A spokeswoman at the Dayton VA Medical Center Friday said she was gathering information in response to questions from this news outlet.
The Dayton VA Medical Center has 2,355 full-time employees.
The VA’s move was announced late Thursday before a three-day weekend. President’s Day on Monday is a federal holiday.
Also Thursday, the Hill newspaper reported that Office of Personnel Management (OPM) officials met with agency leaders across government and “directed them to begin firing employees still in their probationary period a year or more after being hired.”
Multiple reports pointed to Trump’s signing of an executive order instructing federal agencies to prepare for widespread layoffs across government.
Southwest Ohio’s federal installations contribute to more than $19 billion in regional economic activity annually and employ more than 103,000 people, according to the Dayton Development Coalition. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base alone has some 38,000 military and federal employees, more than any other Ohio employer with a single-site concentration of employment.
National media reported that more than 200,000 employees have worked within the federal government for less than a year.
A spokesman for the headquarters of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson didn’t have an immediate response to questions Friday.
A Department of Defense representative could not respond to questions immediately.
“We are working with our Congressional delegation and the federal agencies in the Dayton region to better understand the effect of this on Wright-Patterson, the Dayton VA, and other federal agencies and what steps can be taken,” Jeff Hoagland, president and chief executive of the Dayton Development Coalition, said Friday.
The personnel moves will save the VA more than $98 million per year, and the VA said it will “redirect all of those resources back toward health care, benefits and services for VA beneficiaries.”
There are currently more than 43,000 probationary employees across the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“The vast majority of whom are exempt from today’s personnel actions because they serve in mission-critical positions — primarily those supporting benefits and services for VA beneficiaries —or are covered under a collective bargaining agreement,“ the VA said.
The VA said employees who agreed to the government’s deferred resignation program are also exempt from the dismissals.
The dismissals are effective immediately and have been communicated to each employee, the VA said.
The VA also said the first Senior Executive Service (SES) or SES-equivalent leader in a dismissed employee’s chain of command can request that the employee be exempted from removal.
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