President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that grants his administration sweeping new authority to remove thousands of senior federal employees without explanation, escalating a multi-month effort to fundamentally restructure the career government workforce. The order targets approximately 8,000 federal policymakers, reclassifying them into a newly created employment category named “schedule policy/career,” thereby stripping them of existing civil service protections.
"This administration is hiding the ball in claiming that this new schedule will address the challenge of poor performers in our government. Loyalty to the president rather than effective service to the public will be the new coin of the realm." — Max Stier, CEO, Partnership for Public Service.
Under this new classification, employees can now be dismissed on terms similar to those in the private sector, meaning without cause and without the right to appeal their termination. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had formalized this new category earlier in the year. Wednesday’s executive order specifically directs that the 8,000 affected workers, predominantly those in senior roles with direct influence over federal policy, be moved into this category immediately.
During the public signing ceremony, James Sherk of the Domestic Policy Council stood alongside President Trump, articulating the administration’s primary rationale for the change. Sherk stated, “It’s been a long-standing problem that it’s almost impossible to fire a federal employee, even in cases of serious misconduct. And that’s a particular problem if you’re in a senior policy-influencing role.” President Trump credited Sherk by name during the event, acknowledging him as a principal architect of the order. Sherk further elaborated, “What this [order] does is basically treat those employees like private sector workers.”
Before this executive order, the federal government operated with roughly 4,000 employees under at-will employment procedures. The new directive significantly expands this number to approximately 12,000, representing a threefold increase in such positions. This action marks the latest development in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to downsize and restructure the federal bureaucracy. Since President Trump’s return to the White House in January, his team has pursued workforce reductions through various avenues, including mass terminations coordinated with the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk.
Earlier efforts to reduce the federal workforce did not proceed without opposition. Federal courts intervened on multiple occasions to block or reverse terminations, and Mr. Musk himself conceded that the initiative had achieved only "a little bit successful" in meeting its stated objectives.
A White House fact sheet released concurrently with the executive order pledged that any terminations resulting from this reclassification would proceed “without respect to political affiliation.” However, this assurance has not quelled concerns among critics. Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, issued a swift response, drawing a direct comparison between the executive order and the 19th-century spoils system. This historical practice involved incoming presidents systematically replacing existing federal workers with political loyalists.
Stier commented, “This administration is hiding the ball in claiming that this new schedule will address the challenge of poor performers in our government. Loyalty to the president rather than effective service to the public will be the new coin of the realm.” Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during President Trump’s first term before becoming a vocal critic, shared his reaction on X. Taylor asserted that the order contravenes civil service law and claimed that “Trump has tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government.”
The number of workers affected by Wednesday’s order is considerably smaller than initial projections. In February, the OPM had anticipated that reclassification efforts could ultimately encompass as many as 50,000 federal employees. The current executive order covers only a fraction of that previously estimated figure.
The legal durability of the order remains uncertain. Federal courts have previously intervened multiple times against the administration’s prior workforce actions, and legal challenges to this new reclassification are widely anticipated. The administration continues to argue that career employees who hold significant influence over federal policy must be subject to a higher standard of accountability, and that existing civil service law has historically made enforcing such accountability unfeasible.
