Trump Holds Broad Power Over Which Federal Jobs Lose Protections

President Donald Trump has assumed essentially unlimited discretion to choose how many government employees lose their job security, under a rule that critics say threatens to upend the nonpartisan professional nature of the federal civilian workforce that has existed since the 1880s.

A final regulation from the Office of Personnel Management released Thursday empowers Trump to reclassify federal policy-influencing employees into a new “policy/career” category from which he could fire them at will. It provides no appeals process for agency heads or federal employees who disagree with a reclassification, and employees would lose many legal protections including the right to appeal a termination to an independent body.

The OPM has estimated 50,000 people, about 2% of the federal workforce, may be affected; today, the president has power to appoint only about about 4,000 positions. But the rule sets no limit on how many positions Trump can change or how often he might issue follow-up orders reclassifying more positions. Agency heads can revise job descriptions or duties however they like, whenever they like, to make any position they want into a policy-related position, OPM says in the rule text.

Trump and the OPM say the change is needed to root out poorly performing federal employees and those actively trying to thwart the president’s agenda, as civil service protections create a difficult, lengthy process for firing them. Federal worker unions, advocates, and former federal officials say the rule threatens to create a political loyalty test for government jobs and dissuade policy experts from offering candid advice to their bosses.

“We’re going to fight that in every way we can,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the top Democrat on the House subcommittee responsible for deciding the OPM’s budget, said in an exclusive roundtable interview with Bloomberg Government on Thursday. “They want to change it from a system of what you knew to who you knew. They want a political loyalist, slit-your-wrist kind of employee base, and this is their effort to do that.”

Federal laws providing civil service protections and calling for merit-based government hiring have evolved over the last century and a half, since Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883. The law and its counterparts—up through the latest iteration, the Civil Service Reform Act in 1978—aimed to prevent a “spoils” system in which jobs were often awarded based on bribes paid to government leaders and political paybacks.

The regulation cites authority in the Civil Service Reform Act allowing the exemption of certain positions that are “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating,” language that federal employees or other opponents could use to challenge Trump’s reclassification decisions in court.

Trump last year openly pushed the legal boundaries of his power to fire federal officials who oppose him, removing commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Federal Trade Commission and board members at the National Labor Relations Board historically thought to have legal protections against removal. The Supreme Court majority signaled support in December for Trump’s authority to remove FTC member Rebecca Slaughter, and litigation challenging his attempt to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is pending at the court.

Federal worker unions have vowed to revive earlier legal challenges they filed against the classification change in January 2025 when Trump signed an executive order initiating the process.

“Making it easy to terminate civil servants who push back on political leaders will raise the risk for civil servants who, based on their technical expertise and years of experience, believe a policy position to be dangerous, unwise, or illegal,” a former Food and Drug Administration official said.

Paul Dans, Trump’s former chief of staff at OPM and a co-author of Project 2025, said fears about politicization are “antithetical to the rule.” The rule specifies that the policy/career positions still will be hired on merit and not appointed, though it gives Trump broad discretion.

“To be sure, these positions in the scheduled policy career are still rooted in the competitive service,” said Dans, who is challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in November.

Federal workers attempted to “thwart and subvert” Trump across agencies in his first term through working with opposing members of Congress, leaking to the press, and “bureaucratic wrangling”, he said.

Unpredictable Scope

Even if Trump closely follows agency heads’ recommendations, the number of positions reclassified could differ widely from one agency to another. Former federal officials pointed to senior leadership, regional directors, policy advisors, and perhaps chiefs of staff as likely candidates, but said the change could reach much deeper than that in some agencies.

When Trump first attempted the reclassification idea in 2020, opinions across agencies varied on how far the changes should reach, said Ali Khawar, a former senior official within the Labor Department’s Employee Benefits Security Administration. This latest rule is likely to cover office directors, senior policy advisors, their equivalents, and potentially regional directors, he said, predicting its effects will likely stifle meaningful policy discussions.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, legislative and public affairs employees who ranked on the GS-14 and GS-15 pay scale were thought to be most at risk for reclassification, said a former HHS employee who left in 2025 shortly after Trump proposed the rule. Chief of staffs and their deputies were also discussed as possible candidates for reclassification.

Six agencies told the OPM during the first Trump administration that they wouldn’t ask for anyone to be reclassified, according to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office. Those included the National Labor Relations Board.

“None of the policy decisions are made by career staff,” said Marvin Kaplan, a former NLRB chair under Trump who now practices at Jackson Lewis PC. “The board makes the policy.”

Institutional Knowledge

OPM Director Scott Kupor told reporters Thursday the policy change is aimed at removing individual employees and doesn’t change the procedural rules for wider layoffs.

Nonetheless, some see room for the new classification to make agency restructurings easier, including at the Justice Department, which has already undergone significant shifts during Trump’s second term. The regulation says it doesn’t specifically target federal attorneys, but adds that a minority of them who have policy-related roles are likely to be reclassified.

The regulation would help advance a goal dating back to the first Trump administration to centralize its policy offices—which include Office of Legal Policy, civil rights, and antitrust—within the DOJ’s front office to have more control over priorities, one former DOJ official said.

“This new rule gives enormous latitude to the president, the OPM director and agency heads, all of which are political appointees,” to choose which positions are reclassified, said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of the Partnership for Public Service—after which they can easily fire and replace those employees or leave their positions vacant.

The broad power to reclassify and terminate career agency staff undermines another form of checks and balances within the federal government, said Lisa Gomez, former chief of the Employee Benefits Security Administration under President Joe Biden.

“It was critical to have career non-political staff who had been through several different administrations and had the institutional knowledge and were not answering to any one political administration, no matter what party is in charge,” she said. “I don’t think people are paying enough attention to what these changes would mean for how agencies function.”