President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency has vowed to “send shockwaves” through the U.S. government in order to “eliminate massive waste”.

Well, this cleanup plan unfortunately includes the jobs of federal workers.

The new department is being led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two entrepreneurs who agree with Trump’s stance that the federal bureaucracy must be slashed.

Musk has posted on his social platform ‘X’ that DOGE is seeking, “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

Trump said the commission will provide recommendations and work with the White House “to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

Musk has suggested at a recent rally that DOGE (a nod to cryptocurrency Dogecoin) will seek to cut as much as $2 trillion in federal spending.

“This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people!” Musk said in a statement.

The announcement has attracted much media attention. Trump has said it could lead to innovation with the impact of the Manhattan Project, a secret government program that led to the development of the first atomic bomb.

The federal budget is currently well over $6 trillion and it funds more than 400 federal agencies. Musk has suggested the agencies could be cut to under 100, but that would require the approval of Congress.

This campaign promise to fire large amounts of the federal workforce may have an outsized impact on employees at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Former EPA agency officials across several administrations told reporters throughout a call hosted by the Environmental Protection Network that Trump’s pledge to bring back Schedule F and make federal employees in policymaking roles at-will hires would probably include a significant portion of the EPA’s approximately 15,000-employee workforce.

Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, an EPN board member and former acting assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Research and Development, told reporters that the EPA workforce is “particularly susceptible” to the return of Schedule F, “as are a number of other agencies across the government.”

“Part of the challenge by doing this, by politicizing the workforce and having a number of the people involved in rulemaking — and there are a lot — at-will, if we lose that workforce, if they are dismissed because they’re not following a particular direction and jumping as high as they’re being asked to jump, and I think that’s something that even the Trump administration recognized the first go-around,” Orme-Zavaleta said.

Jeremy Symons, an EPN senior advisor and former climate policy advisor for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said federal scientists at the EPA would also likely fall under Schedule F.

“Trump is trying to paint a narrative of rogue bureaucrats, and public health scientists at EPA are not the poster child for that narrative,” Symons said. “So Schedule F is the same situation with the scientists across the agency.”

It’s unclear how broadly Schedule F would impact career federal employees. Early estimates showed up to 50,000 federal employees in policy-related roles would fall under Schedule F.