Trump strips job protections from 8,000 federal workers

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order converting about 8,000 federal workers into at-will employees, making it easier for the government to fire them without providing a reason as his administration presses ahead with a broad effort to reshape the federal workforce.

The order, released Wednesday by the White House and the Office of Personnel Management, applies largely to senior civil servants deemed to have significant influence over government policy. Nearly all are at the GS-15 level, the highest tier of the civil service, and some earn up to nearly $200,000 a year, The Guardian reported.

The affected jobs include leaders of policy offices and their chiefs of staff, heads of regional offices, program managers, senior public affairs officers and employees who oversee spending and grants. They will be placed in a new category called Schedule Policy/Career, or Schedule P/C. During Trump’s first term, a similar classification was known as Schedule F.

The move is smaller than many had expected. OPM previously estimated that as many as 50,000 positions could be reclassified. Administration officials said Trump could expand the group later, though they said there were no immediate plans to do so.

“This is very much about accountability,” OPM Director Scott Kupor told reporters Wednesday. “It’s also about a restoration, in our mind, of the democratic process.”

Kupor said employees who help implement policy must be willing to carry out the directives of the elected president. “You can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism obviously for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will,” he said.

The federal government currently has about 4,000 political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president. Until now, most of the government’s roughly 2 million employees could be fired only for reasons such as poor performance or misconduct, and agencies had to follow formal procedures that included appeal rights.

Kupor said the reclassified employees will not face loyalty tests and will retain whistleblower protections. Federal law also bars firing workers based on political affiliation, though NPR reported that the employees will no longer have appeal rights and enforcement would be left to agencies.

The order revives an effort Trump began during his first term, when his administration attempted to move some federal employees into Schedule F. The Biden administration rescinded that rule before it fully took effect. Trump has argued that his first-term agenda was hampered by career workers who opposed his policies.

Labor unions and government accountability advocates say the change weakens civil service protections designed to keep public administration nonpartisan. The notion that federal jobs should be insulated from political pressure dates back more than 140 years, after corruption under the spoils system and the assassination of President James A. Garfield helped drive civil service reforms.

“The Trump-Vance administration’s attempts to dismantle civil service protections would make it easier to purge experienced public servants,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which is representing federal worker unions and allies in litigation challenging the rule. “When government experts can be fired without cause, it’s not just federal workers who are harmed – it’s the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day.”

The rule was already facing multiple lawsuits before Wednesday’s order specified which jobs would be affected. Federal judges had paused related litigation while the administration finalized changes.

Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, told NPR the order could discourage career employees from giving candid advice. “It creates bubbles around policymakers,” he said. “If you were a career civil servant and there is bad news that you want to share with the president, you’re less likely to do so if you think, ‘The minute I share that bad news, I’m going to get fired.’”

About 348,000 employees, more than 11% of the federal workforce, have left the government since October 2024, The Guardian reported.