Trump Prepares To Strip Job Protections For Tens Of Thousands Of Government Employees
HuffPost
The president signed an executive order hours after taking office that could eventually make it easier to fire thousands of civil servants.
President Donald Trump moved Monday to make it easier to strip tens of thousands of civil servants of their employment protections, reviving an unfinished priority from his first term to bend the government to his will.
The new category of civil servants, called “Schedule F,” would apply to federal employees who play a role in the policymaking process.
By stripping those positions of requirements for merit-based hiring and firing, and the right to appeal adverse personnel actions, Trump would open up the possibility of staffing the government with loyal political operators.
Early lists of potentially affected employees from the first Trump administration showed Trump’s team intended to interpret the category broadly, applying it to positions as varied as IT specialists, office managers and attorneys.
Monday’s executive order from Trump did not directly create the Schedule F category. Instead, Trump reversed a Joe Biden executive order, published in the early days of Biden’s presidency, that revoked Trump’s previous October 2020 executive order creating Schedule F. The Biden order was among scores that Trump reversed Monday.