The White House on Thursday finalized a policy that will allow President Donald Trump to discipline or fire roughly 50,000 career federal workers at will, putting them in the same category as political appointees. The 255-page rule, published by the Office of Personnel Management, strips longstanding job protections, including for whistleblowers, from tens of thousands of workers deemed to have policy-related roles. Trump will decide which positions get reclassified, OPM said.
Who said what
The new policy, which affects about 2% of the federal workforce, is the “biggest change to the rules governing the civil service in more than a century,” Reuters said, and it “targets employees that the administration sees as undermining the president’s priorities.” Civil service protections “put in place in the 19th century turned federal employment from a partisan spoils system into a professional workforce that is largely insulated from partisan interference,” The Wall Street Journal said.
Congress created a “deliberate division between career employees and political appointees” so “career officials with deep expertise” could offer policymakers unvarnished information “without fear of getting fired,” The New York Times said. OPM said its new rule “explicitly” prohibited political patronage, loyalty tests and political discrimination, but critics question whether this administration “can be taken at its word after a year of retributive firings, including the dismissal of several whistleblowers.”
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These newly reclassified workers won’t be able to bring their allegations of “wrongdoing, such as violating the law or wasting money,” to the independent Office of the Special Counsel, Reuters said, but will now have to raise their concerns with officials inside their agencies. That turns the Whistleblower Protection Act “into a bad joke,” Tom Devine, the legal director at the Government Accountability Project, told the Times.
What next?
The new policy is already facing legal challenges, including from a group of federal worker advocates who argue it “ignores a 1978 law that provides job protections to career federal employees and limits at-will employment to political appointees,” the Journal said. Trump’s various attempts over the past year to “replace nonpartisan civil servants with employees who are ideologically aligned with the president” had “drawn 68 legal challenges” as of Thursday, the Times said, “and 61 remain active.”
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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.
