President Donald Trump signed professional orders in his first days in office that left numerous federal employees reeling from looming cutbacks, a freeze on federal choosing, and new back-to-office expectations for some remote employees. On Wednesday, he announced that people in diversity, equity and inclusion jobs may be put on paid left.
Elon Musk, the current head of Tesla, will be tapped to lead a fresh Department of Government Performance, as he has pledged to do much more.
While the White House sits more than 2, 000 km from the Golden State, the commander-in-chief’s deeds stand to change lots of Californians. About 250, 000 national employees live in California, including tens of thousands in the Bay Area.
According to statistics from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Maryland and Virginia were the only states with more civil federal employees than California were last year.
” It’s the great unknown”, said Bobbie Scopa, a retired fire and former captain with decades of experience in the U. S. Forest Service. She then advocates for national rescuers. The flames companies have not been directly impacted by previous hiring freezes, she said, but “everything seems a little bit different this time.”
The federal government is one of the largest companies in the country, with only over 3 million people. They work for national authorities such as the Forest Service, NASA, FEMA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U. S. Postal Service.
An estimated 38, 000 federal employees live in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara districts, according to statistics from California’s Employment Development Department.
Many of those regional employees are waiting to hear what the upcoming executive order may mean for them. At least one local senior of the federal government isn’t very anxious, however.
” This is all kind of a PR game right now,” said Leon Panetta, former US Secretary of Defense and current head of the CSU Monterey Bay Panetta Institute for Public Policy. Trump” can make it unpleasant for national people, but I don’t think he can take a lot of the ways that he’s threatening to get.”
Panetta, even former chairman of the Central Intelligence Agency, described Trump’s move as” plan hype … to influence the American citizens that he’s getting things done”.
Trump has frequently pledged to drastically reduce national spending and abolish some agencies, but he did so before taking office. During his first term in office, the national workforce increased from 2.81 to 2.88 million employees.
Reagan came in and promised to get rid of the Department of Education and a number of other items, but he was finally unable to do it, according to Panetta, referring to former Republican president Ronald Reagan. He said the same thing could happen with Trump’s fresh promises.
Now discussion is swirling around Musk’s Department of Government Performance, dubbed DOGE.
The committee,  , which officially joined the authorities within the Executive Office of the President,  , has been tasked with finding ways to reduce the federal budget, though Congress would get the last state. Unions and federal watchdog organizations had filed lawsuits against the payment within hours of the new administration’s inauguration, arguing that there must be open suggestions and transparency in order to follow the law.
There are better ways to try to achieve those objectives, according to Panetta, noting that real shift at the provincial level requires patience and cooperation.
The fear, and the truth, of a Musk-induced cancellation is common for hundreds of Bay Area people, including around 6, 000 original people of Twitter, which Musk acquired and turned into X. Some are suing Musk over their dramatic pregnancies.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is the federal government’s largest firm company, with just over 21 % of the workplace, followed by the Navy and the Army, which employ approximately 10 % each.
Outside of the population team hiring that takes place every ten years, the number of national employees has remained roughly steady at about 2.8 million until 2019 when it started to increase, reaching over 3 million in 2024 for the first time since 1993.
There is no valid justification for reducing the size of the national labor. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents hundreds of thousands of federal employees and is one of the organizations suing the administration over DOGE, stated that the number of federal employees has increased by about 6 % over the past 50 years while the U.S. population served by the federal government has increased by 57 %.
While the situation is uncertain, Scopa claimed that the new administration might offer an opportunity to improve efficiency for the national fire services. However, she claimed a hiring freeze may put them in a bind, with many important top positions vacant as fires continue to ravage large swathes of California. Also excluded a hiring ice, Scopa worries all the chat of slashing the federal labor may deter would-be candidates.
” With everything going on and all the threats against federal employees”, she said, “why would ( someone ) want to take a chance and go to work for the feds”?
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