TikTok has returned to Apple and Google's app stores, nearly a month after the video-sharing platform was pulled as a result of its U.S. ban. According to Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, the move followed assurances from the White House that the ban would not immediately be enforced. Per an earlier, anonymously-sourced report in The Information, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told staff he is working closely with the White House to determine the app's U.S. future.
Amazon's RTO initiative is in flux, The Wall Street Journal reports, as the 350,000 corporate employees ordered into offices full-time this year still face a space crunch. Workers at dozens of sites are waiting to hear when they can actually return, and those who have gone back encounter parking shortages — or no teammates when they get there. Amazon, which said RTO would enable collaboration, insists the "overwhelming majority" of employees do, in fact, have seats.
The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, the nation’s largest employer, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection — potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
In addition, workers at some agencies were warned that large workplace cuts would be coming.
The decision on probationary workers, who generally have less than a year on the job, came from the Office of Personnel Management, which serves as a human resources department for the federal government. The notification was confirmed by a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Even workers in the personnel office itself were not immune: Dozens of probationary employees at OPM were told on a Thursday afternoon group call that they were being dismissed and then instructed to leave the building within a half-hour, according to another person who likewise spoke on condition of anonymity.
It’s expected to be the first step in sweeping layoffs. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that told agency leaders to plan for “large-scale reductions in force.”
Elon Musk, whom President Trump has given wide leeway to slash government spending with his Department of Government Efficiency, called Thursday for the elimination of whole agencies.
“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leaving a lot of them behind,” Musk said via a video call to the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees representing federal workers, said the administration “abused” the probation status of workers “to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office.”
Thursday’s order was an expansion of previous directions from OPM, which told agencies earlier this week that probationary employees should be fired if they weren’t meeting high standards. It’s not clear how many workers are currently in a probationary period. According to government data maintained by OPM, as of March 2024, 220,000 workers had less than a year on the job — the most recent data available.
The firing of probationary employees began earlier this week and has included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education workers.
At least 39 were fired from the Education Department on Wednesday, according to a union that represents agency workers, including civil rights workers, special education specialists, and student aid officials.
The layoffs also hit Department of Veterans Affairs researchers working on cancer treatment, opioid addiction, prosthetics, and burn pit exposure, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, said Thursday.
Murray said in a statement that she heard from VA researchers in her state who were told to stop their research immediately, “not because their work isn’t desperately needed, but because Trump and Elon have decided to fire these researchers on a whim.”
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that defends government workers, said the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service would be hit especially hard by laying off probationary employees because it has trouble recruiting inspectors required to be present at all times at most slaughterhouses.
The civilian federal workforce, not including military personnel and postal workers, is made up of about 2.4 million people. While about 20% of the workers are in Washington D.C., and the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, more than 80% live outside the Capitol region.
Layoffs are unlikely to yield significant deficit savings. When the Congressional Budget Office looked at the issue, it found the government spent $271 billion annually compensating civilian federal workers, with about 60% of that total going to workers employed by the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs.
The government could, in theory, cut all those workers and still run a deficit of over $1 trillion that would continue to grow as tax revenues are needed to keep up with the growing costs of Social Security and Medicare.
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said firing employees on probation is flawed because it targets younger workers.
“Baby Boomers are retiring right and left, so actually the people you want to keep are probably most of the people who are right now on probation,” said Kamarck, who worked in former President Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration when about 426,000 federal jobs were cut over more than eight years in a deliberative effort aimed at reinventing government. “They’re younger and presumably have better skills, and that’s who you want.”
Trump’s initial attempt to downsize the workforce was the deferred resignation program, commonly described as a buyout, which offered to pay people until Sept. 30 if they agreed to quit. The White House said 75,000 people signed up, and a federal judge cleared a legal roadblock for the program Wednesday.
However, the number of workers who took the offer was less than the administration’s target, and Trump has made it clear he would take further steps.
Employees at the National Science Foundation and Housing and Urban Development Department were told this week that large reductions, in some cases a halving of the workforce, would be coming, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
The order Trump signed Tuesday stipulated that government functions not required by law would be prioritized for cuts and hiring would be restricted. With exceptions for functions such as public safety, only one employee can be added for every four that leave. In addition, new hires would generally need approval from a representative of the DOGE, expanding the influence of Musk’s team.
Trump has praised Musk’s work to slash federal spending.
The Republican president has also been sharply critical of federal workers, especially those who want to keep working remotely, though his administration is simultaneously working to cut federal office space and ordering the termination of worksite leases throughout the government.
“Nobody is gonna work from home,” Trump said Monday. “They are gonna be going out, they’re gonna play tennis, they’re gonna play golf, they’re gonna do a lot of things. They’re not working.”
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to temporarily lift a three-week funding freeze that has shut down U.S. aid and development work worldwide, citing the sweeping damage that the sudden shutdown has done to the nonprofits and other organizations that help carry out U.S. assistance overseas.
The court ruling was the second to deliver a major setback for the Trump administration in what has been its dismantling of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development, which President Donald Trump and ally Elon Musk accuse of being out of line with Trump’s agenda.
Thursday’s ruling by the U.S. district court in Washington is the first ruling that targets what aid groups and others say has been a sudden and absolute cutoff of USAID funds for programs abroad.
The funding cutoff has left contractors, farmers, and suppliers in the U.S. and around the world without hundreds of millions of dollars in pay for work already done and forced wide-scale layoffs among those enterprises.
Judge Amir Ali issued the temporary order Thursday in the U.S. in a lawsuit brought by two organizations, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalitio,n and the Global Health Council, representing health organizations receiving U.S. funds for work abroad.
In his order, Ali noted that the Trump administration argued it had to shut down funding for the thousands of USAID aid programs abroad to conduct a thorough review of each program and whether it should be eliminated.
However, administration officials “have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended” contracts with thousands of nonprofit groups, businesses, and others “was a rational precursor to reviewing programs,” the judge said.
Lawyers for the administration had failed to show they had a “rational reason for disregarding...the countless small and large businesses that would have to shutter programs or shutter their businesses altogether,” the judge added.
The ruling also bars Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump officials from enforcing stop-work orders that the Trump administration and Musk have sent to the companies and organizations carrying out foreign aid orders.
The funding order applies to contracts that were in place before Trump issued his Jan. 20 executive order declaring a freeze on foreign assistance.
Ali also rejected the Trump administration’s argument that it was buffering the impact of the funding freeze, offering waivers to allow funding to keep flowing to some aid partners.
Ali cited testimony that no such waiver system yet existed and that the online payment system at USAID no longer functioned.
He rejected a request from the health organizations to challenge Trump’s executive order itself, limiting his ruling to temporarily blocking Rubio and other administration officials from enforcing it.
Earlier Thursday, a judge in a separate case over the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID and U.S. aid programs abroad said that his order halting the Trump administration’s plans to pull all but a fraction of USAID staffers off the job worldwide will stay in place for at least another week.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols ordered the extension after a nearly three-hour hearing Thursday, much of it focused on how employees were affected by abrupt orders by the Trump administration and Musk, who leads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, to put thousands of USAID workers on leave and freeze foreign aid funding.
The judge said he plans to issue a written ruling in the coming days on whether the pause will continue.
Nichols closely questioned the government about keeping employees on leave safe in high-risk overseas areas. When a Justice Department attorney could not provide detailed plans, the judge asked him to file court documents after the hearing.
USAID staffers who until recently were posted in Congo had filed affidavits for the lawsuit describing the aid agency all but abandoning them when looting and political violence exploded in Congo’s capital last month, leaving them to evacuate with their families.
The funding freeze and purge of top USAID officials meant agency staffers are now stranded in Washington, without homes or agency funding, and facing the loss of their jobs, staffers said in the affidavits.
The judge handed the administration a setback last week by temporarily halting the plans that would have put thousands of workers on leave and given those abroad only 30 days to return to the United States at government expense. His order was set to expire by the end of Thursday.
Two associations representing federal employees asked him to continue his stay, as well as suspend Trump’s freeze on almost all foreign assistance. The president’s pause has shut down almost all of the thousands of U.S.-funded aid and development programs around the globe, USAID workers and humanitarian groups say.
Nichols grilled lawyers for USAID unions in Thursday’s hearing, probing how workers were being affected by the stoppage of funding for the agency’s work.
The judge’s questions probed the concept of legal standing — whether the unions can show the kind of legal harm that would justify a continued block on the Trump administration’s plans.
Standing is a legal technicality, but an important one. A different judge cited it when he sided with the Trump administration and allowed a Musk-backed plan to cut the federal workforce through deferred resignations, often known as buyouts.
While the administration and DOGE, Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, have taken aim at other agencies, they have moved most destructively against USAID, asserting without evidence that its work is wasteful.
In a court filing, deputy USAID head Pete Marocco argued that “insubordination” made it impossible for the new administration to undertake a close review of aid programs without first pushing almost all USAID staffers off the job and halting aid and development work. He did not provide evidence for his assertion.
USAID staffers, in court filings, have denied being insubordinate. They said they were doing their best to carry out what they describe as vague and confusing orders, some of which were said to come from a Musk associate and other outsiders.
Agency supporters told Democratic senators earlier this week that the shutdown — along with other administration steps, including revoking USAID’s lease on its Washington headquarters — was really about eradicating USAID before lawmakers or the courts could stop it.
The employee groups, the Democratic lawmakers, and others argue that without congressional approval, Trump lacks the power to shut USAID or end its programs. His team says the power of courts or lawmakers to stand in the way is limited at best.
“The President’s powers in the realm of foreign affairs are generally vast and unreviewable,” government lawyers said in court documents.