Trump reclassifies thousands of federal employees, making it easier to fire them | Trump administration

Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday reclassifying thousands of federal employees as political recruits, making them easier to fire if they are deemed insufficiently loyal to the new president and his goals.

Part of a series of promised measures signed on the first day of Trump’s return to office, the order effectively reinstates “Schedule F,” which was intended to allow the reclassification of tens of thousands of federal workers. Appendix F changed civil service rules to permit the termination of a wide range of career federal employees without civil service protections, effectively reclassifying their jobs as political appointees.

In the executive order posted Monday evening on the White House website titled “Initial Reversals of Executive Orders and Harmful Actions,” Trump revoked an executive order issued by Joe Biden two days after he took office in 2021.

This order revoked another a Trump end-of-term executive order that redesignated many federal civilian employees, thereby exempting them from civil service protections.

The Biden administration rescinded that order, then countered it in April of last year with a rule that Joe Biden called “a measure to combat corruption and partisan interference to ensure that public officials can focus on the most important task at hand: meeting citizens’ expectations.” American people.”

But Trump’s top aides have long announced mass government layoffs as part of an attack on the so-called “administrative” or “deep” state, a supposedly permanent government of bureaucrats, agents and agents dedicated to block radical right-wing reforms.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman and former White House strategist, one of the main propagators of such attacks, said the deep state theory was “reserved for crackpot cases.”

Nonetheless, such attacks are a key part of Project 2025, the sweeping plan for a second Trump administration orchestrated by the far-right Heritage Foundation, which calls for public officials deemed politically unreliable to be fired and replaced with conservatives.

Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, was a key architect of the 2025 plan.

Trump also named Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and of Government Effectiveness” or “Doge”. “, an attempt to reduce federal spending by several billion dollars.

Observers expect significant opposition to moves to fire federal employees for political reasons, including in the courts.

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But Donald Kettl, an expert on government reform, recently told the government’s executive website that Schedule F “is probably constitutional.” If unions and Democrats challenge it, they will likely lose.

“…It would likely take at least two years to resolve the constitutional issues (but) even if Appendix F lost, it would give the administration two years to establish a new model of practice.” »

Many experts expect Trump’s actions 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 linked to positive performance outcomes, greater trust public and lower levels of corruption (while) politicization was negative. linked to government performance, employee attitudes to work…and impartial administration, and positively linked to corruption.

The implications of Trump’s plans, the authors write, are “unequivocal: Converting career employees to Schedule F and removing their civil service protections is likely to degrade government performance.”