• All agencies are under a 90-day hiring freeze with the exception of military personnel of the armed forces or of positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety. The freeze will last until OMB, OPM and the new advisory board Department of Government Efficiency submit a plan to the White House to reduce the size of the government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition. The freeze would lift for all agencies except for the IRS, which would remain unable to hire new employees until the Treasury Secretary, OMB and DOGE determine it's national interest to lift the freeze. The new hiring freeze is nearly identical to an executive action Trump took on his first day in office in 2017. The 2017 hiring freeze lasted for nearly three months.
  (Federal hiring freeze - White House)
• President Donald Trump’s pick to run the State Department is now confirmed. Senate voted unanimously for now-former Florida Senator Marco Rubio to serve as the next Secretary of State on Inauguration Day. The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee advanced his nomination earlier that day. Rubio told lawmakers he plans to make State Department “relevant again” and would work with a new congressional commission focused on its modernization. He also supports using emerging technology to make the department’s workforce more productive issuing passports and other public-facing services.
  (Marco Rubio confirmation - Senate cloakroom)
• The Department of Government Efficiency faces a slew of legal battles over public transparency requirements. The American Federation of Government Employees along with the nonprofits Public Citizen and State Democracy Defenders Fund filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and the Office of Management and Budget just minutes after Trump was sworn into office for a second term. Other groups filed at least three other similar lawsuits. The lawsuits claim the Trump administration violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act, because DOGE members “do not have a fair balance of viewpoints,” its meetings are held behind closed doors and records from those meetings are not available to the public.
  (Trump administration faces lawsuits over DOGE’s membership - Federal News Network)

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• President Donald Trump is telling federal workers to return-to-office. He issued a memo telling agencies to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to the office full-time. The memo, however, does give agencies some flexibilities, letting agency leaders make exemptions they deem necessary. Any return-to-office efforts would be met with strong pushback from federal unions. A return-to-office mandate would also likely run into challenges with physical office space, since some agencies have been scaling down their property holdings with a now hybrid federal workforce.
  (Return-to-office plans - White House)
• The General Services Administration has new leadership already in place on day one of the Trump administration. GSA has a new acting administrator, new commissioners of the Federal Acquisition Service and the Public Building Service and new director of the Technology Transformation Service. And what the Trump administration charged these new leaders with is recommitting the agency to its founding purpose: Ensuring governmentwide efficiency and maximizing value for the American taxpayer. Stephen Ehikian, the new deputy administrator and acting administrator, wrote in an email that this means, among other things, working with the administration to move agencies outside of DC and eliminating environmental, social and governance regulations from contracts.
  (GSA's new leadership mostly comes from tech, finance sectors - Federal News Network)
• Agencies will soon have to change the way they evaluate employees in senior leadership positions. The Office of Personnel Management has updated its list of executive core qualifications. The list helps agencies determine if feds are fit to hold a position in the Senior Executive Service. New items on OPM's list include senior leaders' data literacy, and the ability to build a workplace culture. The SES qualifications had not been updated in over 15 years. The new list is a result of a year-long study that OPM conducted.
  (Update of the SES executive core qualifications - Office of Personnel Management)
• The Transportation Security Administration set new records in 2024. TSA screened a record 904 million passengers last year. That’s a 5% increase over 2023. TSA employees are also sticking around longer after Congress passed a historic pay increase two years ago. The attrition rate of TSA’s screening workforce decreased by 7.3% between 2022 and 2024. The agency hired 8,760 new Transportation Security Officers and Security Support Assistants last year.
  (TSA highlights a banner year of record passenger volumes - Transportation Security Administration)
• Agencies have a new way to understand how efficient the services they provide are to the public. The American Customer Satisfaction Index developed a new "Efficiency Gap" metric as part of their ongoing measure of citizen satisfaction of federal services. ACSI said the Efficiency Gap metric is calculated by comparing the average scores of four core drivers process efficiency, information accessibility, customer service and website functionality for each department against the federal government average during the Biden presidency. ACSI most recent Federal Government Study reported citizen satisfaction reaching a seven-year high of 69.7 out of 100.
  (ACSI launches new federal efficiency metric - Business Wire)
• After taking the oath of office on Monday, President Donald Trump pledged to reinstate service members dismissed from the military for refusing the COVID vaccine and provide them back pay. The Defense Department’s vaccine mandate was in effect from August 2021 to January 2023. While the number of service members dismissed for refusing the vaccine was less than one percent, Former President Joe Biden and the Defense Department faced a political backlash over the issue, with several service members subsequently suing the DoD over its vaccine mandate.
  (Trump to reinstate service members dismissed for refusing Covid vaccine - Federal News Network)
• President Donald Trump announced plans to deploy active-duty military troops to the southern border. The administration plans to end the "catch and release" practice, bring back the “Remain in Mexico” policy and designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. During his inauguration speech, Trump said he would send troops to the region to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.” The details are still unclear about how many troops will be deployed to the border or how this administration will use the military to go after cartels.
  (Trump announces plans to declare national emergency, send troops to the border - Federal News Network)
• A top Biden administration appointee will temporarily serve as the government’s lead U.S. intelligence official. President Donald Trump has named principal deputy director of national intelligence Stacey Dixon as the acting director of national intelligence. Trump’s pick to serve as the DNI former Hawaiian congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is still awaiting her confirmation hearing in the Senate. Dixon has served in the principal deputy director role since 2021. She previously served in leadership positions at the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
  (Designation of acting leaders - White House)

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