Holding the Government Accountable
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Analysis

The Dangers of Trump’s Schedule Policy/Career Executive Order

Schedule F attempted to replace nonpartisan federal workers with partisan lapdogs. Schedule Policy/Career is even worse.

Collage of a giant, looming hand pointing; underneath, a queue of fired workers hold cardboard boxes with danger symbols scattered around them.

(Photos: Getty Images; Illustration: Leslie Garvey / POGO)

On Inauguration Day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of dangerous executive orders targeting the federal workforce. These executive orders include instituting a new hiring freeze for federal employees, ending diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and positions, reassigning Senior Executive Service officials, and reclassifying career civil servants as at-will employees. This change rolls back additional protections the Office of Personnel Management provided in 2024 and makes it easier to fire up to hundreds of thousands of federal employees. This widespread attack on federal workers will undermine the professional civil service, allowing for the elimination of anyone the administration views as potentially disloyal to the president’s ideological agenda, and remake the executive branch into a partisan political weapon.

Foundational to this approach is bringing back the Trump administration’s 2020 Schedule F policy, this time renamed Schedule Policy/Career. This policy would empower this president to dismantle the federal civil service by stripping wide swaths of nonpartisan career experts of their job protections as a precursor to firing and replacing them with partisan ideologues who would pledge their loyalty to the president’s political agenda and follow any order regardless of the consequences.

This will further instill a culture of fear across the federal government, possibly even making federal employees too “traumatically affected” to do their jobs. Traumatizing federal workers or replacing them with unqualified sycophants would put at risk the servicesbenefits, and support that empower the public to live safer and healthier lives. Schedule Policy/Career also goes against what the American people want, according to 2024 polling. Strong majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents believe that having a nonpartisan civil service is important for a strong democracy, and that civil servants should serve the people and the Constitution more than any individual president. And finally, politicizing the civil service and silencing dissent will make it far less likely that anyone would speak out against abuse of power, waste, fraud, illegal orders, and other wrongdoing, worsening corruption across our government. 

The Trump administration always planned to reimplement Schedule F as soon as possible. But Schedule Policy/Career takes that extreme policy even further. Here are the three biggest ways Schedule Policy/Career is more dangerous than Schedule F ever was. 

Schedule Policy/Career Targets More Federal Employees Than Schedule F

It was commonly estimated that the president’s 2020 Schedule F policy would impact up to 100,000 or more federal employees, but Schedule Policy/Career gives the administration far more discretion to reclassify workers. Schedule F already had an expansive definition of policy-related positions to be reclassified, encompassing any federal employees whose duties included “viewing, circulating, or otherwise working with proposed regulations, guidance, executive orders, or other non-public policy proposals or deliberations.” This swept up office managers, HR specialists, administrative assistants, IT specialists, correspondence specialists, and Freedom of Information Act officers.

Replacing federal workers with unqualified sycophants would put at risk the services, benefits, and support that empower the public to live safer and healthier lives.

Schedule Policy/Career expands this definition to include any federal workers “directly or indirectly supervising employees in Schedule Policy/Career.” While Schedule F authorized agency heads to petition the Director of the Office of Personnel Management to reclassify employees, Schedule Policy/Career goes even further, allowing the Office of Personnel Management’s director to add any other positions they believe “may be appropriate for inclusion in Schedule Policy/Career.” This means that almost any career civil service position could be at risk of being politicized and fired.

Guidance issued by the Office of Personnel Management lists additional positions that agencies should consider for Schedule Policy/Career, including those that involve “substantive participation and discretionary authority in agency grantmaking [including] recommending or selecting grant recipients.” This may be especially troubling, given the administration’s recent attempt to freeze agency grant, loan, and financial assistance programs, and increase concerns that all future federal funding may be politicized.

Schedule Policy/Career Confuses Loyalty to the President with Loyalty to the Constitution

Schedule Policy/Career tries to preempt one of the main arguments against it, that the federal workforce will be forced to pledge loyalty to the president personally over their oath to the Constitution. The executive order states, “Employees in or applicants for Schedule Policy/Career positions are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration.” This suggests there may still be room in the federal workforce for those who are opposed to the president’s agenda but will silently obey any order. However, the executive order continues by stating that employees “are required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability, consistent with their constitutional oath and the vesting of executive authority solely in the President. Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal.” 

This language gives the administration extensive authority to fire anyone it deems a threat to its partisan agenda and provides little comfort for those willing to speak out about unlawful or unethical actions. The way the executive order is worded even suggests that the Constitution may require federal employees to follow any order given. 

This raises the question of whether failure to “faithfully implement administration policies” will put a target on anyone who defends scientific integrity, disseminates accurate public health advice, publicizes truthful weather reports, targets real national security threats, or otherwise speaks honestly, even when it isn’t what the administration wants to hear.

Schedule Policy/Career Attempts to Shield Itself from Lawsuits

Having anticipated legal challenges to this executive order (indeed, the National Treasury Employees Union is already challenging it in court), the order was drafted to include three avenues intended to stave off such lawsuits.

First, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a final agency action is what triggers judicial review and allows someone to bring forth a lawsuit challenging an agency’s rulemaking. The 2020 Schedule F policy authorized the Office of Personnel Management to grant agencies’ petitions to reclassify employees, likely constituting final agency action and allowing lawsuits to challenge that action. Schedule Policy/Career tries to circumvent APA challenges by shifting some authority from agency heads to the president, requiring the Office of Personnel Management’s director to instead “recommend to the President which positions should be placed in Schedule Policy/Career.” Because the president is not an agency under the APA and agency recommendations are not final actions, this process will make it more difficult to successfully challenge this policy under the APA.

This language gives the administration extensive authority to fire anyone it deems a threat to its partisan agenda.

Second, rulemaking can also be challenged on the grounds that it is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion,” “contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity,” or “in excess of statutory jurisdiction.” The amorphous definition of policy-related positions and expansive application of this definition to encompass almost any position could provide ample opportunity to challenge Schedule Policy/Career on the grounds that it is arbitrary and an abuse of discretion. But because the executive order shifts some authority from agencies to the president, this may make the executive order more immune to judicial review.

Third, as stated above, Schedule Policy/Career also includes language that federal employees are not required to support the president or policies of the administration. This may insulate the executive order from any lawsuits that are based on constitutionally protected freedom of speech.

Conclusion

At first glance, President Trump’s 2025 Schedule Policy/Career Executive Order may appear to simply reimplement the original, if still very harmful, Schedule F policy from 2020. But this policy goes much further than the first attempt to remake the nonpartisan federal civil service into an arm of the president’s political apparatus. Schedule Policy/Career will encompass more federal employees, inject confusion as to where employees’ loyalties should lie, and prove more difficult to challenge in the courts. 

Lest there be any doubt, this executive order is framed around the unitary executive theory that the president has sole authority over the executive branch, notwithstanding the role of independent agencies, federal courts, and Congress’s authority to legislate and appropriate funds — and therefore the president’s orders should be treated as those of a king.

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