Trump to sign order to extend federal hiring freeze, White House says

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By Alexandra Alper and Tim Reid

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Thursday to extend a federal hiring freeze, which was set to expire this month, through July, the White House said.

Trump first imposed a hiring freeze through an executive order on January 20, his first day in office, but that halt to new hiring inside the federal government was due to expire on Sunday. The new order he was due to sign on Thursday would extend the freeze by another three months.

The latest executive order came as a second round of mass layoffs began this week in several government agencies, driven by Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and government workers faced deadlines to accept a second buyout offer.

Over 260,000 employees of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce have been fired, taken early retirement, have been earmarked for termination or have accepted buyouts, according to a Reuters tally.

More than 22,000 employees at the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service have accepted the Trump administration’s latest buyout offer, two agency sources told Reuters on Tuesday. About 75,000 took the first buyout, or “deferred resignation program”, which was offered in January.

Under its terms, workers will be paid in full until September 30 but most will not have to work during that period.

Despite the hiring freeze, Reuters reported last month that the federal human-resources agency leading efforts to slash the federal workforce decided to hire its first new career employee since Trump took office, a driver to ferry around leaders of that agency.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, Kanishka Singh, Alexandra Alper and Tim Reid in Washington; Editing by Chris Reese and Marguerita Choy)