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U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday his administration is set to change the employment classifications of tens of thousands of federal workers, a move governance experts say will make it easier to carry out more mass layoffs.
Trump said on social media that moving forward, career government employees who work on policy matters will be classified as “schedule policy/career.”
This change would ensure the federal government will finally be “run like a business,” Trump said.
Trump’s announcement, putting into action an executive order he signed on his first day in office on January 20, will likely strip vast numbers of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce of their job protections by effectively making them employees at will.
By deeming anyone involved in “policy” as part of this new category, the pool of people that could potentially be fired expands enormously, because nearly everyone in government touches policy in one way or another, said Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
Trump ordered the reclassification of many government workers at the end of his first term, known as Schedule F, which former Democratic President Joe Biden rescinded on his first day in office in 2021. Estimates then were that Schedule F could make at least 50,000 federal workers vulnerable to being fired.
The new order is broad enough that hundreds of thousands of people could be reclassified, Moynihan said, before firings begin.
Over 260,000 federal workers have already been fired, have taken buyouts, retired early or have been earmarked for termination since Trump took office, according to a tally by Reuters.
The reclassification comes as Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continue their drive to cut the size and cost of the federal workforce. They claim it is bloated and full of waste and fraud.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the biggest federal workers’ union with 800,000 members, decried the move by Trump.
“President Trump’s action to politicize the work of tens of thousands of career federal employees will erode the government’s merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on,” Kelley said.
Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, which represents 90,000 workers, said Trump’s move will make federal employees “essentially at will employees. So they can just go ahead and fire them.”
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Biggs said his union will fight the move.
(Reporting by Tim Reid and Ismail Shakil, Editing by Chris Reese)
