If Donald Trump returns to the White House, he is expected to try to shake up the federal workforce by making it easier to replace career civil servants — many of whom have worked through both Democratic and Republican administrations — with conservative loyalists.

But critics say such reform could inflict considerable, lasting damage on the federal government. 

In October 2020, with three months left in his presidency, Trump signed an executive order reclassifying employees “in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” to a new category called “Schedule F.” The shift meant those workers would lose their job protections and could be fired without cause. 

There was not enough time for the Trump administration to implement Schedule F before his term ended, and President Joe Biden quickly rescinded the executive order after taking office. But Trump has vowed to revive it if he wins in November as part of his plan to “dismantle the deep state.”

“I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump said in a March 2023 video posted on Rumble, a message he has repeated on the campaign trail since. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”

Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee again this year, blames the so-called “deep state” for plotting in the shadows of the federal government to undermine his presidency. It’s a message many Republicans have bought into.

A coalition of conservative organizations, led by the policy institute The Heritage Foundation, is working on an initiative called Project 2025, which aims to provide Trump with a list of vetted, trained — and conservative — candidates to consider for government jobs.

“A conservative president coming to the office has very little ability in terms of personnel to even shape the policy that the American people just voted to deliver,” Project 2025 Director Paul Dans told Spectrum News. “And that’s what we want. We want the president to be able to have a team behind him or her to move out day one.”

A tool to fight corruption

Federal workers have enjoyed the protections for more than a century. 

In 1912, Congress passed a law, the Lloyd-La Follette Act, codifying that classified civil servants could only be removed “for such cause as will promote the efficiency of said service.” 

The law was in response to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft prohibiting federal employees from speaking to Congress without authorization from their supervisors. Lawmakers wanted to protect workers who wished to report corruption and malfeasance in the executive branch. 

Prior to 1883, federal employees were hired or retained based upon political contributions and connections rather than qualifications, known as the “spoils system.” The Pendleton Act then transformed the government workforce to a merit-based system and made it illegal to fire or demote certain employees for political reasons. 

‘A league of folks … that is highly partisan’

But Dans said that today “the pendulum has gone completely to the other side” and the federal workforce is highly politicized, favoring Democrats. 

The Heritage Foundation pointed to data showing Republicans make up just 5% of the electorate in Washington, D.C., and that 95% of political contributions by federal employees went to Democrats in the 2022 congressional midterms. (A 2022 poll by GovExec, however, found more balance — 46% of federal workers planned to vote Democrat and 35% planned to vote Republican.)

Dans argued Trump faced employees within his own agencies who worked, for example, against the then-president’s wishes to remove troops from Afghanistan and build a wall on the southwest border.

Dans also claimed the FBI investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with Russia and the ongoing criminal cases against Trump are proof of a government weaponized against the former president. Dans alleged the White House and the Justice Department under President Joe Biden are behind the New York case in which Trump is on trial for allegedly falsifying business documents to hide hush money payments made to a porn star, although there is no evidence of their involvement. Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four of his criminal cases.

“There is a league of folks within the government that is highly partisan and really working against democracy, and they need to be excised from the government properly,” Dans said.

Adding to the concerns of Schedule F critics is that Trump, who continues to baselessly claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, has a track record of demanding loyalty from his aides and exacting revenge against his perceived political enemies, including by encouraging primary election challengers to take on Republican lawmakers who have defied him.

‘Very, very dangerous’

It’s not clear how many of the federal government’s 2.2 million employees Schedule F might impact. Some estimates have put the number at 50,000, but it could potentially extend to hundreds of thousands.

Dans stressed that Schedule F does not seek to make wholesale changes to the federal workforce, only to convert the jobs to at-will employment.

“Those jobs have to be now accountable to political management,” he said.

Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal workers, said a shift toward to politically driven workers would be “very, very dangerous.” 

“We want people who are hired because they have the skills necessary to perform the duties of the position, not because of their political affiliations or loyalty or anything like that,” she said. 

Simon said Schedule F is written so vaguely that it could apply to an extremely wide range of employees because “you could make an argument that almost every federal job involves policy implementation.”

“Deep state — what the hell does that mean?” Simon said. “If you look at our union, the people we represent are corrections officers, border patrol officers, nurses and nursing assistants in a VA hospital. These are not somehow people who are out there trying to harm Americans. They’re people who are trying to use the law to protect them from E. coli in their meat, from air that’s not breathable, from car manufacturing that has faulty wiring or brakes.”

Simon contended that the vast majority of the civil servants set their personal political views aside when on the job.

The employees who would be reclassified under Schedule F differ from the roughly 4,000 political appointees — including department and agency leadership — typically selected by incoming presidents.

Potential impact

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, said there are several reasons to maintain an apolitical federal workforce.

For starters, civil servants are not easily replaceable because they have skills not developed in the private sector, such as expertise about the inner workings of an agency and laws that must be considered, he said.

“That is just something you have to build up and acquire over many years,” Moynihan said. 

The return of Schedule F would make such jobs less attractive when the federal government is already struggling to replace an aging workforce, he added. 

Moynihan added that research has found that countries with merit-based personnel systems run more efficiently than ones with politicized systems because, in part, there is less on-the-job training after administration changes. 

In addition, Moynihan said non-politicized, merit-based hiring protects against corruption. And both he and Simon warned that a politically charged federal workforce could bring cronyism in the awarding of contracts. 

“What if we just really do have a complete free-for-all where you get the contract if you’ve got the political connections?” Simon said. “We don’t want that. Taxpayers don’t want their taxpayer dollars to just go to crony corporations and contractors as opposed to somebody who can actually perform the work in a high-quality way.”

Moynihan also said there could be a “chilling effect” on the sort of whistleblowing the Lloyd-La Follette Act aims to protect. 

If career civil servants fear losing their jobs, they “will be reluctant to talk about wrongdoing that they observe happening in the executive branch,” he said.

Dans, however, argued that one factor driving Project 2025 is there currently is little accountability among federal employees. 

Workers can be fired for performance-related issues. But a 2016 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that in 2013 — the most recent year data was available — more than 99% of all permanent, non-senior executive service employees received a rating at or above “fully successful” on their performance appraisals.

“Show me any other enterprise in our country where you believe that 99.7% of people are doing a fully successful job,” Dans said. “It’s just the system's broke.” 

Biden’s roadblock

Last month, the Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule that would make it more challenging for Trump to reissue his Schedule F executive order. 

The rule prevents civil servants from losing job protections they’ve already received. It also clarifies that the phrase “confidential, policy determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions” can only apply to non-career, political appointees. And it establishes procedural requirements for changing existing jobs to at-will employment.

Simon said the rule is “excellent” and “was so well done.” 

“To the extent that any rule can slow down and prevent the damage from Schedule F, this one tries to do it and tries to do it in the most effective, imaginable way,” said Simon, who predicted the matter would end up before the Supreme Court. 

Moynihan said a court fight and subsequent new rule-making process under a second Trump administration could delay implementation of Schedule F by a year or two.

Dans, who served as chief of staff in Office of Personnel Management under Trump, called the new rule “a sad exercise in self preservation by the bureaucrats that they would take our taxpayer dollars and spend all their time … to basically put in a job regulation that helps you grandfather and let them keep their jobs instead of working to do their jobs more efficiently.”