Trump reinstates plan to strip protections from federal workers

President Donald Trump on Monday reinstated a policy to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of federal workers, potentially allowing his administration to reshape agencies by stocking them with political loyalists.

The executive order was one of multiple first-day Trump directives aimed at overhauling the federal workforce of 2.3 million - including a hiring freeze, a strict return-to-office mandate, an update of hiring rules and changes designed to bring more accountability to career senior executives, in part by making them easier to dismiss.

The White House described the order stripping employment protections from agency employees as necessary to rein in what Trump and his allies have called a “deep state” of bureaucrats who resisted his plans during his first term.

“There have been numerous and well-documented cases of career Federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership,” reads the order, signed by Trump around 9 p.m. on Monday. “Principles of good administration, therefore, necessitate action to restore accountability to the career civil service.”

Critics, though, have said the policy will upend the foundation of the modern civil service, in which staffers are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. Those in the new job category will have limited due-process rights to appeal dismissals by the Trump administration. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in 37 agencies and departments, quickly sued Trump over the order.

“President Trump’s order is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 750,000 civil servants, said in a statement. “This unprecedented assertion of executive power will create an army of sycophants beholden only to Donald Trump, not the Constitution or the American people.”

The Biden administration last year passed a rule designed to prevent Trump from reinstating the plan, originally issued at the end of Trump’s first term by creating a new job category called Schedule F. It was unclear Monday how Trump’s revived order would navigate that obstacle.

The new mandate empowers the Trump administration to reclassify career civil servants, largely serving in high-ranking policy roles, into a category similar to political appointees who come in with every new administration and can be fired at will.

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Another order signed Monday mandates a strict new performance appraisal system for senior agency leaders that will make it easier for the administration to fire those it considers poor performers.

Schedule F was one of the most significant - and controversial - initiatives in Trump’s first term. But the administration ran out of time to fully implement it. Only the White House budget office, led then by Russell Vought - who is also Trump’s pick to run the office in his second term - completed a review of which analysts would fall into the new job category. The number came to more than 90 percent.

The first directive did not lead to any firings of career civil servants, the mostly professional employees across the government who stay on when new administrations take office, carrying out the policies of any new president. Roles vary from meat inspectors to Border Patrol officers, Veterans Affairs nurses to environmental experts implementing clean-air regulations.

After Biden rescinded the 2020 order, Democrats tried to pass legislation to block it permanently. But that effort failed in a divided Congress. Instead, the Biden administration instituted a regulation that would make it more burdensome for Trump to reinstate Schedule F.

The legality of the policy has never been tested. But attorneys representing federal workers have been preparing a court challenge for months.

Unions that represent federal employees assailed Monday’s reissued plan as a return to the patronage system that formed the federal workforce until the end of the 19th century.

Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement that the order will “administer political loyalty tests to everyday employees in the federal workforce who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and serve their country. The American people deserve to have government services delivered by qualified, nonpartisan professionals who do their job regardless of which party occupies the White House.”

The policy’s return is one of a number of Trump plans to shrink federal spending, and to gut and radically reshape the nonpartisan bureaucracy.

Trump on Monday also issued a robust plan to improve and speed up the federal hiring process. Some of the provisions - for example, shortening the time it takes to hire someone - have been goals of other presidents. But Monday’s order also explicitly calls current federal hiring practices “broken, insular, and outdated”; bans racial, gender and religious preferences in hiring; and calls on federal agencies to come up with better tools to vet candidates, possibly by imposing assessment tests.

Trump also signed a freeze on the hiring of civilian employees across the government, exempting active duty military personnel and positions related to immigration enforcement, national security and public safety. The order prohibits the use of outside contractors to get around the freeze, a strategy used by previous administrations to maneuver around hiring caps.

The hiring freeze also appears to open the door for permanent personnel reductions that Trump pledged in his campaign. The order directs the administration to come up with plans to “reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition” within 90 days. Then the freeze will be lifted for most agencies - except the Internal Revenue Service. That agency will not be able to hire until Trump officials “determine that it is in the national interest” to bring on new employees.

Federal employees whose pandemic work-from-home arrangements continued through the Biden administration will be required to return to the office full time, under another executive order issued Monday. The order directs federal agency and department heads to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”

But it leaves room for federal officials to “make exemptions they deem necessary,” creating an opening for more flexible arrangements or possibly full-time telework for some employees. The directive does not address how agencies should bring employees back if their offices no longer have space for them to work.

The return-to-office order is likely to run into stiff resistance from federal unions, many of which have telework guaranteed as part of their contracts - including some agreements extended in the final weeks of Biden’s administration.