Tim Whitehouse, executive director at another nonprofit group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said the organization has been in touch with hundreds of terminated employees who have been informed that they are being placed on administrative leave.
“They are getting paid to not do their jobs—they will have no access to any of their agency computers, emails or equipment,” Whitehouse told Newsweek.
Whitehouse said that paying federal employees while keeping them from their assigned tasks is evidence that the underlying motive is not about efficiency.
“The whole purpose here is to destroy federal agencies that are viewed as problematic for certain parts of our economy,” he said. “It’s not about efficiency, it’s not about lowering costs to the American citizens, it’s about fundamentally changing the way our system of government works.”