New Trump rule allows federal workforce to be fired if they defy his agenda

President Donald Trump is moving forward with plans to reclassify career federal employees so as to make them easier to fire if they perform poorly or, worse, defy his administration’s agenda.

The plan, known as Schedule F, would reclassify career federal employees as “Schedule Policy/Career,” which is to say, as political appointees.

“This will allow agencies to quickly remove employees from critical positions who engage in misconduct, perform poorly, or undermine the democratic process by intentionally subverting presidential directives,” a memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) explains.

How so? Because this move will strip career employees of the extra civil protections that the Biden administration afforded them that require their terminations to be preceded by “cumbersome adverse action procedures or appeals,” according to a White House fact sheet.

.@WhiteHouse released a fact sheet on OPM’s new rule to strengthen the accountability and responsiveness of the federal workforce. Read more: https://t.co/yJEKCxneBZ

— U.S. Office of Personnel Management (@USOPM) April 18, 2025

OPM has estimated that the rule change would affect at least 50,000 federal employees.

President Trump fiercely defended the rule change in a Truth Social post.

“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,” he wrote. “This is common sense, and will allow the federal government to finally be ‘run like a business.’ We must root out corruption and implement accountability in our Federal Workforce!”

Following my Day One Executive Order, the Office of Personnel Management will be issuing new Civil Service Regulations for career government employees. Moving forward, career government employees, working on policy matters, will be classified as “Schedule Policy/Career,” and will…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2025

“Policy-making federal employees have a tremendous amount of influence over our laws and our lives,” OPM Acting Director Chuck Ezell likewise said Friday. “Such employees must be held to the highest standards of conduct.”

The media have already begun distorting the administration’s plans, with taxpayer-funded outlets like PBS News leading the charge.

“Bottom line, it [this rule change] makes it easier for the president to fire anyone that he considers disloyal and replace them with complete loyalists to his cause and to his agenda,” network correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez claimed Friday.

“We spoke to Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at University of Michigan, who said that … the end goal this is about imposing loyalty tests and that targeting bureaucracy in this way is a hallmark trait of authoritarian regimes,” she added.

But Barron-Lopez was lying.

The White House fact-sheet explicitly notes that affected career employees “will keep their competitive status and are not required to personally or politically support the President, but must faithfully implement the law and the administration’s policies.”

So no, it’s not a loyalty test.

White House asks Congress to formally defund NPR, PBS, USAID, claw back $9 billion https://t.co/y82bdILUbe

— BPR (@BIZPACReview) April 15, 2025

Meanwhile, pushback has begun to emerge from the American Federal of Government Employees (AFGE), which sued the administration in late January to try to preemptively stop it from enacting Schedule F.

“President Trump’s action to politicize the work of tens of thousands of career federal employees will erode the government’s merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on,” Everett Kelley, AFGE national president, said in a statement.

“This is another in a series of deliberate moves by this administration to corrupt the federal government and replace qualified public servants with political cronies. … Politicizing the career civil service is a threat to our democracy and to the integrity of all the programs and services Americans rely on,” he added.

There’s also been pushback from the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers.

“Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, which represents 90,000 workers, said … his union will fight the move,” Reuters reported.

Reuters also noted that, according to its own tally, “over 260,000 federal workers have already been fired, have taken buyouts, retired early or have been earmarked for termination since Trump took office.”

Ed. Dept. offers employees $25K buyout if they quit or retire by Monday https://t.co/4KcnfIW1mZ via @BIZPACReview

— Rick (@Richard03284638) March 2, 2025

Senior Staff Writer
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.

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