President Donald Trump plans to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers, reducing their civil service protection and making it easier to dismiss career employees, according to Axios.
On Friday, Axios reported that the Trump administration is set to reclassify 50,000 federal employees, about 2% of the federal workforce, as "at will" workers under Schedule F, a new employment category for federal workers established by an executive order Trump issued in his first term and renamed "Schedule Policy/Career" in an order issued on the first day of his second term.
This category would make it much easier for the Trump administration to dismiss longtime civil servants and other federal workers "in policy-influencing roles for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of presidential directives, without lengthy procedural hurdles."
"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," said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, in a statement.
Trump's executive order issued earlier this year prompted several lawsuits against the administration from employee rights groups and government watchdogs, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Democracy Forward, which filed a lawsuit against Trump as well as Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, and the OPM itself over the order in federal court at the end of January.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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