A stroke of the pen Wednesday gave the Trump administration sweeping new authority to remove thousands of entrenched federal employees without explanation, escalating a months-long campaign to fundamentally restructure the career government workforce.
The executive order targets 8,000 senior federal policymakers, stripping them of civil service protections and placing them into a newly created employment category called “schedule policy/career.”
Workers in this classification can now be dismissed on the same terms as employees in the private sector — without cause and without appeal.
The Office of Personnel Management formalized the new category earlier this year. Wednesday’s order directed that the 8,000 affected workers — primarily those in senior roles with influence over federal policy — be moved into it immediately.
James Sherk of the Domestic Policy Council stood beside the president at the public signing and laid out the administration’s core argument for the change.
“It’s been a long-standing problem that it’s almost impossible to fire a federal employee, even in cases of serious misconduct,” Sherk said. “And that’s a particular problem if you’re in a senior policy-influencing role.”
Trump singled out Sherk by name during the ceremony, crediting him as a principal architect of the order.
“What this [order] does is basically treat those employees like private sector workers,” Sherk added.
Before Wednesday, the federal government could hire and fire roughly 4,000 employees under at-will procedures. The new order pushes that number to approximately 12,000 — a threefold increase.
The action is the latest chapter in the administration’s aggressive effort to downsize and restructure the federal bureaucracy.
Since Trump returned to the White House in January, his team has pursued workforce reductions through multiple fronts, including mass terminations carried out in coordination with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Those earlier efforts did not go unchallenged. Federal courts repeatedly stepped in to block or reverse terminations, and Musk himself acknowledged the initiative had been only “a little bit successful” in achieving its stated goals.
A White House fact sheet released alongside the order pledged that any terminations would proceed “without respect to political affiliation.” That assurance did little to quiet opponents.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, responded swiftly. CEO Max Stier drew a direct parallel between the order and the spoils system — a 19th-century practice in which incoming presidents systematically replaced the existing federal workforce with political loyalists.
“This administration is hiding the ball in claiming that this new schedule will address the challenge of poor performers in our government,” Stier said. “Loyalty to the president rather than effective service to the public will be the new coin of the realm.”
Miles Taylor, who held the position of chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term before becoming one of the president’s most vocal critics, posted his reaction on X.
Taylor charged that the order ran afoul of civil service law and stated that “Trump has tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government.”
The number of workers caught in Wednesday’s order is dramatically smaller than what the administration once projected. The OPM predicted in February that reclassification efforts could ultimately sweep up as many as 50,000 federal employees. The current order covers a fraction of that figure.
Whether the order survives legal scrutiny remains to be seen. Courts have already intervened multiple times against the administration’s earlier workforce actions, and legal challenges to the new reclassification are widely anticipated.
The administration has maintained that career employees wielding outsized influence over federal policy must be held to a higher standard of accountability — and that existing civil service law has long made that accountability impossible to enforce.
