Trump, who has derided civil servants as agents of the “deep state,” promised on the campaign trail to reinstate a 2020 executive order known as Schedule F, giving him the power to commence mass firings of nonpartisan federal employees who might spoil Trump’s partisan plans.
“The objective is to create space to put loyalists in what were, what are still, career civil service positions,” former Trump appointee Ronald Sanders – who resigned over Trump’s politicization of the federal workforce – told CNN. Sanders added it is “problematic” if schedule F is being used to reinforce and maintain political loyalty.
Trump’s loyalist vision is already having a profound chilling effect on career employees, some of whom told CNN they plan to stay into the new year – but don’t know what’s next
“I would say there is a general feeling of dread among everyone,” one Energy Department employee told CNN.
In his first term, Trump sidelined and ridiculed civil servants and service members, silenced government offices and stifled scientific research. Many workers quit; others stuck it out, hopeful that the 2020 election would bring a new boss in the White House.
Now they face another four years of Trump – a term that by his own account will be worse for the government workforce than his first.
“We are absolutely having conversations among ourselves about whether we can stomach a round two,” an employee at the Environmental Protection Agency said.
How Trump could gut the government
Trump’s purge could be the biggest change to the federal workforce since the late 1800s, returning the federal government to the “spoils system” of 1883 when victorious political parties gave government jobs to their supporters, said Max Stier, the president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service. The spoils system was replaced by the current merit-based system where career employees serve multiple administrations, carrying out their jobs independent of politics.
“What’s at stake here is the nature of our government, how it works and who it works for,” Stier told CNN.
A Trump transition team spokeswoman didn’t respond to CNN’s questions about when Schedule F might be put in place, or how many workers it could impact.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “He will deliver.”
Mass firings likely won’t happen on day one. The Biden administration erected temporary roadblocks at the federal Office of Personnel Management – rules aimed at protecting federal workers from retaliatory mass firings.
But Biden’s rule was never codified by Congress and could easily be reversed.
Out of the more than 2 million federal employees working in the US and abroad, Schedule F could have a profound impact on the DC-Maryland-Virginia metro area, where nearly 449,000 federal workers live, according to a 2024 report. The District of Columbia itself has the largest individual chunk of federal workers in any state or territory, with more than 162,000.
But it could also be devastating to employment in states that went to Trump, where roughly 967,000 federal workers live.
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