President Donald Trump justified his administration’s mass firings of federal workers by claiming, without evidence, that many of them simply were collecting a paycheck and doing nothing, NBC4 Washington reported on Wednesday.
The firings cover some 200,000 “probationary” workers across dozens of federal agencies and departments, and are part of the mission of tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force. Probationary workers have fewer legal protections from dismissal than typical government employees.
During a White House event with the Prime Minister of Ireland, Trump told NBC News, when asked whether he felt sorry about all the people now out of work, “Sure I do. I feel very badly … but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.” He continued, “When we cut, we want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren’t working or … not doing a good job.”
Although termination letters for affected employees cited unspecified performance issues, many of those employees received high marks on their most recent performance reviews. Some were on probationary status because they were recently promoted.
In response to the firings, a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general have filed suit in Baltimore, arguing that Trump’s firings — which did not follow federal guidelines on 60 days’ notice and job placement assistance for affected employees — have flooded their states’ job markets and are overwhelming their support systems.
A federal judge appeared inclined to agree with this argument, on Wednesday noting that “This case isn’t about whether or not the government can terminate people. It’s about if they decide to terminate people, how they must do it.”