>My guess is, departments don't want layoffs, but they don't want to contradict the higher-ups either, so they fire and rehire.

Your guess is very wrong.

Everybody is hired and fired by OMB (run by loyalist Russell Vought). They are now firing people directly without going through any sort of triage of who is actually somebody that needs to be let go - they are running pulls on internal HR data and firing every person who fits the criteria of "can be fired".

Shockingly, this sort of insane scattershot firing of the federal workforce is stupid! and catches a lot of people who need to be doing their jobs for us to do things like keep track of nuclear waste and track the spread of bird flu.

Their default play seems to be across the board firing all probationary employees. It's happened at so many departments it's hard to deny/ignore. Then anywhere that was/has investigated a Musk company gets an extra layer of layoffs in their investigative arms.

Externally it doesn't even seem like there is a "can be fired" criteria. It seems like there is some high level bucket of "these shouldn't be fired", and the rest is just pull plugs and see what breaks immediately. Which incidentally also spills into the "shouldn't be fired" pool as in this case and the earlier nuclear one.

This seems like the same approach as the Elon going into twitter's data center to physically remove servers story. Except instead of pulling servers, they're pulling jobs instead.