President Donald Trump has formally moved thousands of federal employees to a new job classification to make it easier to fire them for any reason, finalizing a process that many lawmakers, advocates and employees warn will lead to a politicization of the career civil service.
Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that served as the final step in the long-anticipated implementation of the new Schedule Policy/Career system, which administration officials said will strip around 8,000 employees of the due process rights that have typically been afforded to the roughly 2 million nonpolitical appointees who work in federal agencies around government. Many of those rights date back to a 19th-century law meant to end the era of a government dominated by political patronage. The laws were most recently updated by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
Trump administration officials told reporters Wednesday there would be no political litmus test for federal employees subject to the reclassification.
“It’s also about a restoration, in our mind, of the democratic process,” Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said during a briefing on the order. “There are zero loyalty tests in this.”
Trending
Administration officials previously estimated as many as 50,000 employees would convert to the new designation, but they said in the end Trump opted for a far smaller number.
“This is what the president decided to do for the time being,” a senior administration official said, adding Trump could add more people to the list if he decides to do so, but “I would not suspect that anything is going to be imminent or impending.”
The Trump administration in February issued final regulations to implement the new classification system, which followed an executive order the president signed on his first day in office last year. The regulations established that agencies would determine which employees serve in policy-related roles. Those employees would then lose their rights to advance notice of forthcoming disciplinary action, an opportunity to respond to that decision and the chance to appeal it before a third party.
Under Trump’s new order, those designated for conversion will serve as at-will employees, a category previously reserved for political appointees and a small subset of career staff.
Trump attempted to issue the policy — then known as Schedule F — in the waning days of his first term, but ran out of time before it could take effect.
At least some agencies, such as the Health and Human Services Department, have already begun notifying employees that they would be converted to the new category. HHS said, however, the formal reclassification would not occur until Trump signed the executive order.
Administration officials said selections for reclassification were based on position duties. That overwhelmingly included staff at the very top of the federal employee pay scale, such as supervisors who lead agency subcomponents, provide strategic direction for their agency, spearhead the issuance of regulations or guidance, influence spending decisions, develop human resources policy or engage in policy advocacy.
A coalition of groups representing federal employees is currently suing over the policy — the suit is still pending in federal court. Those groups and others argue the new schedule system violates federal employees’ constitutional rights and undermines existing statutory protections. Converting large swaths of federal employees to at-will employment could make them vulnerable to the political whims of the administration, lead to firings based on loyalty and erode the expertise that the career civil service is designed to develop, they have said.
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a non-profit group leading the lawsuit against the administration over Schedule Policy/Career, said Trump’s new order could lead to a “purge of experienced public servants” that would harm the public.
“For generations, our country has relied on a professional, nonpartisan civil service,” Perryman said. “The people responsible for protecting our public health, safeguarding our environment, delivering our mail, managing our airports, protecting our public lands, and enforcing our laws should be allowed to do their jobs, not targeted by the same government they serve.”
The administration has said Article II of the Constitution grants the president the authority to remove federal workers without due process, and that existing civil service law is an “overcorrection” to historical abuses of power. A senior administration official said on Wednesday that any effort to cast the new schedule policy as a politicization of the civil workforce was due to “historical ignorance.”
“The purpose here is for positions that are senior positions with significant influence over policy, that they can be held accountable for effectively carrying out the law and advancing administration priorities,” the official said.
The officials stressed that hiring would be based on merit, though the administration has taken various actions to inject politics into the federal recruiting and selection process. Most federal job posts, for example, require applicants to write a short essay about their favorite Trump policies.
Agencies have spent months gathering lists of employees to reclassify. Ultimately, OPM and the White House had final say over which employees were included. OPM will issue final implementation guidance this week and agencies will have seven days to carry out the necessary administrative actions.
Author
