After receiving the go ahead from the Supreme Court, federal agencies are relaunching efforts to trim their workforces, a top White House official said on Thursday.
Only a few agencies have moved forward with mass layoffs in the 10 days since the high court lifted an injunction that blocked the administration from carrying out the reductions, but Eric Ueland, deputy director for management and the Office of Management and Budget, said efforts to cut staff are still underway. The Trump administration told a federal court this week the district court injunction had blocked 70 reduction in force actions at 19 agencies.
“Now that the court has moved the injunction aside, we’re going to redouble our efforts to examine what departments and agencies are doing, trying to get them right sized,” Ueland said. He added that as agencies continue to adjust their missions and assess their statutory responsibilities, they will “address the question of, ‘Do we have the right people in the right place, and, at times, do we have too many people in the wrong place?’”
Agencies are still looking for ways to reduce their staffing levels through attrition and incentivized departures. Trump has extended the governmentwide hiring freeze through at least Oct. 15 and the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Thursday employees in several of its divisions will be offered a third opportunity to take extended paid leave before exiting government as part of the deferred resignation program.
The remarks followed the Trump administration also saying in court this week that some agencies may walk back some of their planned layoffs, as efforts to drive employees out through voluntary needs had obviated the need for RIFs. Ueland on Thursday boasted the Trump administration has already shrunk the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands of people.
The OMB official, speaking at GovExec’s Government Efficiency Summit in Washington on Thursday, opened his remarks saying the federal government is a “failure” filled with an “inefficient bureaucracy” in the minds of most Americans. He added the government is taking “everyone on a terrible trip to a horrible end,” likening it to the movie franchise Final Destination.
“No matter what you do to avoid the inevitable, it’s just not going to turn out all that well,” Ueland said.
President Trump is intent on changing that, he said, in part by slashing agency workforces. Other pillars of the reform effort will involve streamlining procurement, improving technology and making more products in America. He repeatedly said the government needed action over rhetoric.
He cited the administration’s efforts to root out wasteful spending, saying existing efforts to “manage our money better we’re just utterly, completely, totally a bunch of failures.”
Ueland said the administration is working on creating the President’s Management Agenda, which will set Trump’s long-term vision for modernizing and improving government service, but added only that it would be released “in due course.”
Ueland said Trump will further improve the efficiency of the federal workforce by instituting Schedule Policy/Career, which will strip some federal workers of their civil service protections by allowing agencies to fire tens of thousands of employees for any reason. The deputy director said he thought of the reform as “actually empowering the federal workforce.”
“It’s a new way to think, but it gives you a lot of better opportunity to ultimately be directly connected to what the secretary or the senior leadership community of your department or agency, under any president, is trying to pull off,” Ueland said, “and work hard to actually deliver those results.”
Speaking of the Department of Government Efficiency, Ueland said those employees are largely now embedded within agencies but still have an influential function.
“They continue to play a key role in providing advice, counsel and direction, up to secretaries, but also back to us, as well as [the General Services Administration] and [the Office of Personnel Management] and other institutions, and I anticipate those individuals are continuing to be hopeful and influential voice moving forward,” he said.
