Last month, the White House released a fact sheet outlining the broad actions the Trump Administration is taking to “significantly reduce the size of the federal government,” in part by “shrink[ing] the size of the federal workforce.” In a new insight, Labor Policy Analyst Emmet Bowling and Joseph Brown explore what legal authorities the Trump Administration may have to conduct mass layoffs of federal workers and where it may run into obstacles in court.

An excerpt:

In targeting probationary employees, the Trump Administration seems to be selecting those workers who would be deemed nonessential in the case of a lack of funding, and does not seem to be selecting for, among other things, employee performance. That said, the Trump Administration has often cited employee performance as a pretext for its layoffs. It has sent agency staff several urgent requests demanding response that appear to be attempts to establish evidence for performance issues. Whether the Trump Administration’s claims of employee performance issues as cause for these layoffs is legitimate is another point of contention.

Read the analysis.