The U.S. Army has approved approximately 20,000 new civilian employees for exemption from President Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze following the implementation of a process that seeks to facilitate the granting of such exceptions, Federal News Radio reported Wednesday.
Jared Serbu writes Diane Randon, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, said the new process works to gather exemption requests from commanders through a common email inbox and approve them within a day to 48 hours.
The figure is higher than the 5,500 exemptions the Army had granted in the previous week, Serbu reported.
Randon told attendees of an Association of the U.S. Army-hosted conference in Alabama that the acting Army secretary did not want the hiring freeze to impact military readiness.
“We could get exemptions through if we tied them to readiness, but it took some storming and norming to put a process together,†she added, according to the station.
