'Tougher posture': Trump reportedly hatches new plan to ratchet up federal purge

Federal employees on Thursday were put on notice by the Trump administration that workers with less than stellar performance reviews would face immediate termination as the focus shifts from offering resignation buyouts to poor performers, according to media reports.

The new development comes as the president and his billionaire ally at the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk increase their bullying tactics to fulfill their vow of upending the federal workforce. So far, the so-called “buyout” program has received more than 50,000 takers across federal agencies, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

But that is just a fraction of the more than 2 million people currently employed by the U.S. government. Now, a new memo gives federal agencies until March 7 to compile lists of their poorest performing employees as the administration looks to advance a “tougher posture,” according to Bloomberg.

The memo from the Office of Personnel Management instructed agencies to come up with lists of “all employees who received less than a ‘fully successful’ performance rating in the past three years.” OPM acting director Charles Ezell, who wrote the memo, said the information would be used “to swiftly terminate poor performing employees.”

ALSO READ: 'Driven to self-loathing': Inside the extremist website believed to 'groom' teen attackers

“OPM is developing new performance metrics for evaluating the federal workforce that aligns with the priorities and standards in the President’s recent Executive Orders,” Ezell wrote in his memo.

The memo “is the latest in a series of directives implementing Trump’s executive orders demanding sweeping changes to the federal workforce,” Bloomberg noted.

The president has already swept out diversity programs and threatened federal workers who don't comply with the order. As Bloomberg reported, Trump has also "sought to reclassify potentially thousands of jobs as political positions — a change that would make it easier for him to dismiss workers and replace them with loyalists."