WASHINGTON — Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, gave a bipartisan boost on Tuesday to a bill that aims to help federal workers who have lost their jobs as part of the mass firing led by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.
The Protect Our Probationary Employees Act is co-sponsored by dozens of House lawmakers, but so far only two Republicans: Baumgartner and his fellow freshman, Rep. Jeff Hurd of Colorado. Its lead sponsor is another first-term lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Sarah Elfreth of Maryland.
The bill would clarify regulations that apply to a federal worker’s probationary period — the first year on the job, or in some cases two years — so that fired probationary employees could keep the seniority they had accumulated if they are rehired.
In a brief interview at the Capitol, Baumgartner said his support for the bill shouldn’t be construed as criticism of President Donald Trump or his administration’s effort to rapidly downsize the federal workforce.
“There are some workers who were fired by mistake, and those workers shouldn’t lose their accrued probationary status,” he said. “I think it’s just a good, commonsense bill.”
“We want good people spinning turbines and guarding our nuclear stockpiles,” Baumgartner said, referring to the seemingly arbitrary termination of hundreds of workers at the Bonneville Power Administration, which runs hydroelectric dams in the Northwest, and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages U.S. nuclear weapons.
Trump has empowered Musk, a billionaire adviser who has ignored government ethics rules and continues to run multiple companies with billions in federal contracts, to fire workers without specific reasons through an entity dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency.
The group, largely composed of software engineers and other business associates of Musk, isn’t technically a department — something only Congress can create — and has taken over the offices and the acronym of a small agency formerly called the U.S. Digital Service, which was also referred to as USDS.
Pointing to a story published by Politico on Tuesday, Baumgartner emphasized that his backing of the bill is not “some specific pushback against Elon Musk.”
“That’s not how the bill is intended,” he said. “It’s just a bill that says we need good federal employees, and if they’re mistakenly fired, let’s just have common sense.”
Even Trump, Baumgartner pointed out, has come to endorse a more targeted approach to cutting the government workforce, whose salaries account for about 5% of federal spending, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute. In a social media post on March 6, the president called Musk’s DOGE project “an incredible success” and said he had directed his cabinet secretaries to continue the staff cuts.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, Musk led the termination of about 2,500 probationary employees, including more than a dozen at Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center. Then, on March 4, VA Secretary Doug Collins directed his department to lay off approximately 70,000 to 80,000 more employees within six months.
“As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’ The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.”
Orion Donovan Smith’s work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper’s managing editor.
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