Trump strips civil-service protections from thousands of feds

Some 8,000 career federal workers were stripped of civil-service protections on Wednesday by President Trump, who ordered their positions to be converted into at-will employment.

The edict marks the culmination of a years-long push to make it easier to fire federal employees in “policy-related” jobs by removing them from the federal government’s competitive service and placing them in a new job category, initially called Schedule F and now referred to as Schedule Policy/Career. Such employees lose their right to challenge adverse personnel actions before the Merit Systems Protection Board, while their whistleblower complaints will be investigated by their own agency, rather than the Office of Special Counsel.

The Trump administration had considered converting some 50,000 federal jobs, a senior administration official told reporters Wednesday. Instead, the president chose to focus on "the most senior-level career policy officials," an OPM spokesperson said.

About 97 percent of the affected workers are GS-15s or senior leaders, the official said. Among them are agency office and division heads; C-suite leaders such as chief information officers; regional officers and their deputies and chiefs of staff; program managers; people who help write federal regulations; attorneys who craft agency or internal policies; as well as advisors, senior HR officials, and grantmaking posts.

The White House's list of affected positions includes ones at the departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security.

Trump first ordered such conversions in October 2020, but after he lost his re-election bid, his executive order was left unimplemented. President Biden rescinded the edict, and in 2024 the Office of Personnel Management issued new regulations to make it more difficult to revive the idea.

Soon after Trump took office for the second time, administration officials suggested he could simply “nullify” those regulations. But OPM ultimately followed the notice-and-comment process to propose new regulations to unwind the Biden-era protections and implement Schedule F ideas as Schedule Policy/Career. OPM’s final rule implementing the new job category took effect in March.

The policy remains the subject of multiple lawsuits by federal employee unions, who have accused the administration of violating the Constitution, the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. Good-government groups have warned that at-will employment of public employees in state government has sometimes reduced productivity while increasing reports of political and personal favoritism in the workplace.

On Wednesday, OPM chief Scott Kupor and another official rejected warnings that the measure would give rise to a new spoils system in federal employment. They said the hiring process would remain unchanged, without political litmus tests.

They did not mention that OPM added politicized essay questions to the federal hiring process more than a year ago. 

“In order to effect the president’s policy priorities, we need people in these senior positions willing and capable of carrying out those directives,” Kupor said. “All this does is basically say: it doesn’t matter what your political views are–and you can have any political views–but if you allow them to interfere in your willingness to carry out lawful orders and directives, this is a mechanism for you to be removed, effectively at-will...There are zero loyalty tests in this.”