On February 13, 2025, Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell signed a directive instructing federal agencies to fire probationary employees — workers in their first one or two years who lack full civil service protections. The resulting mass terminations, dubbed the "Valentine's Day Massacre," removed approximately 24,583 employees across virtually every federal agency in a matter of days.
Scale and Targeting
The firings struck indiscriminately across the federal government:
Termination letters used a standardized OPM-provided template falsely citing "performance" as the reason for firing, despite the fact that most employees had received satisfactory or better reviews. This fraudulent justification would become a central finding in subsequent litigation.
Workforce Targeting Logic
Probationary employees were targeted specifically because they lacked the procedural protections (advance notice, right to respond, appeal rights) available to tenured civil servants under Title 5. The strategy exploited a legal vulnerability to achieve rapid workforce reduction without the slower reduction-in-force process required for permanent employees.
Capture Significance
The mass probationary firings represented the largest single-day workforce purge in federal history. By using fraudulent performance justifications and exploiting the probationary gap in civil service protections, the administration demonstrated its willingness to circumvent legal safeguards designed to protect the merit-based civil service from political interference. The firings were the second phase — after the "Fork in the Road" deferred resignations — of a systematic campaign that would continue with agency-level RIFs throughout 2025.