Trump Floats Scrapping Seniority Shield for Federal Layoffs (2)

Federal worker layoffs would be decided based largely on employees’ performance rather than their years of service under the Trump administration’s latest proposal to overhaul government workforce job protections.

The proposed regulation (RIN 3206–AO86) released publicly on Wednesday calls for changing the federal government’s procedures for selecting which employees are subject to a reduction in force. It floats several alterations aimed at making the overall process of laying workers off more efficient, as the Trump administration continues to seek widespread federal job cuts.

The rule joins a long list of regulatory efforts from the Office of Personnel Management related to federal workers over the past year, including a recent proposal to reduce their options for appealing a layoff. Another would overhaul the performance review process in a way that’s expected to make workers’ ratings lower on average.

The OPM also is pressing many federal agencies to cancel employee union contracts and finalized a rule last month to reclassify thousands of workers as at-will employees who lack appeal rights if they’re terminated.

Wednesday’s proposal attempts to reduce “burdensome” regulations that inhibited President Donald Trump’s efforts in 2025 to make large cuts to the workforce, the OPM said in the rule text.

Federal agencies lost a historically large number of workers last year, eliminating 317,000 jobs for a net reduction of about 250,000 after accounting for hires. But more than 90% of those exits came through voluntary departures such as the deferred resignation or “fork in the road” offered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Those reductions will be difficult to replicate in 2026.

The existing “cumbersome and intricate rules make RIFs more time-consuming and resource intensive than necessary and create the possibility of more errors when agencies attempt implementation,” according to the proposed regulation. “Further, the current rules prioritize tenure and length of service over performance ratings.”

The proposal also would exempt certain employees from the government’s RIF procedures, allowing agencies broader discretion to lay off those workers. The exemptions include new employees still working out a probationary period and those working under time-limited contracts of less than one year.

Fears of Loyalty Tests

The American Federation of Government Employees, part of AFL-CIO, criticized the proposal as setting the stage for widespread layoffs and advancing the administration’s goal to “dismantle the non-partisan civil service.”

“By gutting seniority protections and handing agencies sweeping new discretion over who stays and who goes, OPM is making it easier to conduct politically motivated layoffs dressed up as ‘performance-based’ decisions,” Everett Kelley, AFGE president, said in a statement.

AFGE and other unions and advocacy groups have challenged many of Trump’s federal workforce policies in court, including the Schedule Policy/Career reclassification and the use of essay questions on job applications that the plaintiffs say serve as a political loyalty test.

OPM Director Scott Kupor previously told reporters his office has made clear that federal agencies can’t consider political or ideological views in personnel decisions, but that federal employees who actively obstruct Trump’s policy goals could face termination.

Kupor has also said he would like to see all federal workers treated as at-will employees, although he acknowledged it’s unlikely the administration could convert them all given the federal laws and regulations in place.

Concerns about loyalty tests imposed on federal workers aren’t new to the Trump administration, said George M. Chuzi, an attorney who represents federal employees at Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch, P.C.

He represented a laid-off federal employee in the 1980s who won a settlement after their agency’s leadership displayed a list of employees labeled as “Democrat worms” and then eliminated their jobs.

But the OPM’s many rule changes and proposals in Trump’s second term are eroding the legal protections designed to prevent such politicization, Chuzi said.

“They all have the same guiding principle, which is to make it easier to get rid of employees,” he said, and then to “replace the workforce with employees who are more aligned with the politics of the administration.”