WASHINGTON — The Trump administration moved Thursday to eliminate job protections for up to 50,000 government employees.
The Office of Personnel Management issued a final rule allowing the administration to expand a designation for high-ranking employees whose work focuses on implementing the president's policies. They would no longer be subject to long-standing rules for firing federal employees.
The move would recategorize career employees, who for decades have enjoyed strong job protections, such as the ability to appeal firings to an independent board. Under their new status, they would be stripped of those rights and treated similarly to political appointees, who can more easily be dismissed.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the reclassification plans.
The Office of Personnel Management said in a news release announcing the change that it was a “key civil service reform aimed at strengthening accountability, improving performance, and reinforcing a merit-based federal workforce.”
“This rule preserves merit-based hiring, veterans’ preference, and whistleblower protections while ensuring senior career officials responsible for advancing President Trump’s agenda can be held to the same performance expectations that exist throughout much of the American workforce,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement.
The rule prohibits “political patronage, loyalty tests, or political discrimination,” and it says it cannot be used to reshape existing reduction-in-force laws, according to OPM.
Federal workforce advocacy groups decried the change, with one saying it has “nothing to do with restoring merit” and will be used to remove workers who don’t follow President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“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,” the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization, said in a statement.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers, said the new rule would directly open the door to political patronage, have a chilling effect on free speech and weaken protections against retaliation for whistleblowing.
“The practical impact is clear: employees moved into the new schedule can be fired ‘at will’ by political appointees or other overseers with essentially no procedural or appeal safeguards that have long protected the integrity of government operations,” the union said in a statement.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday she thought the rule change was “a good thing.”
“I think if people aren’t doing their jobs, if they aren’t showing up for work, if they’re not working hard on behalf of this president, they’re not welcome to work for him at all,” she said.
Before he left office in 2020, Trump had signed an executive order that aimed to make a similar reclassification known as “Schedule F.” President Joe Biden rescinded that order, and Trump, in turn, reinstated it last year.
The Trump administration has taken numerous steps to slash the federal workforce, from essentially closing agencies to issuing reduction-in-force notices, in addition to steps the Department of Government Efficiency took in the early months of Trump's second term.
The Office of Personnel Management recently published data that said 242,260 employees have left the federal workforce — voluntarily or involuntarily — since Trump took office again.
