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The Trump administration’s Day 1 executive actions governing federal workforce issues could collectively kickstart the new president’s efforts to politicize the nonpartisan civil service, beginning with a potential “mass layoff” of recent agency hires, good government experts said Tuesday.
As part of a tranche of executive actions either setting new policy or revoking Biden-era initiatives issued upon his inauguration Monday, President Trump revived Schedule F, albeit under a slightly different moniker—Schedule Policy/Career. Like the first iteration of the policy, unveiled in October 2020 but never implemented, it aims to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers in so-called “policy-related” positions out of the competitive service, stripping them of their civil service protections and making them effectively at-will employees.
There are some changes from the original Schedule F executive order: first, it strips much of the language regarding exempting Schedule F positions from the competitive hiring process. And in various places it moves the final decision-making authority for conversion of jobs into the new job classification to the president, rather than the Office of Personnel Management director, likely in an effort to make it easier to ward off legal challenges.
The National Treasury Employees Union has already filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from moving forward with implementing Schedule F, arguing that when Congress passed the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, it defined “policy-related” positions specifically as political appointees, not career workers, and that excepted service job schedules should be “narrowly defined.”
“Congress has enacted comprehensive legislation governing the hiring and employment of federal employees,” the union wrote. “When establishing hiring principles, Congress determined that most federal government jobs be in the merit-based, competitive service. And it established that most federal employees have due process rights if their agency employer wants to remove them from employment. Because the Policy/Career executive order attempts to divest federal employees of these due process rights, it is contrary to congressional intent.”
Replacing the original Schedule F’s hiring process changes is a new executive order entitled Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service. Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, positively cited the measure, which tasks officials with developing a hiring action plan to reduce the time it takes to hire new federal employees, better communicate with job applicants throughout the process and better incorporate technology into the hiring and selection process.
“I think there’s clearly been a lot of work and thought done here at the end of the day,” he said. “The fact is there are some things that we think are quite positive, like the proposed reform of the hiring process, which is indeed quite broken.”
But Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy, warned that there are worrying passages within that order as well. In addition to language denigrating concepts like equity and gender identity, it calls for ensuring federal jobseekers “faithfully serve the executive branch,” in addition to the existing oath to defend the Constitution.
“It’s a loyalty test, to both the administration and to its values,” Kettl said. “It’s an opportunity in the screening process to ensure that the people hired are aligned with what they want to advance, an effort to transform government to match Trump’s basic values from the very start.”
Jacque Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, said that her union is always opposed to efforts to make the hiring process “more subjective.”
“If you look at the language of this hiring executive order, where they’re talking about making sure you only hire Americans ‘dedicated to . . . ideals and values,’ you have to wonder how that’s going to be measured and assessed,” she said. “In the competitive service, objective criteria are supposed to be the only factors considered, and it sounds like these are very subjective matters, which opens the system up to discrimination.”
Another troubling development came in the form of a Monday night memo from Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell, which calls on agencies to submit a complete list of employees still within their one-year probationary periods by Friday. It also stresses that probationary employees lack appeal rights before the Merit System Protection Board and encourages agencies to use paid administrative leave to send employees home while they consider restructuring offices and components.
Kevin Owen, a partner at the law firm Gilbert Employment Law, said he took OPM’s memo as a signal that the administration may seek to use probationary employees as a way to fulfill Trump and his confidant Elon Musk’s promise of “mass layoffs” of federal workers.
“I think that is a precursor to their pledge to reduce the size of the federal government, and an easy target to make those reductions are the people with no rights and who were hired by the last guy,” Owen said. “[And] I think it sets a precedent that will allow future administrations to do the same going forward. That may invite Congress to step in and change that rule in the future—not this Congress, but a future one—because this will start to encroach more and more into a spoils system as time goes on.”
And Ron Sanders, a former chairman of the Federal Salary Council who resigned his post in 2020 after Trump unveiled the first iteration of Schedule F, described the OPM memo as the first in a pair of shoes to drop.
“The second shoe is that once those lists are in place, those probationary workers are at risk,” he said.
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