On Valentine’s Day, thousands of probationary federal employees — typically those who have been in their current role for less than a year — received similar notices that they were being fired for “performance”-related reasons. The firings were swift and often confusing, with employees being locked out of their government emails before they could get any answers.
Federal agencies have not released data on firings by state. But in a state where the federal government owns more than 80 percent of the land, job cuts coupled with the federal hiring freeze implemented by President Donald Trump could lead to a slowdown of services everywhere from wildfire management to veterans’ hospitals to nuclear research.
‘Based on your performance’
Probationary federal employees are civilians typically in the first one to two years of their roles. The status applies to workers in their first roles with the federal government, people who have recently been promoted or those who have changed agencies.
While exact data on the firings is unclear, there were about 220,000 probationary employees in the federal government at this point last year.
The mass firings were part of Trump and Elon Musk’s mission to cut the size of the federal workforce. Other measures have included making resignation offers across the entire federal workforce — which the Office of Personnel Management said 75,000 workers took — as well as implementing a hiring freeze. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is also going department by department making broader cuts.
Federal workforce data shows that in May 2024, Nevada was home to nearly 14,000 civilian federal employees. About half work at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs; the next biggest employers are the Department of the Interior, the Air Force and the Department of Agriculture. There were nearly 1,475 employees with less than a year in their current roles, and an additional 2,270 employees who had between one and two years of service.
These employees range from social workers at veterans’ hospitals in Las Vegas and Reno, nuclear weapons researchers at the Nevada National Security Site and wildfire and fuels management workers at the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.
Impacts on service
Part of the frustration for Nevada lawmakers is the lack of available data. Nevada Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen have sent letters to agency heads at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service requesting data on the number of terminations and job descriptions for each terminated employee in Nevada, but have yet to receive answers.
In an interview, Cortez Masto said that Lehman Caves inside Great Basin National Park in White Pine County has had to close due to job cuts and that she’s heard of service challenges at the Social Security Administration and the National Park Service. She’s worried about increased wait times for medical care and delays in processing paperwork at VA centers in Nevada.
And at Great Basin National Park — the only national park in the state — five rangers have been let go, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Cortez Masto said she agrees with the need to cut waste in the government, but that the process has been haphazard.
“The way that this administration and Elon Musk are going about it is just burning down the house [and] having a devastating impact — not only on the employees that they're letting go, but on the services that are essential to states like Nevada, that are going to be harmful to Nevadans in the long term,” she said.