyle Cooper and Mitchell Miller
Thousands of people concerned about their federal government jobs after President-elect Donald Trump returned to the White House attended a Tele-Town Hall last week to learn about plans to address potential workforce cuts. prevent.
The event Thursday night, hosted by Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-4th), drew about 15,000 people, mostly federal workers from the D.C. area, bracing for potential budget cuts that Trump has promised to make. Attendees were able to ask questions and interact with Ivey and union leaders who will try to defend their jobs from elimination.
“No one should expect to be laid off on January 20,” said Daniel Horowitz, deputy legislative director of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union for federal employees.
Trump has said he plans to reinstate Schedule F, which would reclassify some federal workers to make it easier to fire them without cause. Horowitz said a Biden administration rule would at least delay any plan to lay off federal workers en masse.
“If you are transferred as a federal employee to, say, Schedule F, and you already had tenure protection as a member of the competing service that was going to be transferred, you would still have that and you cannot be arbitrarily removed,” he said.
Horowitz said the Trump White House will likely try to have that provision removed, but it will take months before that happens. Ivey added that while efforts will be different for federal contractors, they should also be prepared for an attempt to eliminate their jobs.
Any cuts likely wouldn’t affect federal retirees, Horowitz said, but they might not be completely off the charts. Efforts to make cuts across the board could include changing federal pension programs, which could impact existing benefits for current or future retirees, which will require close monitoring over the next twelve months, said he.
It is also possible that remote working will end and employees will be forced to return to the office. While the union will defend its members’ right to continue teleworking under current agreements, Horowitz told federal employees at the town hall: “If you’re ordered to go to the office, go to the office.”
Trump has also appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not a real agency but an advisory group tasked with coming up with ways to make government more efficient, possibly through unprecedented cuts to the federal workforce.
Musk and Ramaswamy visited Capitol Hill last week to meet with lawmakers and discuss how they plan to reduce the number of federal employees. Pledges to shrink the federal government have been made many times over the years, and some are skeptical that this latest effort will lead to the sweeping changes Musk and Ramaswamy have committed to.
But Ivey said his constituents have taken notice.
“There is certainly concern,” he told WTOP. “I think a lot of people are afraid that they will be unfairly removed from their position.”
But Republican critics of the federal spending say much of it is wasted and there is plenty of room for cuts. They argue that reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy would improve the overall economy.
Ivey said he and other members of Maryland’s congressional delegation are working with local members of Congress to stop the cuts, including Reps. Gerry Connolly and Don Beyer of Virginia and D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, all Democrats.
Virginia has more than 140,000 federal employees, and like Maryland and DC, its economy is heavily dependent on federal dollars.
“This is critical,” Ivey said Thursday evening. “We’re going to work together to focus on this.”
– As part of Maryland Matters’ content sharing agreement with WTOP, we are publishing this article by Kyle Cooper and Mitchell Miller. Click here for the WTOP News website.
