Trump said on social media that moving forward, professional government employees engaged in policy matters will be classified as “planned policy/professional.”
Trump said the change will ensure that the federal government eventually “operates like a business.”
Trump announced the news, putting the executive order he signed on the first day of his tenure on January 20, which could effectively deprive their employees of a large amount of federal labor among the 2.3 million federal labor force by arbitrarily.
Don Moynihan, a Ford public policy professor at the University of Michigan, said the population that could be fired could be greatly expanded by thinking that anyone involved in the “policy” is part of this new category, as nearly everyone in every government touches policy in one way or another.
Trump ordered a reclassification at the end of his first term, known as Schedule F, and former Democratic President Joe Biden was revoked on his first day of office in 2021. It is estimated that Plan F can make at least 50,000 federal workers vulnerable to firing. Moynihan said the new order was broad enough to reclassify thousands of people before firing. According to Reuters, 260,000 federal workers have been fired since Trump took office, and have been fired, retired early or have been designated for termination.
The reclassification is as Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s government efficiency division continues to cut the size and costs of the federal workforce. They claim it is swollen and full of waste and fraud.
Everett Kelley, president of the U.S. Government Employees Federation, is the largest federal workers’ coalition with 800,000 members, condemned Trump’s move.
“President Trump’s actions to politicize the work of thousands of professional federal employees will erode the administration’s performance-based recruitment system and undermine the professional civil servants Americans rely on,” Kelly said.
Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers who represent 90,000 workers, said Trump’s move would allow federal employees “to be Will Will Employ in essence. So they can move on and fire them.”
Biggs said his union would fight the move.
