Agencies would make layoff decisions based more highly on federal employees’ performance, rather than how long they have been working in government, according to a new proposal from the Trump administration.
If finalized, proposed regulations that the Office of Personnel Management is expected to publish Thursday morning would reorder the factors that agencies consider when determining which employees to retain or remove during a reduction in force (RIF).
When it comes to personnel decisions during RIFs, current federal regulations tell agencies to first look at employees’ tenure and length of service, before considering their performance ratings. The new proposed regulations seek to reverse that order, making employee performance the top priority.
In the proposal, OPM argued that the current RIF priority order can lead to high-performing employees with fewer years of service being kicked out, while lower-performing but more senior employees are retained.
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“These proposed changes will better assist agencies in retaining their top performers, which will leave agencies better positioned to carry out their missions after a RIF occurs,” OPM wrote. “By elevating performance in the order of retention, the employees who are best contributing to the mission will be more likely to be retained during restructuring.”
If finalized, agencies that conduct a RIF would be required to sort employees on a “retention register” using the new priority order, including adding points for employees based on veterans’ preference. If employees are tied on their performance scores, agencies would defer to tenure and then length of service as tie-breakers.
The new proposal echoes an effort from President Donald Trump’s first term. In December 2020, OPM proposed similar regulations prioritizing performance over tenure during RIFs. But those regulations were never finalized, and the Biden administration withdrew the proposal in December 2024.
This time around, the revived RIF proposal is accompanied by other related efforts from the Trump administration to alter federal personnel processes. In February, OPM proposed to give itself the authority — rather than the Merit Systems Protection Board — in deciding on cases where employees appeal a RIF action. OPM also recently teed up an overhaul of the government’s performance management system, which would cap how many employees can receive high performance ratings.
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, warned that taken together, the regulatory changes could lead to arbitrary firings of even more federal employees.
“OPM is making it easier to conduct politically motivated layoffs dressed up as ‘performance-based’ decisions,” Kelley said Wednesday in a press release. “But the performance system itself is being rigged by another recent proposed OPM rule that would cap how many employees can receive high ratings, ensuring that ‘performance’ reflects not actual merit but management’s subjective preferences.”
This week’s proposed regulations also come days ahead of the anticipated finalization of Schedule Policy/Career, which would remove impacted federal employees’ appeal rights in adverse actions, such as a termination or suspension.
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The new regulations would make other changes in the RIF process as well. For instance, OPM is proposing to exempt employees within a trial or probationary period, as well as employees working on time-limited appointments lasting one year or less, from any future agency RIFs.
“OPM believes that agencies should have the flexibility to retain or terminate a temporary employee without regard to RIF procedures,” the agency wrote.
The Trump administration said exempting those employees would streamline the RIF process, while also not “unduly disadvantaging” the affected employees.
“These are typically more junior, less-tenured employees who have historically been the first ones separated in a RIF,” OPM wrote. “Exempting these employees from RIF procedures would in fact make it more likely that they could continue federal employment, as it would enable agencies to retain such employees without regard to their standing in a retention register.”
Throughout 2025, the Trump administration pressed forward with significant efforts to scale down the size of the federal workforce, resulting in about 350,000 employee separations since Trump took office.
Although a vast majority of federal staffing reductions over the last year occurred due to retirements and separations through the deferred resignation program (DRP), some agencies still pursued RIFs in response to a directive from the Trump administration early in 2025.
As agencies moved forward with those efforts, though, OPM described the RIF process as cumbersome, time-consuming and “resource intensive” — all of which, OPM argued, leads to higher risk of errors when conducting layoffs.
In contrast, OPM contended that changing the order of who gets prioritized in a RIF would make the layoff process “more streamlined, efficient and merit-based.”
But AFGE’s Kelley warned that the new regulations from OPM are part of the Trump administration’s “coordinated campaign” to erode the non-partisan nature of civil service.
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“Together, these proposed rules represent a blueprint for faster, less accountable mass firings and another step in the administration’s effort to dismantle the nonpartisan civil service,” Kelley said.
AFGE said it plans to file public comments on the proposal, and will review “all legal options” if the proposed regulations advance.
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email [email protected] or reach out on Signal at drewfriedman.11
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