HR is under pressure to hire new workers as the Obama administration gets ready to turn over the reins to Trump, who has promised to freeze federal hiring, The Washington Post reports. At the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, HR officials were told to cancel holiday vacations so they could finalize paperwork and send out offers to new jobseekers.

An internal agency update from Nov. 17 ordered officials to “be ready for an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to implement the ‘45-day Hiring Plan’ (Plan) to address a potential hiring freeze,” The Washington Post reports.

Dan Wenk, park superintendent for Yellowstone National Park, said a number workers retired last year, leaving a 10% vacancy at his agency. “We’ve been very concerned about getting key positions hired in the parks across the service,” Wenk said. “We’re just trying to be as prepared as we can” for a hiring freeze.

HR officials at the Transportation Security Administration, National Park Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and divisions of the Agriculture and Labor departments have been given similar orders. Some federal agencies are concerned that if they don’t act fast enough to bring in new hires, then they will have few options to ensure that their departments are able to function once Trump takes over.

“If an agency is already significantly understaffed and a hiring freeze is applied, it could exacerbate the staffing problem and make doing the business of the agency difficult or impossible,” says Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. His union represents about 110,000 civil workers. But the accelerated hiring could heighten an already tense transition process between the Obama administration and Trump’s team.

Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said at the end of last month that Obama and the incoming Trump administration agreed in November that there would be no new hires after Dec. 1. “After the election, the current administration notified us there would be a hiring freeze as of Dec. 1,” Spicer said. “The understanding was that there would be a full accounting of anyone put on the payroll after then.”

But whoever Trump nominates from corporate America to run the federal agencies, the idea of clearing out staff quickly as a CEO may be able to do in private sector is not based in reality, according to and article by New York Post columnist Linda Chavez.

“The normal relationships between employer and employees don’t exist,” Chavez wrote. “As the head of a department or agency, you pick very few of your own employees, and you have little or no authority to get rid of those employees you inherit.”

Further frustrating for incoming Trump agency heads are the fewer carrots they will have to reward workers, Chavez noted. “There’s no such thing as pay for performance,” she wrote. “Nor is it even possible to promote the best hires, except within the constraints of federal civil service rules, and you can’t move employees easily from one job to another.”

And while agency heads will have leeway to make about 4,000 political appointments, that is tiny compared to a 1.4 million strong civilian federal workforce, Chavez noted.

Getting someone fired also won’t prove easy. “The greatest culture shock for these new Cabinet members who’ve never worked in government, however, will be how little authority they have to make major changes in their departments,” she noted. “Divisions within agencies often operate as fiefdoms, with their own ties to Congress and appropriations staffers who fund their work.”

While it may be harder to fire federal workers, experts expect the federal civil service will be targeted for major reforms in the next four years, BNA Bloomberg reports. And Trump can put a hiring freeze in effect with an executive order. But a sole focus on body count is wrongheaded, Don Kettl, a professor at the University of Maryland’s school of public policy, told Bloomberg BNA. 

The federal workforce is about the same as it was under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but a lot more money is being spent, he noted. “If you start slashing away at capacity, you run the risk of having a government even more out of control, so we need to be careful that we take aim at the right problems as we try to implement reform,” Kettl said.

Focusing on an employee freeze also can handicap the federal government’s ability to attract the best talent in crucial areas, Kettl said. Right now there are more information technology workers older than 65 in federal agencies than under 30. “The more you focus on shrinking and firing, the harder it is to motivate people inside or to get the workforce you need to accomplish what you want,” he added.