President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order formalizing his plan to strip civil service protections from thousands of federal policy workers, converting them into a new employment category that critics say effectively turns career professionals into political appointees.
The order creates Schedule Policy/Career (P/C), a revised version of the Schedule F classification that the first Trump administration pursued but never fully implemented. It applies to roughly 8,000 federal employees in policy-making roles, who will now be subject to hiring and firing rules similar to those for political appointees, losing the workplace safeguards guaranteed under the Civil Service Reform Act.
In a fact sheet accompanying the order, the White House argued that the current system makes it too difficult to remove underperforming or problematic employees. “Employees with significant policy-making responsibilities can stay in their jobs for years even if they perform poorly, engage in misconduct, or are unwilling to advance Presidential policy across administrations,” the White House wrote, describing the new positions as “at-will.”
The reclassification will affect some of the highest-ranking career officials in government. According to administration figures, about 97 percent of the workers moved into Schedule P/C hold GS-15 positions, the top tier of the federal pay scale.
Federal employee unions immediately condemned the move as an attack on the nonpartisan civil service. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal worker union, said in a statement: “This is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons. Thousands of employees who were hired under the nonpartisan, professional civil service will be converted to a new hiring schedule where they can be fired ‘at will’ by political appointees or other overseers with essentially no procedural or appeal safeguards that have long protected the integrity of government operations.”
Kelley added that the practical effect will be to discourage whistleblowers. “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,” he said. “That is a disservice to them and to the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government every day.”
The White House has insisted that politics will play no role in personnel decisions under the new schedule. “These remain ‘career’ positions and the non-partisan hiring processes, competitive status, and other aspects of these roles will not change,” the fact sheet stated. “Removal decisions will also be made without respect to political affiliation.”
The merit-based civil service was established in 1883 to replace the spoils system, under which government jobs were doled out based on political connections. The Trump administration first finalized the Schedule P/C rule in February, but implementation has been blocked by lawsuits from multiple employee unions, which argue that the new classification violates the Civil Service Reform Act by stripping workers of legally guaranteed protections and undermining the merit-based hiring system.
