Federal employees are questioning who could be pushed out next after the Trump administration tossed civil service protections for thousands of their colleagues.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to convert about 8,000 career staffers to Schedule Policy/Career, a new classification that essentially makes their employment “at will.” That will speed up the firing process, removing roadblocks as the administration plows ahead on its policy goals.
The job category is part of a larger effort by Trump to reshape the federal government, with a smaller workforce that complies more readily with what he and his appointees want to accomplish in office.
The job category supports Trump’s efforts “to make it easier to fire and replace senior — and not so senior — civil servants that the administration thinks are impeding its political agenda,” said John Logan, professor and chair of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University.
“From the perspective of unions and other opponents of this move, it’s a blatant effort to undermine the neutrality of civil servants, subject them to political pressure, and remove those who resist efforts to turn them into partisan employees, rather than neutral experts,” Logan said.
POLITICO’s E&E News talked to 11 federal employees about Schedule Policy/Career and how it will affect their agencies. Those workers, granted anonymity because they fear retaliation, saw the reclassification as a tool to apply political pressure to managers.
Included with Trump’s order was an appendix listing positions to be transferred to the category. Jobs at EPA, the Energy and Interior departments as well as other agencies would be converted.
One EPA employee said they were worried about the category, noting positions in the general counsel’s office as well as human resources and public affairs programs are named. Some supervisors left the agency last year to avoid losing their civil service protections, they said.
“Having them be ‘at will’ employees that could be fired for political reasons is very concerning,” the employee said.
After reviewing the order, a second EPA employee said it primarily affected the agency’s career management staffers, who are already at the discretion of what an administration wants.
“Now, they can be fired on whim for not obeying rules and regs,” the employee said. “Basically, they won’t push back.”
Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, doesn’t expect the administration to push out swathes of employees under the classification.
“They don’t necessarily want to fire a lot of people. They don’t need to,” Kettl said. “They simply want to establish the principle, and perhaps make examples of a few feds, to get the point across: They consider all federal employees to be ‘at will’ employees.”
‘Nothing to be afraid of’
A Department of Energy staffer said the classification mostly applies to people who advise on policy and legal issues at the department, possibly including several working in international affairs, legal and policy offices. Yet the staffer also highlighted inconsistencies, with some senior-level officials affected along with lower-ranking employees.
“As a career fed, I’m always concerned by attempts that seem to politicize positions that are intentionally designated for careers,” said the staffer. “I do understand the point of view that we need more ways to hold people accountable for performance, but designating a handful of positions that we think influence policy is not what I think should be the priority.”
One Department of the Interior official said they hadn’t received any notification from higher management about Schedule Policy/Career.
“But maybe it only went to the staff whose positions are changing,” they said. “Mine, thankfully, is not.”
It’s not clear how many positions will be reclassified at individual agencies. Those figures were not included in a White House fact sheet, which emphasized only top jobs were impacted.
“97% of reclassified positions are GS-15 or Senior Level positions,” the fact sheet said.
EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch didn’t address how many of the agency’s employees will be affected but said the agency “will follow all required timelines and directions.”
“As EPA implements the EO and final rule, the agency will continue to deliver on its core mission to protect human health and the environment and Power the Great American Comeback,” Hirsch said in a statement.
Interior’s press office referred E&E News to the Office of Personnel Management, and DOE didn’t respond.
The administration has stressed the classification is not about politics but rather job performance, noting the order says hires and firings are not to be made based on political affiliation.
“There were serious issues with policy resistance in the first term, and this is designed to provide an accountability tool to ensure that that can be swiftly addressed,” a senior administration official told reporters Wednesday.
The official added, “As long as they’re performing their job duties in a competent and professional manner, they have nothing to be afraid of.”
Ron Sanders, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, said federal employees are required to implement a president’s policy agenda to the best of their ability.
“We should all take a deep breath. This is not ‘the end of Western democracy as we know it,’ as some of my colleagues would claim,” Sanders said. “It precludes any sort of political loyalty test for a civil service job.”
A smaller impact
OPM originally estimated that 50,000 positions could be converted to the classification, according to the finalized rule. Yet Trump’s order signed Wednesday only reclassifies 8,000 positions.
Asked about that gap, OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover said, “The president ultimately decided which positions would be converted and chose the highest-ranking policy career managers in the federal government, those who need to be held most accountable.”
Federal workers were skeptical of the lower figure.
“No one believes that the number of employees affected is as low as 8,000,” said a third EPA employee. “The administration is lowballing the number to convince the American public that there is nothing to see here.”
Logan believes the administration will try to strip civil service protections from more government positions.
“These 8,000 are the most senior/most important to the Trump administration in terms of influencing government policy,” he said. “But it’s unlikely to give up on its agenda to make it easier to fire/politicize more of these positions.”
The senior administration official said that no more positions were about to be reclassified imminently beyond Trump’s order Wednesday.
“This is what’s being decided at the current time, and the president can decide to add more later if he chooses to,” the official said.
Back to court
Federal employees have been awaiting the executive order since March. Now that Trump has signed it, critics are reviving their court challenges.
National Treasury Employees Union President Doreen Greenwald said its lawsuit against the classification will resume.
“NTEU looks forward to aggressively pursuing that litigation and fighting to ensure the American people have their government services delivered by federal employees who were hired based on merit and skill, not partisan affiliation,” Greenwald said in a statement.
NTEU represents employees at 38 agencies, including DOE, EPA and Interior.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the country’s biggest federal worker union, pledged to fight against the category too in court, on Capitol Hill and this upcoming campaign season.
“The practical implications of this action are clear,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement. “Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out.”
Nevertheless, Sanders, who held senior human resources positions at the IRS, Defense Department and intelligence community, said the accountability system for federal employees has been broken for years, calling it “far too legalistic, too complex, and time consuming.”
“It needed to be fixed and this is one way to do so,” he said about Schedule Policy/Career. “Elections have consequences and this is one of them.”
Contact Kevin Bogardus on the encrypted messaging app Signal at KevinBogardus.89 and Hannah Northey at North1.11.
