Executive order effectively reinstates ‘Schedule F’, which sought to categorize workers as political hires
Donald Trump on Monday issued an executive order reclassifying thousands of federal employees as political hires, making them easier to fire if deemed insufficiently loyal to the new president and his aims.
One of a promised flurry of measures signed on Trump’s first day back in power, the order effectively reinstates “Schedule F”, which sought to allow for the reclassification of tens of thousands of federal workers. Schedule F changed civil service rules to allow for a broad swath of career federal employees to be fired without civil service protection, reclassifying their jobs as political appointments.
In the executive order posted Monday night on the White House website titled “Initial rescissions of harmful executive orders and actions,” Trump revoked an executive order issued by Joe Biden two days after assuming office in 2021.
That order revoked a different late-term Trump order that redesignated many federal civilian employees, which exempted them from civil service protections.
The Biden administration had rescinded that order, and then in April last year countered it with a rule Joe Biden called a “step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people”.
But key aides to Trump have long heralded mass government firings as part of an attack on the so-called “administrative” or “deep” state, a supposed permanent government of bureaucrats, operatives and agents dedicated to blocking radical rightwing reform.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and former White House strategist, a key propagator of such attacks, has said the deep state theory is “for nut cases”.
Nonetheless, such attacks are a key part of Project 2025, the vast plan for a second Trump administration orchestrated by the hard-right Heritage Foundation, which calls for civil servants deemed politically unreliable to be fired and replaced by conservatives.
Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget, was a key architect of Project 2025.
Trump has also appointed Elon Musk, the Tesla, SpaceX and X owner and the world’s richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech investor who ran for the Republican presidential nomination, to lead the so-called “department of government efficiency” or “Doge”, an attempt to carry out trillions of dollars of cuts to federal spending.
Observers expect significant opposition to moves to fire federal employees on political grounds, not least in the courts.
Sign up to Headlines US
Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning
after newsletter promotion
But Donald Kettl, an expert on government reform, recently told the Government Executive website that Schedule F “is probably constitutional. If unions and Democrats challenge it, they will probably lose.
“ … It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions [but] even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice.”
Many experts expect Trump’s moves to have a negative effect on the federal government. Last year, after reviewing nearly 100 studies of government performance, a study in the journal Public Administration concluded: “Impartiality and professionalism are consistently related to positive performance outcomes, higher public trust and confidence, and lower levels of corruption [whereas] politicization was negatively related to government performance, employee work attitudes … and impartial administration, and positively related to corruption.”
The implications of Trump’s plans, the authors wrote, were “unequivocal – converting career employees to Schedule F and removing their civil service protections is likely to degrade government performance”.
