From the reporting I've seen, they're not firing "at random", they're firing more or less every single new hire they can, because new hires have less protections than more established employees.

You need to find more reporting then. It's both, and more, and worse. The folks fired at DOE's NNSA were not exclusively probationary employees. DOGE doesn't even know the function of the departments they're eliminating. It's not evident they even know _what_ they're eliminating. See the "find and fire" approach to the word transitional. Oops... turns out that one's used in more than the context of gender.

Even firing all probationary employees explicitly _for cause_ when there's no evidence of performance problems with most of them is worse than random, it opens them up to legitimate legal backlash. Have you ever worked anywhere where the last two years of hires were all just completely worthless as employees? Of course not, that's basically impossible. Eliminating these people would have been harsh but understandable if it were said to be done for simple budget reasons, because yes they indeed are in a vulnerable less protected situation, but to call them all poor performers at the same time is worse than random, it's an obvious and transparent lie.

The people they fired at the VA weren't probationary and one of the first changes they made to the VA was removing gender identity from the account information.

This isn't about efficiency, money, or employees. It's about power and the consolidation thereof. They will have ransacked the VA and the American people not only gave them the keys but they cheered them on.

It's not just new hires. Employees who move to a new position, even if they've been in that agency for a long time, also have less protections and are being fired.

But as others have noted, these are not the only ones being mass fired.

Not just new hires, but also anyone who took a promotion or lateral move, which also puts them into a probationary period. So they're firing all the new employees and all the employees exceptional enough to be promoted or recruited to another department.

Not just new hires. They are firing people on "probationary" status, and people in civil service go through a brief probationary period after being promoted or moved to a new position.[1] This means some people being fired are long-time senior civil servants with expertise and knowledge. The reason they are firing probationary people is because they are easier to let go, by civil service rules.

I suspect the people in charge of the firings are under the same mistaken impression as you are, that all the probationary people are new hires who aren't yet essential. Witness the "oops, we fired the wrong people" rush to rehire.[2][3]

1 https://www.npr.org/2025/02/15/nx-s1-5298182/trumps-probatio...

2 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o

3 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/usda-accidentally-fire...