President Donald Trump’s executive order reclassifying 8,000 federal employees includes hundreds of attorneys who advise the government on matters ranging from patent law to assault investigations.
The move could transform the senior ranks of the government’s legal corps, stripping these attorneys of civil service protections and making them directly answerable to the president. Critics, including some who have served in government legal roles, say the constant threat of termination could prevent them from offering candid analyses up the chain of command—especially if they go against Trump’s preexisting views.
The Trump administration says it’s only targeting high-level roles that influence policy, though some attorneys who have served in those roles question that claim.
“Civil servants have always been required to implement the policy goal of political leadership,” said Jenny Knopinski, a former attorney advisor at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy. But by no longer allowing affected attorneys to appeal terminations, the order “could certainly make people fearful” of disciplinary action, Knopinski said.
More than 500 legal positions were reclassified by executive order Wednesday, according to a White House-issued appendix, though the method of classification makes it difficult to tell exactly how many workers will be affected. Almost all of the positions government-wide are GS-15 and above, officials say
Many of the roles listed as being reclassified to at-will have variations of the title “attorney advisor.” At some agencies, only one or two such positions were reclassified. At the Federal Communications Commission, it’s nearly 100.
Attorney advisors at the Department of Justice have responsibilities ranging from legal strategy to reviewing grant compliance, said Marnie Shiels, who served as an attorney advisor at DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women for more than two decades before her retirement last year. For her, the job included working on the National Protocol for Sexual Assault Medical Forensic Examinations, a DOJ framework guiding criminal justice and healthcare practitioners responding to the needs of assault survivors.
“The whole idea of the federal service is to have people that are experts in their field, that are dedicated to federal service and that are not party loyalists, not beholden to the political system,” Shiels said, adding that Trump’s order could be “detrimental.”
At the IRS, attorney advisors to the commissioner can hold significant sway, lawyers said.
Attorney advisors at the Executive Office for Immigration Review help judges at the country’s more than 70 immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals interpret and apply immigration law in reviews of undocumented migrants’ status in the US.
“Attorney advisors are a quintessential non-political position,” said Margy O’Herron, a senior Biden administration immigration policy counselor who previously served as an attorney advisor at the Board of Immigration Appeals, the highest administrative body interpreting immigration laws. “Stripping them of their civil service protections is an effort to intimidate them from objectively applying the law.”
The review office under the second Trump administration has been under fire by immigrant advocates who say that a slew of changes is making it increasingly difficult for undocumented people to plead their case to remain in the country. These changes include increasing the number of cases immigration judges are expected to get through each day and instructions to newly recruited judges that they should deny asylum in most cases.
The order will also reclassify attorneys at civil rights agencies, including a dozen at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Those include supervisory investigators and program analysts. The executive order also reclassifies budget officers and general attorneys.
“What I see in this is an administration that wants maximum flexibility to remove employees at will for political reasons, when it decides they aren’t doing what the administration wants,” said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of public policy and stakeholder engagement at Partnership for Public Service.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, called the order a “restoration of the democratic process,” and said the reclassifications would be limited to the most senior career officials.
“This is really, again, I think, about making sure that when the American people elect a president, be that President Trump or any subsequent president, that they can have confidence that the policy priorities and objectives of that administration are ultimately carried out,” he said.