Trump Reclassifies 8,000 Senior Civil Servants As Fireable At Will, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Career Experts Could Still Decline To Carry Out An Unlawful Order

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order Wednesday reclassifying roughly 8,000 of the federal government's most senior career employees into a new category called Schedule Policy/Career, stripping the job protections that had long prevented their removal and resolving a persistent concern that the nation's most experienced civil servants could still, in theory, refuse to do something.

Under the order, titled Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service, the affected employees become at-will, meaning agencies may remove them without the lengthy procedures that previously applied. The White House explained that grounds for dismissal include poor performance, misconduct, corruption, and what the order describes as "subversion of Presidential directives," a category the administration declined to distinguish from disagreement. Ninety-seven percent of the reclassified positions are GS-15 or Senior Level, the highest-ranking career posts below the Senior Executive Service, and include directors, the analysts who draft federal regulations, and the officials who determine who receives federal grants.

The administration was careful to clarify that the roles remain "career" positions and that removals would be made "without respect to political affiliation," a reassurance it offered regarding employees who can now be fired for failing to advance the President's agenda. Officials noted that the existing system was broken, citing the burdensome reality that removing a federal employee and resolving the subsequent appeal can take a year or more, a delay that has occasionally allowed civil servants to keep their jobs after declining to assist on matters they believed to be unlawful.

The order completes a project years in the making. It builds on Executive Order 13957, the first-term measure known as Schedule F, which President Biden revoked before it took effect. Trump reinstated the concept on his first day back in office, after which his Office of Personnel Management rescinded the regulations that had been written specifically to prevent a future president from doing what the President has now done. "We are draining the swamp and dismantling the deep state," a senior administration official said, using language the President has deployed since 2016 to describe the civil servants who administer veterans' benefits, forecast hurricanes, and inspect the meat supply.

Good-government scholars observed that the federal merit system was established in 1883, after a disappointed office-seeker shot President James Garfield, precisely to insulate the workforce from the demand that employment depend on personal loyalty to the chief executive. The administration characterized this 143-year-old arrangement as a recent obstacle. A plurality of senior federal employees, the White House added with concern, had told pollsters they would decline to carry out a lawful order from the President that they considered bad policy, a finding the order is designed to make professionally fatal.

At press time, the roughly 8,000 employees newly informed that they serve at the pleasure of the President were said to be performing their duties with a renewed and highly motivated attentiveness to the pleasure of the President.