The Interior Department has kept a strict Trump-era firing policy in place, something critics say contradicts President Joe Biden’s order to protect the federal workforce.
The group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, has called on Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to end the Trump policy, which allows supervisors to fire federal employees 30 calendar days after putting them on notice. Historically, federal performance policies gave floundering workers 60 or 90 days to demonstrate progress.
“The Department of the Interior’s failure to comply with [Biden’s executive order] has opened the door to favoritism, retaliation and discrimination against Interior employees,” reads a letter from PEER to the department last week.