Leaders in Health Department Ordered to Rank Employees as Federal Government Prepares for Widespread Layoffs

As Thursday's deadline to accept a deferred resignation offer from the Trump administration looms, leaders across the Department of Health and Human Services have been directed to rank thousands of their employees who are in probationary periods, bracing for layoffs, according to new emails obtained by The Washington Post.

The emails reveal that leaders were asked to rank 10 percent of their probationary staff as mission-critical, 50 percent as important and 40 percent as not-mission critical. The rankings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of its probationary staff— a period that can last one or two years into the federal service— were due Thursday.

"Please provide input/updates by 11:00 AM" the email read.

Officials in other federal health agencies described similar requests, although they said the process was less specific than the rankings at the CDC, according to The Washington Post. Leaders have also been asked to justify why the probationary employees should be retained.

The process "sucked," one employee told the Post in condition of anonymity via text message. "Had to focus on mission and not the individual."

Probationary employees have emerged as a potential target for the Trump administration, which in a Jan. 20 memo ordered federal agencies to identify all employees in probationary periods and send their names to the Office of Personnel Management by Jan. 24, according to The Post.

The ranking request comes as the Trump administration is planning widespread layoffs among the federal workforce soon, leaving employees who don't accept its deferred resignation offer at risk of losing their jobs.

The layoffs, which are being referred to internally as sweeping "Reductions in Force," were expected to begin as soon as Thursday, after the deadline that the Office of Personnel Management set for workers to accept the resignation package.

However, a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily paused the buyout program's deadline, which had been set for 11:59 p.m., setting a new hearing to consider the date for Monday. Judge George O'Toole Jr. said Thursday afternoon he would hear arguments on the merits of a lawsuit by employee unions challenging the legality of the buyout.

The judge said federal agencies must notify employees who received the buyout offer that the program has been paused until Monday.

The lawsuit says "basic information is absent" from the offer, including whether OPM "can (or will) honor the financial commitment for agencies across government when Congress has appropriated no funds for this purpose, and the statutory basis and appropriation for this promise remain unclear."

Almost 60,000 people— about 3% of the federal workforce— have accepted the administration's offer.