Trump Order Makes It Easier to Fire Agency Staffers At Will

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday stripping job security from nearly 8,000 federal positions, expanding his authority to fire career employees who work on policy matters and accelerating a civil-service overhaul that’s drawn legal and political pushback.

The move was more restrained than expected. The Office of Personnel Management had initially estimated the new job classification could apply to as many as 50,000 federal employees. Still, the directive will transform the upper echelons of the civil service, allowing the president to fire at will staffers who fail to implement and advocate for his policies.

Trump has argued the move is necessary to make the bureaucracy more responsive to elected leadership, contending that civil-service protections allowed what he calls a “deep state” to resist his agenda. Opponents counter that the approach erodes the independence of a professional federal workforce.

The executive order follows a year of groundwork laid by the Trump administration to create rules around the new job classification, known as Schedule Policy/Career. Under regulations from OPM finalized in early February, employees moved into that category lose many of the procedural protections most federal workers have, including the right to appeal their removal to an independent body.

Almost all of the positions are at the GS-15 level or above, said a White House official who briefed reporters on the order earlier Wednesday. That’s the top rank of the civil service pay scale. Some lower-level positions inside the White House Office of Management and Budget are also included. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the directive before it was public, said the president reserves the right to add new positions to the list but that none are expected in the short term.

Among the kinds of jobs stripped of protection are leaders of agency subcomponents, regional or field offices; deputy directors and chiefs of staff; senior policy, budget, grant-making and human resources positions; and public affairs staff.

Read more: How Trump Is Making It Easier To Fire Civil Servants: QuickTake

“From our perspective, this is very much about accountability,” said OPM Director Scott Kupor. “In order to affect the policy priorities of the administration, we need to have people who are in these senior policy making decisions willing to and capable of obviously carrying out those directives.”

The order doesn’t impact the hiring process for the newly reclassified policy-related roles, and it explicitly says that personal political affiliation can’t be used to hire and fire.

“There are zero loyalty tests in this,” Kupor said. “There is no interference with normal whistleblower protections either.”

Kupor said the order also can’t be used to circumvent reduction-in-force laws.

Federal employee unions have condemned the order, arguing it strips job protections from career professionals and opens the door to replacing them with political loyalists. The American Federation of Government Employees has called the policy a “direct assault” on a merit-based civil service and said it plans to challenge the administration’s actions in court.

Nonpartisan good-government groups echoed those concerns, warning the move revives elements of the spoils system Congress abandoned in the late 19th century.

“This new designation can be used to remove expert career federal employees who place the law and service to the public ahead of blind loyalty, and replace them with political supporters who will unquestioningly do the president’s bidding,” said Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service.

The policy draws on language in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 allowing presidents to exempt positions deemed “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” from certain job protections.

Trump tried to institute a similar reclassification, known as Schedule F, in his first term, but he lost reelection before the plan could be implemented and fully tested in court.

--With assistance from Catherine Lucey and Skylar Woodhouse.

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