![OPM has also tasked agencies with delivering lists of every employee hired recently and are therefore still in their probationary period.](https://cdn.govexec.com/media/img/cd/2025/01/27/01272025OPM/860x394.jpg?1738018048)
OPM has also tasked agencies with delivering lists of every employee hired recently and are therefore still in their probationary period. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
White House collects lists of federal DEI office employees as punishments begin
Agencies are starting to take action against DEI-tasked employees and pass lists of those workers on to OPM and the White House.
At least some federal agencies have placed their employees working on diversity and inclusion issues on paid administrative leave as the Trump administration is instructing them to begin the layoffs process immediately.
Agencies must deliver their plans for instituting the reductions in force by the end of January, but Office of Personnel Management acting Director Charles Ezell told agencies in a new memorandum they “can and should” start sending out the layoff notices to impacted workers now. It is not yet clear exactly how many employees will be impacted by the RIFs, but it will affect anyone in a federal office that focused exclusively on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility issues.
The Veterans Affairs Department on Monday reported that it had placed 60 such employees on paid administrative leave, the first step for the soon-to-be laid off employees as laid out in earlier OPM guidance. Those employees collectively made $8 million annually, VA said. They are all still receiving their full pay and benefits while they sit on leave.
“We are proud to have abandoned the divisive DEI policies of the past and pivot back to VA’s core mission,” Morgan Ackley, a VA spokesperson, said. “We look forward to reallocating the millions of dollars the department was spending on DEI programs and personnel to better serve the men and women who have bravely served our nation.”
OPM has received lists of the relevant employees from agencies and is passing that data on to the White House, Government Executive has learned. An exhaustive list with detailing the number of impacted employees governmentwide was not made available, though VA’s 60 employees represents about 0.01% of its workforce. Other agencies contacted by Government Executive did not make the data available.
“The Department of the Interior is expeditiously executing the president’s executive order,” a department spokesperson said.
Agencies notified employees last week of their placement on administrative leave and told them that their programs "divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars and resulted in shameful discrimination.” They were told not to work or report to their offices while on leave.
All federal workers received notification that DEIA initiatives were halted and told that any effort to obscure such efforts, or a failure to disclose any concealment, would result in disciplinary action.
In preparation for the directive, OPM took steps this week to reverse President Biden-era rules that limited the use of administrative leave.
Federal statute allows for RIFs when they are rooted in specific activities, such as a reorganization, a lack of work or a shortage of funds. Still, federal employees subjected to layoffs have appeal rights to the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Separately from the DEI eradication push, OPM has also tasked agencies with delivering lists of every employee hired recently and are therefore still in their probationary period. Those employees can be fired easily without normal civil service hurdles, opening the possibility that the Trump administration is going to dismiss them en masse.
Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency is helping to spearhead efforts to shrink agency workforces, visited OPM’s headquarters on Friday. Amanda Scales, a former employee of Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, is OPM’s new chief of staff and has been listed as the point of contact for both the DEIA layoff and probationary period list memos.