Some 400 U.S. Department of Homeland Security workers have been fired.
The federal government layoffs have expanded to additional agencies, according to a new internal letter and government officials, after President Donald Trump ordered agencies to make plans to reduce the government workforce.
About 400 U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel have been fired, a DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email on Feb. 18.
That includes more than 200 personnel at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), over 130 employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and several dozen workers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
CISA declined to comment. The other two agencies did not return requests for comment by publication time.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are making sweeping cuts and reform across the federal government to eliminate egregious waste and incompetence that has been happening for decades at the expense of the American taxpayer,” the DHS spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the cuts would result in roughly $50 million in savings at DHS, which had about 222,500 workers as of 2024, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“DHS component leads identified non-mission critical personnel in probationary status. We are actively identifying other wasteful positions and offices that do not fulfill DHS’ mission,” the spokesperson said.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which monitors banks nationwide and backstops bank deposits via its insurance fund, terminated some workers on Monday evening, staffers were informed on Tuesday.
An internal email said the agency had “separated certain probationary employees.”
Exactly how many employees were fired was unclear. DOGE says there were more than 500 employees at the agency, which has about 6,000 total workers, who had been there for less than one year.
About 217,000 federal employees had been with the government for less than one year as of March 2024, the last month for which data were available. The full-time government workforce at the time was about 2.3 million.
Typically, probationary employees in the federal government have been there for one or two years, and enjoy fewer protections than longer-term workers.
