Olusegun Ariyo
President Donald Trump of the United States said on Friday that his administration is set to change the employment classifications of many federal workers.
In a post on social media, Trump said moving forward, career government employees who work on policy matters will be classified as “schedule policy/career.”
According to him, the change would ensure that the federal government would finally be run like a business.
The president’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.
A professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Don Moynihan, said that 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.
It will be recalled that 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many government workers at the end of his first term, known as Schedule F, which former Democratic President Joe Biden rescinded on his first day in office in 2021.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.
According to Moynihan, the new order is broad enough that hundreds of thousands of people could be reclassified before firings begin.
No fewer than 260,000 federal workers have already reportedly been fired, have taken buyouts, retired early or have been earmarked for termination since Trump took office.
The reclassification comes as Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continue its drive to cut the size and cost of the federal workforce.
President of the American Federation of Government Employees, the biggest federal workers’ union with 800,000 members, Everett Kelley, decried the move by Trump.
“President Trump’s action to politicise 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.
