The Trump administration is seeking to finalize its overhaul of the federal government’s civil service system through a rule issued this week by the office of personnel management (OPM) to strip job protections from 50,000 civil service employees.
Under the rule, the president would have the authority to fire and hire an estimated 50,000 career federal employees.
The OPM said it was reclassifying certain career civil service roles so agencies can “quickly remove employees from critical positions who engage in misconduct, perform poorly, or obstruct the democratic process by intentionally subverting Presidential directives”.
The rule also would change how whistleblower protections, meant to protect whistleblowers from retaliation, are enforced. Instead of the independent office of special counsel handling most whistleblower disclosures from federal workers, federal agencies would be in charge of determining job protections for whistleblowers in their own department.
On Trump’s first day in office on 20 January 2025, he issued an executive order to reclassify thousands of federal employees as political appointees.
“If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in April 2025 after the OPM proposed the rule to reclassify the federal civil service employees as political appointees. “This is common sense, and will allow the federal government to finally be ‘run like a business.’”
During Trump’s first term, he sought to enact these changes in October 2020 under a rule known as Schedule F, but the change was rescinded when Biden took office before it could be implemented.
The latest rule will be reviewed by a federal judge, and critics, notably the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union and Democracy Forward non-profit, have already expressed intent to challenge the rule in court.
Traditionally, only political appointees – roughly 4,000 positions – can be dismissed “at will”.
Under the new rule, many non-partisan roles would be shifted into a category called “Schedule Policy/Career”, in effect treating them as political appointees. That reclassification could allow the administration to remove employees it views as disloyal. The rule – set to be published in the Federal Register on Friday – also states that “personal or political loyalty tests as a condition of employment” are prohibited.
Critics argue the change would open the door to politically motivated purges. “We have successfully fought this kind of power grab before, and we will fight this again. We will return to court to stop this unlawful rule and will use every legal tool available to hold this administration accountable to the people,” said Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward.
The largest union representing federal workers called the rule “a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service”. In a statement, the AFGE president, Everett Kelley, said the OPM was “rebranding career public servants as ‘policy’ employees, silencing whistleblowers, and replacing competent professionals with political flunkies without any neutral, independent protections against politicization and arbitrary abuse of power”.
Stripping civil service protections has also been a central plank of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.
In a statement on Thursday, anticipating the rule’s release, the OPM director, Scott Kupor, said the reclassification would bring “much-needed accountability to career policy-influencing positions in the Federal government”.
Shrai Popat contributed reporting
