‘Indiscriminate madness’: DOGE claims firings target low performers and new employees. The reality is far from it

The Trump administration and Elon Musk have insisted that they are carefully purging the federal workforce by firing only low-performing employees serving in non-critical roles, or recent hires on probationary status.

The Trump administration and Elon Musk have insisted that they are carefully purging the federal workforce by firing only low-performing employees serving in non-critical roles, or recent hires on probationary status. But interviews with more than a dozen recently laid-off federal workers, plus documents obtained by CNN, demonstrate that firing decisions are far more arbitrary, and that in many cases the exact opposite is happening — people who have been recently promoted or received strong performance reviews are among those who have been terminated. Employees at agencies across the government, including the departments of Homeland Security, Energy, Transportation and Veterans Affairs, who received positive performance reviews within the last year have been fired for failing to meet performance standards or for conduct reasons, CNN has learned. In some cases, employees who received a mark of “achieved excellence” from their superiors last year now find themselves out of a job. That’s fueled widespread criticism from officials who believe the Trump administration is simply using employees’ probationary status, as well as agency performance standards, as a pretext to fire thousands of federal workers – including some who occupy highly-specialized roles in cybersecurity, overseeing US nuclear weapons and maintaining the country’s critical infrastructure projects. At the National Nuclear Security Administration, where Trump officials have scrambled to reinstate hundreds of fired workers tasked with managing America’s nuclear weapons, one fired employee had recently received an ‘exceeds expectations’ performance review.