A House panel on Tuesday voted along party lines to advance legislation that would double the amount of time new federal employees must serve before earning their full civil service protections.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 24-19 to send the Ensuring a Qualified Civil Service Act (H.R. 5750) favorably to the chamber’s floor. Introduced by Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, the legislation would double the length of probationary periods across government from one to two years as well as require agency heads to affirmatively convert new hires into permanent appointments at the conclusion of their trial period.
During a federal worker’s probationary period, they lack access to many avenues by which government employees can appeal adverse personnel actions. Despite having fewer civil service protections than tenured feds, probationary workers may only be let go for performance or conduct.
Gill’s legislation builds upon an April executive order in which President Trump added issues related to an agency’s needs and interests and whether a probationary employee’s continued employment would advance agency organizational goals and efficiency to the list of reasons to end their employment.
“President Trump couldn’t be more right,” Gill said Tuesday. “Probationary and trial periods are essential tools to ensure that newly hired federal employees are sufficiently performing before their appointments are finalized permanently . . . A federal employee can often work for over 25 years, and having an extra year of probationary status to ensure that the right employee becomes career-tenured is a common sense, good government measure.”
Gill and other Republicans cited a 2015 Government Accountability Office report on probationary periods that recommended, along with better training for federal supervisors, extending the trial period from one to two years.
But Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., pointed out that policymakers already tried a pilot program with two-year probationary periods at the Defense Department, undertaken in response to the GAO report, and it failed. In 2021, Congress passed on a bipartisan basis the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which included a provision reverting Pentagon civilian hires to a one-year probationary period.
“We’ve done this before, not just at DOD but at the U.S. Postal Service, and both of those experiences have been cautionary in terms of our ability to compete with the private sector, and as a consequence we lost so many good employees,” Lynch said. “We’ve seen this before at other agencies, and the result is that the recruitment and retention of workers is affected.”
Lynch sought to replace the legislation with a proposal for GAO to study the efficacy of the Defense Department’s dalliance with two-year probationary periods, though that measure failed on a party-line vote.
The effort to lengthen probationary periods also comes just months after the Trump administration fired tens of thousands of newly hired and promoted federal workers en masse and, as several federal judges found, without individualized assessments of their performance or conduct. Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., said that the legislation and Trump’s actions, taken together, are part of a larger effort to politicize the federal civil service and screen federal workers and job seekers according to their political beliefs.
“The administration has relied on the existing structure to indiscriminately purge thousands of probationary employees with little or no justification,” he said. “Extending the probationary period to two years will allow this administration to continue this behavior, eliminating especially early-career employees by political affiliation or other subjective criteria. It’s antithetical to the merit-based, nonpartisan civil service system.”
