President Donald Trump has formally moved thousands of federal employees to a new job classification to make it easier to fire them for any reason, finalizing a process that many lawmakers, advocates and employees warn will lead to a politicization of the career civil service.
Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that served as the final step in the long-anticipated implementation of the new Schedule Policy/Career system, which administration officials said will strip around 8,000 employees of the due process rights that have typically been afforded to the roughly 2 million nonpolitical appointees who work in federal agencies around government. Many of those rights date back to a 19th-century law meant to end the era of a government dominated by political patronage. The laws were most recently updated by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
Trump administration officials told reporters Wednesday there would be no political litmus test for federal employees subject to the reclassification.