Trump Is Making It Easier To Fire Federal Workers Who Disagree With Him

Is it a fireable offense to say climate change is real?

If you’re a government scientist whose work is considered “policy-influencing,” the answer may soon be “yes.”

Tens of thousands of highly skilled government employees will be stripped of job protections — and become fireable based on their supposed infidelity to the president’s agenda — under the final version of a rule that conservative operatives in President Donald Trump’s orbit have been gunning for for years.

The rule creates a new category of government workers that fits in between career civil servants and the small number of political appointees that come and go with every president. The new category, initially called “Schedule F” and now called “Schedule Policy/Career,” includes an estimated 50,000 workers deemed to be “policy-influencing” — meaning those with work that is “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating.” This includes government workers such as bank examiners, attorneys, scientists, policy analysts and even IT professionals.

The “final rule” defining Schedule Policy/Career positions was made available in the federal register Thursday, and is set to be officially published on Friday. After 30 days, the president will be able to designate tens of thousands of civil servants across the government as “Schedule Policy/Career” positions, meaning they would lose the ability to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board — a key safeguard for government employees who believe they’ve been unfairly punished.

The rule to create this new category of easily fireable employees — what the administration calls “much-needed accountability” — has been a Trump priority since his first term. Critics say the rule change will essentially recreate the spoils system, in which loyalty to the president and his partisan agenda is a test for government employment.

“No matter what the administration says, today’s action has nothing to do with restoring merit in federal employment. This new designation can be used to remove expert career federal employees who place the law and service to the public ahead of blind loyalty and replace them with political supporters who will unquestioningly do the president’s bidding,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a good-government group, said in a statement.

The group recently published a review of similar policies at the state level and found they led to increased turnover, risks of firings for political reasons, and disincentives to reporting wrongdoing or other issues at work.

“There is a reason our nation abandoned the spoils system that handed out government jobs to political lackeys nearly 150 years ago,” Stier said. “That system inevitably led to corruption, incompetence, waste and ineffective government. This one will be no different.”

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The Trump administration has maintained that the rule would not be used to create a new patronage system based on loyalty to Trump himself, and that reclassified positions would still be protected against so-called “prohibited personnel practices,” which include discrimination based on political affiliation and retaliation for reporting violations of the law.

But the final rule has dozens of references to what it refers to as “policy resistance” to the president’s agenda — that is, government workers supposedly dragging their feet or otherwise subverting the president’s wishes. Among the examples of such “resistance” in the 250-page final rule are scientific reports in Trump’s first term that said climate change is real.

A footnote in the document laying out the rule change cites a Bloomberg News article that it claims included numerous examples of “policy resistance.” Among them: “State Department staff preserved programs to boost the economies of developing countries — at odds with Trump’s campaign pledges — by relabeling them”; “[National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] employees continuing to issue reports that are at odds with Trump administration’s policies” and “Pentagon staff delaying the reversal of an Obama-era directive by conducting a review of the policies.”

The Bloomberg article, published in 2017, explained that the supposed “resistance at NOAA” was, basically, climate scientists being climate scientists, and releasing reports that state, in the article’s words, “climate change is real, serious and man-made.”

“As the case of NOAA illustrates, the most radical example of bureaucratic resistance may also be the simplest: continuing to issue information or reports that are factually accurate, even when they clash with the administration’s policies,” the Bloomberg story added.

Trump’s attempts to strip some 50,000 workers of job protections began in his first term, but were never fully realized, and were reversed during President Joe Biden’s tenure. But the Trump administration came prepared the second time around. On the day Trump took office a second time, he issued an executive order restarting the effort, and the federal government’s top human resources official laid out expansive definitions for potentially affected workers a few days later.

Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a second Trump term, called for reinstating Schedule F as a matter of “accountability in hiring” and terminating “nonperforming employees.” And Russ Vought, the Schedule F cheerleader who once said he wanted to “put [federal workers] in trauma,” now leads the White House budget office.

“The President has concluded that policy resistance is a significant problem and that Schedule Policy/Career is needed to address it,” the final rule states. It adds later: “So long as Schedule Policy/Career employees work effectively to carry out the President’s agenda, their jobs will be safe, no matter their personal political views.”

Unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, have fought the proposed rule change in court, and said Thursday they would continue to do so.

“This rule is a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement responding to the final rule text. “When people see turmoil and controversy in Washington, they don’t ask for more politics in government, they ask for competence and professionalism. [The Office of Personnel Management] is doing the opposite. They’re rebranding career public servants as ‘policy’ employees, silencing whistleblowers, and replacing competent professionals with political flunkies without any neutral, independent protections against politicization and arbitrary abuse of power.”

Democracy Forward, another frequent court challenger to the Trump administration, said Thursday it would continue to fight the new job classification in court.

“This proposal was wrong when it was outlined in Project 2025, wrong when the President issued an executive order, and it remains wrong now,” Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

“During the public comment period, the Trump-Vance administration was clearly warned by the American public that this approach violates the law and threatens the nonpartisan civil service that people in America depend on, yet it chose to move forward anyway.”