President Trump signed an executive order reclassifying 8,000 high-ranking civil servants into at-will employees who can be fired without due process.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump is taking action on one of his long-standing complaints that it’s too hard to fire federal employees – everyone from underperformers to people trying to get in the way of his agenda. NPR’s Andrea Hsu reports.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: It was originally called Schedule F, a new category of federal workers who can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. President Trump introduced the idea back in 2020, and now he’s made it official.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s a big one.
HSU: Yesterday at the White House, he signed an executive order reclassifying some 8,000 high-ranking civil servants, stripping them of the government’s strong job protections. The vast majority of federal workers can only be fired for a reason like misconduct. Trump invited White House aide James Sherk, the mastermind behind this plan, to say a few words.
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JAMES SHERK: What this does is basically treats those employees like private-sector workers. If they’re messing up, then they can be removed quickly rather than taking a year or longer to get rid of them.
TRUMP: That’s great.
HSU: Now, already, there are multiple lawsuits over this. Critics point out Congress gave government workers strong job protections for a reason – to shield their work from political interference, to make sure food safety experts and vaccine researchers and economists could issue reports and guidance based on their expertise, not on shifting political winds. Don Moynihan is a professor at the University of Michigan. He fears this move will have a chilling effect.
DON MOYNIHAN: If you are a career civil servant and there is bad news that you want to share with the president, you’re less likely to do so if you think, the minute I share that bad news, I’m going to get fired.
HSU: That’s not theoretical. Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a bad jobs report. Now, originally, the Trump administration estimated some 50,000 positions could be reclassified. That’s far more than the 8,000 covered by the executive order. Moynihan thinks they may just be getting started.
Andrea Hsu, NPR News.
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