Donald Trump on Friday said his administration is implementing a move that will allow far more firings of federal employees and will make significantly more roles into politically appointed positions beholden to the president.
The office of personnel management (OPM) on Friday published a new rule that invokes “Schedule F”, a prior attempt to reclassify wide swaths of federal workers not as civic service roles with protections regardless of who’s in power, but as political appointees who can be hired or fired based on their allegiances to the president.
“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,” Trump wrote on Friday on his Truth Social platform. “This is common sense, and will allow the federal government to finally be ‘run like a business.’”
The president previously issued an executive order on his first day in office that reclassified a host of federal workers.
The policy unveiled on Friday is one Trump first sought late in his first presidency. But Joe Biden overturned it after defeating him in the 2020 election. The idea aligns with a major plank of Project 2025, the conservative policy manifesto, which calls for a federal government more beholden to the executive branch to drive out a supposed “deep state” that stood in Trump’s way before he won his second presidency.
Most federal government employees serve in roles that are not politically appointed. About 4,000 employees are in roles appointed based on who is in power. Friday’s move would expand that by about 50,000 people, prior estimates have shown.
The latest rule comes on top of the Trump administration’s ongoing quest to root out of the federal government all priorities, and the personnel who carried them out, with which Trump disagrees.
