President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday stripping civil service protections from roughly 8,000 senior federal employees, converting them to at-will status under a new employment classification called Schedule Policy/Career.
The order, released by the White House and the Office of Personnel Management, covers positions mostly at the GS-15 level, the highest rung of the career civil service. Affected roles include leaders of agency subcomponents and divisions, heads of regional and field offices, chief information officers, chief learning officers, senior HR officials, and program managers. Agencies have seven days to update the personnel records of affected employees.
“In order to affect the policy priorities of the administration, we need to have people willing to and capable of carrying out those directives,” OPM Director Scott Kupor told reporters on a press call Wednesday.
Kupor cast the order as a matter of accountability rather than political retribution. “It’s also about a restoration, in our mind, of the democratic process,” he said. “What Schedule Policy/Career does is really nothing new. This is exactly the way the system worked for a very long time.”
Kupor added: “You can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at-will.”
Under long-standing civil service rules, the federal government’s roughly 2 million career employees can be dismissed only for documented cause, with formal appeal rights. Wednesday’s order changes that for the targeted 8,000. The federal government already has about 4,000 political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president. The new order roughly triples that number.
The 8,000 figure is far smaller than initial projections. OPM originally estimated that as many as 50,000 positions could be reclassified. Some outside analysts had placed the number as high as 200,000. Administration officials said expanding the pool of affected positions remains possible.
Wednesday’s order formalizes a rule the administration finalized in February. That rule is already facing lawsuits from multiple federal employee unions, who argue it violates the Civil Service Reform Act and would gut the merit-based civil service system.
