Trump Officials Have Told Agencies to Find More Workers to Make At-Will

The Trump administration is working with each federal agency to grow the number of jobs it can strip worker protections from, according to three people with knowledge of the process.

The effort is part of the White House’s push to tighten the president’s control over career civil servants. In an executive order last month, President Donald Trump stripped roughly 8,000 employees of protections they have historically had before facing discipline.

The Office of Personnel Management is expected to submit expanded lists of jobs that can be reclassified to at-will employment to the White House by the end of September, according to one of the sources familiar with the plan.

OPM and federal agencies are using artificial intelligence to review job descriptions to help identify the roles that will be reclassified to a designation that does not have due-process rights before a disciplinary action, one federal worker briefed on the matter said.

Another employee said their agency was told “we have to have more!” employees on its list.

A third said they were aware of several agencies across the government facing a mandate to update and expand their registers of staff falling under the new policy.

Administration officials previously estimated as many as 50,000 employees would see their jobs reclassified to the “Schedule Policy/Career” designation that does not have those protections.

Under Trump’s changes, federal employees classified as working on policy matters lose their rights to advance notice of forthcoming disciplinary action, an opportunity to respond to that decision and the chance to appeal it before a third party. Those converted to that Schedule Policy/Career designation now serve as at-will employees, a category previously reserved for political appointees and a small subset of career staff.

Officials within and outside the government told NOTUS they were surprised Trump’s initial order only impacted 8,000 workers and had expected the number to grow at some point. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, was an original architect of the controversial plan to convert large swaths of the federal workforce into Schedule Policy/Career workers, previously known as “Schedule F.”

It hasn’t yet been determined how many employees will be included in the new wave of reclassifications.

A senior administration official said OPM was engaged in a “thoughtful, collaborative process” with agencies to review their previous submissions for conversions, update position descriptions and identify any additional roles they want to reclassify into Schedule Policy/Career. The official stressed that no decisions have been made and that a subsequent executive order from Trump to formally convert the jobs is not imminent. They instead called the process “an internal planning exercise.”

Trump attempted to make these reclassifications in the waning days of his first term, though he ran out of time before they could take effect.

The proposal has generated outcry from some lawmakers, advocates and employees who say it will strip career government workers of protections that date back to a 19th-century law meant to end the era of a government dominated by political patronage. The laws were most recently updated by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

The policy’s implementation last month came after Trump issued a separate executive order on his first day in office reviving it, as well as final regulations earlier this year. Those regulations established that agencies would determine which employees serve in policy-related roles.

Trump administration officials told reporters last month there would be no political litmus test for federal employees subject to the reclassification.

“It’s also about a restoration, in our mind, of the democratic process,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said. “There are zero loyalty tests in this.”

Administration officials said at the time that Trump could opt to expand the number of employees affected by the policy but that no such decision was “imminent or impending.”

A coalition of groups representing federal employees is suing over the policy. The suit is still pending in federal court. Those groups and others argue the new schedule system violates federal employees’ constitutional rights and undermines existing statutory protections. Converting large swaths of federal employees to at-will employment could make them vulnerable to the political whims of the administration, lead to firings based on loyalty and erode the expertise that the career civil service is designed to develop, they have said.

The administration has said Article II of the Constitution grants the president the authority to remove federal workers without due process, and that existing civil service law is an “overcorrection” to historical abuses of power. A senior administration official said last month that any effort to cast the reclassifications as a politicization of the civil workforce was due to “historical ignorance.”

In a dissenting opinion on a recent Supreme Court ruling that expanded Trump’s power to remove leaders of independent agencies, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the new precedent could empower presidents to fire civil servants at will.