In California, District Judge William Alsup called the sacking of these employees part of a “sham” strategy that aimed to circumvent proper procedures for reducing the federal workforce.

His order – which was followed by another from Maryland – applies to thousands of probationary workers who were fired at a range of departments, including defence, energy, treasury, and veterans affairs.

The Department of Justice says the firings were done based on guidance – rather than a directive – from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

The BBC has contacted OPM for comment.

OPM, a once-obscure agency that manages the federal government’s civil service, has been thrust into the spotlight amid President Donald Trump’s moves to slash the size of the federal workforce.

In Thursday’s hearing in San Francisco, California, Judge Alsup countered the DOJ lawyer’s arguments from the bench, citing evidence including termination letters that stated the firings were carried out on OPM’s instructions.

“That should not have been done in our country,” Judge Alsup said. “It was a sham in order to avoid statutory requirements.”

Danielle Leonard, a lawyer representing a coalition of government employee unions, said probationary employees were targeted because they lacked the right to appeal.

During the hearing, Judge Alsup also lamented the firing of a government worker in Albuquerque, New Mexico who had been given top marks for performance but was then issued a pink slip citing performance as the cause of their termination.

“I just want to say it is a sad day when our government would fire a good employee and say it’s for performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Judge Alsup said.

Judge Alsup’s order was followed by a similar ruling from Baltimore, Maryland, by District Judge James Bredar, who agreed that Trump’s team had broken regulations and cast doubt on the idea that the workers had been individually sacked for unsatisfactory performances.

Responding to the first ruling, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Judge Alsup of singlehandedly “attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the executive branch”.

She said that power rested with the president and “singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the president’s agenda”.

“The Trump administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order,” she added.

Elon Musk’s name was not mentioned during the California hearing, but he has been tasked by President Trump with downsizing the federal workforce through the ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency – or Doge.

“He was on everybody’s mind,” said Luz Fuller, president of a local Sacramento branch of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 4,500 employees in Northern California.

The White House has denied that Musk is the agency’s leader, although Trump labelled him as such during his Congressional address last week.

Judge William Alsup called the sacking of these employees part of a “sham” strategy that aimed to circumvent proper procedures for reducing the federal workforce.

The order will apply to thousands of probationary workers who were fired at the Agriculture, Defence, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs departments.

During Thursday’s hearing, the Department of Justice maintained that the firings were done based on guidance – rather than a directive – from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

The BBC has contacted OPM for comment.

OPM, a once-obscure agency that manages the federal government’s civil service, has been thrust into the spotlight amid President Donald Trump’s moves to slash the size of the federal workforce.

District Judge Alsup, appointed in San Francisco, countered the DOJ lawyer’s arguments from the bench, citing evidence including termination letters that stated the firings were carried out on OPM’s instructions.

“That should not have been done in our country,” Judge Alsup said. “It was a sham in order to avoid statutory requirements.”

Danielle Leonard, an attorney representing a coalition of government employee unions, said probationary employees were targeted because they lacked the right to appeal.

During the hearing, Judge Alsup also lamented the firing of a government worker in Albuquerque, New Mexico who had been given top marks for performance but was then issued a pink slip citing performance as the cause of their termination.

“I just want to say it is a sad day when our government would fire a good employee and say it’s for performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Judge Alsup said.

Elon Musk’s name was not mentioned during the hearing, but he has been tasked by President Trump with downsizing the federal workforce through the ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency – or Doge.

“He was on everybody’s mind,” said Luz Fuller, president of a local Sacramento branch of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 4,500 employees in Northern California.

The White House has denied that Musk is the agency’s leader, although Trump labelled him as such during his Congressional address last week.

The impacts have already been felt by visitors – who are seeing longer park entrance lines, reduced hours at visitor centres, trails closed and dirty public facilities – and workers who not only are worried about their futures as their jobs vanish, but also the state of these outdoor marvels eroding.

Each season, Kate White and her team typically carry 600lbs (270kg) of litter on their backs out of the Enchantments, a sensitive alpine wilderness located in Washington state that welcomes over 100,000 visitors a year.

Remote and often covered in snow and ice, staff are needed to maintain backcountry toilets that must be serviced with helicopters, which Ms White says may overflow without proper maintenance.

“I’m not totally sure what the plan is to get that done,” she says.

“That’s probably gonna be very damaging to the ecosystem in that area, and maybe to the visitor experience.”

But one of the most important parts of her job was to keep people safe – and be there if the worst happened.

As a National Forest wilderness ranger for over nine years, she has seen her share of tragedy when hikers or campers are confronted with severe weather and remote and tricky terrain. She has comforted people who have faced life-threatening injuries and even recovered bodies of hikers who died while out in the steep and often icy mountain region.

“We were kind of usually first on scene if something were to happen,” she says.

On any typical Saturday in the summer months, she’d speak to an average of 1,000 visitors. She and her team published reports on trail conditions and helped hikers who appeared unprepared – wearing sandals or not carrying enough water – and guided them to easier and safer routes.

Now, those jobs are gone.

She worries what the cuts will mean for the future of public safety and how people experience US parks and forests, especially ahead of the busy spring and summer months when millions travel to visit.

Mass terminations, first announced on 14 February, have led to 5% of the National Park Service staff – around 1,000 workers – being forced out.

The cuts have hit the US Forest Service, which maintains thousands of miles of popular hiking trails, even harder. Around 10% of the Forest Service’s staff – about 3,400 people, including Ms White and her team – have been fired.

The cuts have upended the management of national parks, which get around 325 million visitors annually, as well as national forests, which see about 159 million visitors each year.

Long queues of cars were stuck outside Grand Canyon National Park over President’s Day weekend, one day after the mass firing, due to a lack of toll operators to check people in at the gate. Similar lines of cars have been growing at other parks as well.

A popular trail outside Seattle was closed indefinitely only hours after the cuts were announced, with a sign at the trailhead explaining that the closure is “due to the large scale termination of Forest Service employees” and “will reopen when we return to appropriate staffing levels”.

At Yosemite National Park, the annual “firefall” spectacle led to a different kind of display this year when a group, which reportedly included employees, hung an upside-down American flag at the park in protest of the Trump administration’s recent deep cuts to staff.

Andria Townsend, a carnivore biologist who supervised a team of eight people at Yosemite National Park before she was fired in an email, told the BBC she “100%” supports the protest.

“It’s bringing lots of good attention to the issue,” she says.

Shesays sheis especially worried for the future of the endangered species that she had been working to protect.

Ms Townsend studied and attached GPS collars to the Sierra Nevada red fox and the Pacific fisher, which is related to a badger, in attempts to track and preserve the species.

“They both are in dire straits,” she says, with only about 50 fishers and 500 red fox left in the wild.

Staff at a sister site conducting similar research were also cut.

“I don’t want to be doom and gloom, but it’s really hard to say what the future is now,” she says.

“The future of conservation just feels very uncertain.”

Long-time couple Claire Thompson, 35, and Xander Demetrios, 36, haveworked for the Forest Service for about a decade, most recently maintaining trails in central Washington state so that hikers could explore the snow-capped Cascade mountains.

The email firing them and thousands of other staff cited “performance” issues – something they took issue with.

“Especially with the amount we’ve gone above and beyond,” says Mr Demetrios, explaining that his work in the backcountry had carried significant risk to his safety, and sometimes involved rescuing people from dangerous situations, including one person who had fallen in a river and become hypothermic.

He and Ms Thompson have carried heavy equipment through rugged terrain, through foul weather at times, to clear trails and repair bridges and outhouses – and never being paid more than $22 (£17.40) an hour.

“It’s been hurtful – insulting – to just feel like your work is so devalued, and by people who I’m quite certain have like zero concept of what we do at all,” Ms Thompson added.

Following a backlash, dozens of national park staff were reportedly rehired since the mass terminations on Valentine’s Day. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department oversees the National Park Service (NPS), has also committed to hiring over 5,000 seasonal workers during the coming warm months.

“On a personal level, of course, I’ve got great empathy for anybody that loses a job,” Burgum told Fox News last Friday.

“But I think we have to realise that every American is better off if we actually stop having a $2 trillion a year deficit.”

The Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) being spearheaded by Elon Musk claims to have saved over $65bn from the widespread cuts which have hit dozens of federal agencies across government. However, it has produced no evidence to back that figure, which would represent around 0.9% of the entire 2024 federal budget.Watch: ‘Thank God for Elon Musk’ – Maga Republicans praise Doge cuts

Outdoor advocates say that travellers currently planning their outdoor vacations to national parks should expect numerous issues, including increased litter, a shortage of lodging and the unavailability of many services they have come to expect.

“If the administration doesn’t reverse these policies, visitors are going to need to lower their expectations,” says John Garder of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) in Washington DC.

Some of these cuts are already being felt: Yosemite has fired their only locksmith, Gettysburg fired the staff who handle cabin reservations for visitors, and hurricane damage to the Appalachian Trail won’t get repaired in time for through-hikers trying to complete the 2,200-mile (3,540km) trail.

Meanwhile, private businesses that operate in and around parks stand to lose out on billions of dollars if visitors drop off, according to the NPCA.

Concerns are also growing about the absence of park and forest service personnel who assist in wildfire fighting during the dry season.

Wildland firefighters, like Dan Hilden, have so far been exempted from forest service cuts. He says the roles of the people who were terminated are “completely crucial” to fire safety. Many directly fight fires, while others are responsible for “sweeping” backcountry trails – telling people to leave and ensuring that no one is in danger from expanding fires.

“I don’t know how we’ll be doing that this summer, because we’re heavily dependent on them,” says Hilden, explaining that it takes several days to travel into the wilderness for these sweeps.

“Every year things have been getting worse as the staffing issues go. This year is going to be a lot worse.”

The ruling said the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had told thousands of employees across a handful of federal agencies they were fired using authority the agency does not have, US District Judge William Alsup ruled.

“[OPM] does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency,” he said. “They can hire and fire their own employees.”

In court the government argued OPM asked, not ordered, the agencies to fire these employees.

They also argued that probationary employees are not guaranteed employment and that only the highest performing and mission-critical employees should be hired.

Government workers have been the target of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce in the name of cutting costs.

Many employees affected by the firings are probationary employees – usually those in their first or second year in a job – though they can sometimes be long-time employees who were recently promoted.

There are some 200,000 probationary employees in the federal workforce.

Judge Alsup ordered OPM to revoke its directives to multiples agencies – including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Park Service, and the Defence Department – to terminate employees.

He issued a temporary restraining order which puts a momentary pause on the government’s actions until a judge revisits the matter in the coming weeks.

The case began after a coalition of labour unions and non-profit organisations sued the government, arguing OPM unlawfully fired individuals by falsely claiming workers were performing poorly.

Everett Kelley, the National President of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the ruling a victory for Americans were were “illegally fired” from their jobs by an agency with “no authority to do so”.

“These are rank-and-file workers who joined the federal government to make a difference in their communities, only to be suddenly terminated due to this administration’s disdain for federal employees and desire to privatize their work,” he said.

Just 48 hours after an email asking “what did you do last week?” was sent, the office behind it clarified responses were voluntary, leaving agencies to decide their approach.

But as this new guidance was shared with federal agencies, President Donald Trump weighed in that workers who did not comply with Mr Musk’s demand would be fired or “sort of semi-fired”.

And later on Monday evening, Mr Musk reinforced the ultimatum, granting workers a final chance to respond.

The mail from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Saturday, instructed recipients to reply with five examples of what they did over the past seven days, without revealing any classified information. The recipients were asked to respond by end of Monday.

Mr Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), said that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation.

The comments fuelled backlash, with federal worker unions and activist groups filing a lawsuit in California to halt the email mandate.

Key agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services (HHS), Justice, and the FBI—now led by Trump appointees—instructed employees to ignore the directive. This led to widespread uncertainty, with some workers receiving contradictory messages over the weekend.

The result was widespread bafflement, as federal workers faced uncertainty over their employment. Many also expressed confusion at the competing guidance they had been given by their respective agencies.

“They’re succeeding in driving us insane,” one employee who works under HHS told the BBC, and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

On Monday afternoon, OPM held a call with the heads of human resources at federal agencies and said it was up to each entity to determine how they want to handle the directive employees received Saturday, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The same afternoon, President Trump told reporters at the White House that Mr Musk’s demand was a “genius” move.

“There was a lot of genius in sending it,” he said. “We’re trying to find out if people are working and so we’re sending a letter to people, please tell us what you did last week. If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”

“And then if you don’t answer like you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist,” Trump said.

Mr Musk maintained he was acting on instructions from President Donald Trump.

“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” he wrote on X, apparently referring to workers who did not respond to his demand by the end of Monday. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”

“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!” he said in another post. “Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”

Despite pushback from agencies led by Trump appointees, the White House insisted, “Everyone is working together as one unified team at the direction of President Trump”. “Any notion to the contrary is completely false,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

The statement did not explain why different government agencies were giving different recommendations.

The guidance marks notable public disagreement between Trump appointees who manage thousands of bureaucrats and Musk who – as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – has been leading an outside effort to aggressively reduce government spending.

Some heads of agencies encouraged staff to comply while others requested employees wait for further guidance on how to appropriately respond.

President Donald Trump has yet to comment on the email.

The message sent to millions of federal employees Saturday evening came after Musk posted on his social media platform X that government staff would “shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.

In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to respond explaining their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points – without disclosing classified information – before midnight on Monday. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s human resources agency, confirmed the email was authentic.

The message did not mention whether declining to comply would be considered a resignation, despite Musk’s social media assertion that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.

Newly confirmed FBI director Kash Patel told his employees in a separate email later Saturday that they should “pause any responses”.

“FBI personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information,” Patel wrote in a message obtained by CBS News. “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with the FBI procedures.”

The state department sent a similar message to its employees, saying its leadership would respond on behalf of the agency.

“No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” an email from Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary for management, said.

In a sign that the OPM email may have come as a surprise to many agencies, a senior figure at the Department of Justice wrote to staff on Saturday evening to say: “Media reports indicate the email was distributed to employees throughout the federal government.” The message added, “at this point, we have no reason to believe this message is spam or malicious”.

Later on Saturday evening, a follow-up email was sent clarifying that the OPM message was “legitimate” and that “employees should be prepared to follow the instructions as requested”.

The DoJ message also came with a warning to staff: “Do not include any sensitive, confidential, or classified information in your response. Should you have any questions about the contents of your response please contact your supervisor.”

“If we receive additional guidance or information, I will update all employees, as necessary.”

Other departments, including the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration requested that employees wait for further guidance.

OPM did not immediately respond to the BBC’s inquiries about whether some staff might be exempt.

The request also poses logistical questions. Federal law prohibits some of the roughly 3 million federal workers from accessing email outside their working hours. Other government employees, such as those at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were placed on leave in the last month.

Some Republican members of Congress defended Musk and his broader efforts on Sunday.

Congressman Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, described Musk’s efforts as a “comprehensive, forensic audit of every department and agency in the federal government” and told ABC that the Doge chief was trying “to find efficiencies across the board”.

But Senator John Curtis, a Republican representing Utah, criticised Musk’s methods, though said he supported the ultimate goal of Doge’s efforts.

“If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages,” Curtis said in an interview with CBS.

“I don’t think this is a request that is that difficult. I would ask my employees to let me know what they’re doing. But I will double down on the fact of we don’t need to be so cold and hard,” he added.

The email came after billionaire Trump confidante Elon Musk tweeted that employees would “shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” he wrote.

Musk has been leading an outside effort to aggressively curtail government spending through funding cuts and firings.

The email arrived in inboxes shortly after Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac). The messages came with the subject line “What did you do last week?” from a sender listed as HR.

The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, confirmed the email was authentic in a statement to CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.

“As part of the Trump Administration’s commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce, OPM is asking employees to provide a brief summary of what they did last week by the end of Monday, CC’ing their manager. Agencies will determine any next steps.”

In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to explain their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points – without disclosing classified information – before midnight on Monday.

The message did not mention whether a failure to respond would be considered a resignation.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees, criticised the message as “cruel and disrespectful” and vowed to challenge any “unlawful terminations” of federal employees.

“Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people,” Everett Kelley, union president, said in a statement.

Newly-confirmed FBI director Kash Patel told his employees in an email that they should “pause any responses” to the OPM memo.

“FBI personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information,” Patel wrote in a message obtained by CBS News. “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with the FBI procedures.”

Earlier in the day, Trump touted cuts and told a crowd of supporters at Cpac that the work of federal employees had been inadequate because some of them work remotely at least some of the time.

“We’re removing all of the unnecessary, incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats from the federal workforce,” the president told the crowd at the annual conference in suburban Washington on Saturday afternoon.

“We want to make government smaller, more efficient,” he added. “We want to keep the best people, and we’re not going to keep the worst people.”

Elon Musk’s team has exacted wide-ranging changes to the US federal infrastructure, with approval from the White House, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

Thousands of government employees at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as other agencies, have been fired in recent weeks.

The email mirrors Musk’s handling of employees after he acquired social media platform Twitter in 2022. As the staff there shrunk under his ownership, he issued ultimatums that included a now-infamous request to commit to being “extremely hardcore” at work or resign.

Trump has repeatedly applauded Musk’s government-cutting measures.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said that Musk is doing a “great job” in reducing the size of the federal government and that he would like to see him “get more aggressive” in the pursuit.

Around 6,000 layoffs at the IRS began on Thursday, coming in the middle of tax season as millions of Americans file their returns.

The defence department plans to axe more than 5,000 jobs next week as part of a goal to reduce its nearly million-strong civilian workforce by 5 to 8%, the Pentagon said on Friday. It will also put a hiring freeze in place.

The Trump administration has appointed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to implement the layoffs as part of a cost-cutting drive.

The probationary workers who are expected to lose their jobs at the IRS “were not deemed as critical to filing season”, according to an email seen by CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Most Americans have a deadline of 15 April to file their taxes, though the government allows extensions under some circumstances.

Probationary employees are generally those on the job for less than a year. A person who has been a long-serving employee but moved to a new position is also often considered in a probationary position.

The BBC has contacted the IRS and treasury department for comment.

Reports suggest the terminations will target mostly new and newly promoted employees, with half of the cuts hitting an office known as the Small Business/Self-Employed (SBSE) Division.

The email from SBSE commissioner Lia Colbert says that “while details are still developing, we understand that over 3,500 SB/SE probationary hires will be terminated by the end of this week”.

About 83,000 people worked for the IRS as of the 2023 fiscal year.

Many of the targeted roles appear to deal with compliance matters, or ensuring Americans pay what the government says they owe.

Linda Bilmes, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the BBC: “What people like even less than paying taxes is not being able to reach someone to help them pay their taxes accurately.”

The Biden administration had secured $80bn (£63bn) in funding for new resources and staff at the IRS, to help the government bring in more revenue.

Republicans, who generally advocate for lower taxes, opposed the effort and have long targeted the IRS for funding cuts.

In an interview on Fox News, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Trump’s “goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay”.

The president has proposed an “External Revenue Service” to generate funds from tariffs, or taxes on foreign imports, instead.

The firings at the Pentagon were expected to initially affect about 5,400 probationary workers beginning next week before freezing hiring, a defence department statement said.

But these job losses might not be the last.

“We anticipate reducing the Department’s civilian workforce by 5-8% to produce efficiencies and refocus the Department on the President’s priorities and restoring readiness in the force,” the statement added.

The defence department is the largest government agency, with a civilian workforce of about 950,000 employees, according to Reuters.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has supported these cuts, posting on X last week that the Pentagon needs “to cut the fat (HQ) and grow the muscle (warfighters)”.

Polling indicates some discomfort among Americans for Trump’s changes to the federal workforce.

A Washington Post/Ipsos poll suggests that 54% of Americans disapproved of the way Trump is managing the federal government, compared to 44% who approved.

Speaking at an investment summit hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in Miami Beach, Florida, on Wednesday, Trump said he was considering using 20 percent of the savings for payouts to the public and 20 percent to pay down the federal government’s $36 trillion debt.

“The numbers are incredible, Elon. So many billions of dollars … hundreds of billions,” Trump told the Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute Priority Summit, referring to savings identified by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

“We’re thinking about giving 20 percent back to the American citizens, and 20 percent down to pay back debt.”

Trump’s suggestion came a day after DOGE adviser James Fishback, the CEO of investment firm Azoria, proposed a “DOGE dividend” funded by the cost-cutting initiative.

In a four-page memo posted on X on Tuesday, Fishback said every tax-paying household could be sent a $5,000 cheque assuming Musk’s task force saves $2 trillion by the time it finishes up its work in July 2026.

In response to Fishback’s memo, Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said on X that he would “check with the President”.

Guo Xu, an associate professor at UC Berkeley Haas who studies the efficiency of government bureaucracies, expressed scepticism about the proposal.

“This seems like a populist measure designed to make the crippling of our federal government capacity more appealing,” Xu told Al Jazeera.

“Instead of cutting the government to cut cheques, we should be investing to strengthen the nation’s infrastructure, science and national security.”

During  Trump’s election campaign, Musk, the world’s richest person, predicted he could find $2 trillion in savings but later backtracked on that estimate, suggesting in an interview in January that he had a good chance of saving half that much.

DOGE, which is not an official government department, has claimed to have achieved savings of $55bn so far, but has not released detailed documentation to support that figure.

On Monday, DOGE published a list of contracts it said it had cancelled to achieve $16bn in savings.

The list, however, misstated the value of a $8m contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as $8bn.

Canice Prendergast, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of “The Limits of Bureaucratic Efficiency,” expressed doubt that DOGE would make much of an impact on waste in the federal bureaucracy.

“My guess is that at least 100 percent of the ‘savings’ will be used to pay the severance payments to the workers that they let go,” Prendergast told Al Jazeera.

“There  is no question that there is a lot of inefficiency in the government. Finding it is either pretty hard to do without screwing up services or something no politician is willing to touch. For instance, most of the US federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare that no one is touching. While I am pretty sure that a serious look at the government bureaucracy could find valuable savings, it’s not likely to happen in the 90 seconds that the current administration seems to have thought about it.”

Several hundreds of the agency’s probationary workers – who have generally been in their positions for less than a year – received the news via email late on Friday night, a statement from PASS’s head, Alex Spero said.

It is a part of a cost-cutting drive, driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), that aims to drastically cut the federal workforce.

Spero called the firings “shameful” and said they “will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin”.

According to Spero’s statement, workers impacted include systems specialists, safety inspectors, maintenance mechanics and administrative staff, among others.

Criticising the move, Spero said the FAA is “already challenged by understaffing”, and that the decision to cut staff was “unconscionable in the aftermath of three deadly aircraft accidents in the past month”, including the deadly crash in Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan airport, in which 67 people were killed.

Jason King, who is among those laid off, said he was worried about how the move would impact aviation safety.

He told WUSA9, an affiliate of the BBC’s US partner CBS, firing people directly involved with air safety is “concerning for public safety in our national airspace.”

Mr King, whose work at the FAA involved directly addressing safety concerns, said the cuts “threatens public trust and increases the likelihood of future accidents.”

“Aviation safety should never be treated as a budget item that can just be completely cut,” he added.

On Monday, a team from Elon Musk’s SpaceX was set to visit the FAA to suggest improvements to the US’s air traffic control system, following the Washington DC plane collision in January.

Though the National Transport Safety Board has not yet determined the cause of the collision, staffing levels in air traffic control at the airport, were reportedly below normal levels on the evening of the crash.

Transport Secretary Sean Duffy said the SpaceX team’s visit to the FAA would give them a “first-hand look at the current system”, and would allow them to figure out how they make “a new, world-class air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world.”

He added that he plans to visit the FAA Academy – which provides training for the organisation’s workforce – later this week, to learn more about staff member’s education “and how we can ensure that only the very best guide our aircraft”.

President Donald Trump caused controversy last month when he suggested diversity programmes supported by his predecessors had lowered hiring standards that could have affected the Washington DC plane crash.

The Trump administration has ordered government agencies to fire nearly all of their probationary employees, who have not yet earned job protection. It is a move that could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Among those losing their jobs in Friday’s cuts were half of the Centers of Disease Control’s so-called “disease detectives”, multiple health officials told CBS.

The researchers – officially officers serving in a two-year programme in the organisation’s Epidemic Intelligence Service – are often deployed on the front lines of major disease outbreaks.

Many members of the scheme have gone on to rise in the agency’s ranks.

President Trump has also asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire the head of an independent ethics agency that protects whistleblower federal employees.

Hampton Dellinger, the head of the US Office of Special Counsel, sued the Trump administration after being fired last month.

It is thought to be the first case related to Trump’s series of executive actions to reach the country’s highest court.

Since taking office, the president has cut more than a dozen inspectors general at various federal agencies.