WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump has signed a memorandum extending the
federal hiring freeze through July 15, White House principal deputy press
secretary Harrison Fields wrote in a post on social media platform X.
The move is part of President Trump and Elon Musk's
aggressive efforts to cut spending within the federal government, CNN reported.
The original action dictated that no new federal civilian
positions could be created and no vacant positions could be filled.
It specifies that it does not prohibit hirings to
"maintain essential services, and protect national security, homeland
security, and public safety".
A fact sheet put out by the White House called the move
"a critical step in shrinking the federal government and ensuring taxpayer
dollars are used efficiently".
"The American people elected President Trump to
drain the swamp and end ineffective government programs that empower government
without achieving measurable results," it said.
The hiring freeze stops federal agencies from filling
vacant positions or creating any new ones. The only exceptions are for
immigration enforcement, national security or public safety positions.
The freeze is now through July 15, and once that is up,
agencies will still only be able to hire one employee for every four that
leave.
Trump first implemented the hiring freeze through
executive order on his first day in office, and it was set to expire on Sunday.
"The President will usher in a Golden Age for
America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the
American people," the administration said in January.
"He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in
essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid Diversity, Equity,
and Inclusion (DEI) activists buried into the federal workforce."
The hiring freeze mirrors an initiative Trump took at the
beginning of his first term.
A memorandum he signed in January 2017 put a freeze on
federal government hiring except for military and other positions that were
deemed necessary.
Since January, several federal agencies have been turned
upside down with mass firings, while others have been liquidated altogether by
the work of Elon Musk, whom Trump made the head of the Department of Government
Efficiency (DOGE).
The Department of Education has been reduced by nearly 50
per cent, and the Health and Human Services Department by around 24 per cent.
Other agencies that have faced 10 per cent reductions or
up include the National Science Foundation, the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service and Energy Department, among others.
"In the last two years of the Biden Administration,
government was directly responsible for the creation of more than 1 in every 4
jobs," the White House fact sheet said.
"President Trump is committed to reversing this
trend by prioritising private-sector job growth and reducing the federal
workforce to focus on essential functions."
Trump began his new term by ordering federal employees to
go back to work in person, after years of work-from-home policies left much of
the government's Washington office buildings vacant, or risk being fired.
"We don't want them to work from home because as
everyone knows most of the time they're not working, they're not very
productive and it's unfair to the millions of people in the US who are in fact
working hard from job sites and not from their home," Trump said in
January.
The Supreme Court last week blocked a lower court order
for the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of federal workers who lost
their jobs in mass firings.
The justices made the ruling in the administration's
emergency appeal of a ruling by a California judge that ordered 16,000
probationary employees at six different federal agencies to be reinstated while
a lawsuit runs its course.
