President Donald Trump moved Monday to make it easier to strip tens of thousands of civil servants of their employment protections, reviving an unfinished priority from his first term to bend the government to his will.
The new category of civil servants, called “Schedule F,” would apply to federal employees who play a role in the policymaking process.
By stripping those positions of requirements for merit-based hiring and firing, and the right to appeal adverse personnel actions, Trump would open up the possibility of staffing the government with loyal political operators.
Early lists of potentially affected employees from the first Trump administration showed Trump’s team intended to interpret the category broadly, applying it to positions as varied as IT specialists, office managers and attorneys.
Monday’s executive order from Trump did not directly create the Schedule F category. Instead, Trump reversed a Joe Biden executive order, published in the early days of Biden’s presidency, that revoked Trump’s previous October 2020 executive order creating Schedule F. The Biden order was among scores that Trump reversed Monday.
While in office, Biden also created a formal rule codifying current distinctions between career civil service employees and the political appointees that change with every president. Trump will presumably have to write his own rule, reversing this Biden rule, before pursuing Schedule F again in earnest.
Civil servants who spoke to HuffPost about Schedule F during the presidential campaign stressed that they felt it would make government worse. The knowledge that their livelihoods could be the subject of political decisions would lead to a slower, less efficient government, as they judged their day-to-day work both on its own merits and on its political implications, they said.
We Won’t Back Down
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
Academics who study the federal government noted Schedule F would represent a dramatic increase in the power of the president in particular.
“In the hands of a president who is not committed to democratic norms, taking control of the bureaucracy is a tried and tested way to work toward authoritarian government,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, told HuffPost in June.
The executive order runs parallel to others that are expected to weaken the federal workforce by targeting unions representing federal workers.