I don't think an LLM has access to payroll or authority to fire anyone. It just flags and people review. Have you worked in a large organization? Have you ever had to fire anyone, or tried to get someone fired? It's not easy.

Judging by how many people DOGE has gotten fired, it doesn't seem that hard

As of April 1, 2025, approximately 60,000 federal employees have been forcibly terminated or laid off as part of the Trump administration's workforce reduction efforts. These terminations primarily targeted probationary employees—those hired, promoted, or transferred within the last year—who lack full civil service protections.

There are about 3m employees so this is about 2%.

This is pretty normal course of business for most organizations. Meta laid off 13% of workers in 2022-2023 and an additional 5% in 2025. Other tech companies did similar numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mas...

Yes and no – nearly half federal government's actual workforce is contractors, and contracts have been cancelled en masse. Here is data from 2017 -- the percentage is nearly 40%.

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/contractors-and-true-size-of-g...

The issue is, probationary in Gov doesn't mean what it means in Corporate speak. They do actually have most of the same protections which he ignored illegally.

"promoted, or transferred within the last year"

You normally want to keep the people you promote. You also normally want to keep the people you transferred to that new important project you spun up.

They reason they fired this specific classification is because it was easier to, not because there was any justification to fire them. I thought above you said it's hard to fire people without reason?

> It's not easy.

This is pathetic. In the US, nearly everyone is an "At will" employee. It cannot be legally easy to fire someone.

You can fire your employees because you don't like their shirt. Do you understand that? There is NO REQUIRED REASON to fire nearly anyone in the US.

Meanwhile, for non-at-will employees like federal employees, all you need is "cause", in other words, a bullshit couple "bad" reviews or a PIP or similar.

Do you know why governments don't usually fire people? Because they don't exactly have the most productive employees lining up to work for below market rates.

The government doesn't fire workers because whoever you replace them with (if you even can at all) will likely be just as bad or worse. It's not because "It's hard" and I'm so sick of the whining.