National security, veterans care and veterans employment could all be harmed by the Trump administration's move to gut the civil service by reclassifying career government employees as policymakers working to advance the president's political agenda, both experts and employee unions are warning.
One of the executive orders President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office would strip employment protections afforded to civil servants by putting anyone who works in a "policy-influencing" role into a new class of government employees called "Schedule Policy/Career" who could be fired at will for any reason, including if they are deemed insufficiently loyal to the administration's agenda.
The executive order leaves it to individual government agencies to determine exactly which employees would fall under that category, and agencies have until April to submit their lists to the White House's personnel office -- meaning it could take some time to know the exact scope of the order and its effects.
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But experts said the language of the order and subsequent implementation guidance from the personnel office is broad enough that nearly any government worker may be considered a policymaker -- from a lawyer at the Pentagon helping determine whether an order is lawful to a benefits claims processor at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"It could really sweep up just about anyone, it seems," said Joe Spielberger, senior policy counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight’s Effective and Accountable Government team. "Especially when we're talking about agencies like the Pentagon that obviously has both such a critical role to play and also where we might see some of the greatest threats, like deploying the military domestically, it's hard to overstate the potential consequences of this."
The order Trump signed last month was similar to one he signed in the waning days of his first term in office after battles with career officials -- whom Trump derided as the "deep state" -- stymied some of his political agenda. Called "Schedule F" back then, the earlier order similarly tried to make it easier to fire bureaucrats and replace them with political appointees.
When former President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he quickly rescinded Trump's Schedule F order. Before leaving, the Biden administration also enacted regulations that sought to strengthen employment protections for civil servants in an effort to prevent a future GOP administration from reviving Trump's Schedule F plan.
But the new Trump administration is contending that Biden's regulations have no bearing on its Schedule Policy/Career order. A memo issued last week by the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, acting director Charles Ezell argued that Trump used his authority to "directly nullify these regulations" and that Trump's executive order "immediately superseded OPM regulations issued using delegated presidential authority."
The OPM memo also gives federal agencies until April 20 to identify which jobs will be reclassified as Schedule Policy/Career.
While the full scope of the order won't be known until then, clues about how expansive it could be can be gleaned from the first Trump administration's efforts to implement Schedule F, Spielberger said.
Prior to Trump leaving office the last time, the Office of Management and Budget identified dozens of jobs within its office that could be affected, according to documents obtained by the National Treasury Employees Union, or NTEU, through a public records request. In addition to policy and legislative analysts, the jobs included office managers, human resource specialists, administrative assistants, cybersecurity specialists and more.
NTEU, which represents employees in 37 agencies and offices, sued over the new executive order the same day it was signed.
Estimates for how many federal workers could get swept up in the new order range from 50,000 to 100,000. With an estimated 30% of the more than 2 million people who work for the federal government being veterans, any effort to gut the civil service could also have an outsized effect on veterans, said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that advocates for civil servants.
Further, replacing career officials at the Pentagon and the VA with political appointees could mean a loss of expertise in areas such as complex global relationships or veterans' unique health-care needs, Mattingley said.
"Government serves the public, and particularly when you think about Veterans Affairs or national security, those have some real significant implications for the public," Mattingley said. "Thinking about national security staff ... it's not always just the analysts. It's, do we have the HR staff? Do we have the data folks? Do we have all the adjacent pieces that make an organization work? There's a lot of impact to just doing good business if you start arbitrarily cutting folks."
With the implementation of the Schedule Policy/Career order pending, the Trump administration has already made other immediate moves to reshape the federal workforce, including instituting a hiring freeze, placing employees alleged to be involved in diversity efforts on leave and sending federal workers a "deferred resignation" offer that purports to allow them to agree to resign while continuing to get paid through September.
National security workers were exempt from the deferred resignation offer, and dozens of jobs at the Pentagon and VA were exempt from the hiring freeze.
But employees broadly see the early moves as a way to intimidate the federal workforce and soften the ground for the eventual Schedule Policy/Career implementation, said MJ Burke, first executive vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees' National Veterans Affairs Council. American Federation of Government Employees, or AFGE, is the largest federal employees union.
"If you're a dietitian technician who's cleaning trays for the veterans that go up on the ward, he just knows to put the mashed potatoes on there, to put the green beans, whatever. He is not entrenched in federal rulemaking," Burke said. "It is, I think, very confusing for people, and it creates chaos."
The union is bracing for what the Schedule Policy/Career implementation could look like for the VA, Burke added. Burke said she has heard anecdotally that there is already work going on at the Veterans Benefits Administration to figure out which jobs would be considered policymaking and so get converted into jobs that are easier to replace with political operatives.
"I think it's going to be a little chaotic for a while," Burke said.
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