Trump Signs Order to Strip Protections From 8,000 Trump At-will Federal Workers
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that makes it easier to fire about 8,000 federal employees, creating a new class of trump at-will federal workers under the administration’s policy. The White House and the Office of Personnel Management released the order the same day.
The affected workers are mostly senior federal employees earning up to almost $200,000 a year. Scott Kupor said the order gives the administration a way to remove people in those agencies effectively at will if their views interfere with lawful orders and policy directives.
Trump and the OPM order
The order strips job protections from workers deemed to be influencing government policy. Kupor said the administration needs people willing and able to carry out orders to achieve its policy priorities, and he described the new mechanism in a call previewing the move.
“You can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism obviously for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will,” Kupor said.
The affected group is far smaller than a ceiling estimate of up to 50,000 workers who could have fallen under the new rules. Senior administration officials said Trump could expand the grouping, but they said he has no immediate plans to do so.
Schedule F and federal staffing
Trump’s first administration tried to reclassify federal employees to at-will status under schedule F. The Biden administration rescinded that rule before it took full effect.
About 348,000 employees have left the federal government since October 2024, a separate measure of how quickly the workforce has changed. The new order adds another layer of turnover pressure by reaching workers who had previously kept civil service protections.
Democracy Forward response
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement on the executive order: “The Trump-Vance administration’s attempts to dismantle civil service protections would make it easier to purge experienced public servants,” and “When government experts can be fired without cause, it’s not just federal workers who are harmed – it’s the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day.”
Democracy Forward is representing several federal worker unions and their allies in a lawsuit filed in January to strip civil service protection from thousands more workers. Federal judges paused that litigation while the Trump administration finalized changes, leaving the new order as the clearest immediate action affecting this group.
