Trump Pushes a Federal Workforce Shakeup

Happy Thursday! Let’s get right into the news.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter manned by three soldiers collided midair with a passenger jet carrying 64 people as the commercial aircraft made its final descent toward Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport on Wednesday night, causing both aircraft to crash into the Potomac River. The American Airlines flight had departed from Wichita, Kansas, ahead of the feared mass casualty incident. The helicopter reportedly was on a training flight at the time of the collision. Rescue and recovery efforts were continuing this morning, law enforcement officials said, as some 300 emergency responders contended with cold, windy conditions and low visibility as they searched the crash site. As of 6 a.m. ET, law enforcement had confirmed fatalities but not yet provided a death toll. 
• Syrian authorities named the country’s de facto leader, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa—formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—president of the transitional government on Monday. The military commander headed the Sunni rebel force that led the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime last month. Al-Sharaa’s appointment came amid a meeting of rebel factions in Damascus, where Syria’s new sovereigns dissolved the country’s 2012 constitution, disbanded Assad’s Baath party, and announced the formation of an interim legislative council. The factions did not specify how long the transitional period would last. 
• A federal district court judge on Wednesday sentenced former Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey to 11 years in prison following his conviction on bribery and corruption charges last year. The former Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee was found guilty in July after being tried on charges of accepting almost $1 million worth of cash and gold bars—which FBI agents found in a raid of his home last year—from the governments of Egypt and Qatar. Prosecutors said he took the money in exchange for favors to the two countries, including drafting a letter on behalf of Egypt asking for additional military aid from the United States. Menendez, who resigned from the Senate in August, said Wednesday that he plans to appeal the sentence. 
• President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday reinstating military personnel who were discharged for refusing COVID vaccinations. More than 8,000 members of the military were discharged from 2021 to 2023 because of their refusal to get vaccinated before the requirement was rescinded in a 2023 spending bill. The order specifies that the service members will receive full back pay and be restored to their former ranks.
• Meta has agreed to pay President Trump $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit over the suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol, multiple outlets reported Wednesday. Of the total payout, $22 million will reportedly go toward Trump’s presidential library while the remainder will go to legal fees and other plaintiffs involved in the case. Trump had accused the social media platform and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, of engaging in “impermissible censorship” after its decision to halt his access to the accounts in the wake of the riots. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing in the settlement, which followed months of outreach efforts by Zuckerberg after Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.   
• Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in 2026. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is reportedly “seriously considering” a run, along with several Michigan Democrats. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer removed herself from consideration despite being widely seen as a strong contender. The open Senate seat could be yet another hurdle for Democrats trying to reclaim the upper chamber in the midterm elections. 
• A wildfire broke out in McDowell County, North Carolina, on Wednesday, burning through some 250 acres and forcing the evacuation of many residents. Dubbed the Crooked Creek fire, the blaze was fueled by winds of up to 50 miles per hour and warm temperatures, threatening an area still reeling from Hurricane Helene’s devastation in September. The fire was 15 percent contained as of Wednesday afternoon.

A Federal Workforce Overhaul

After a rise to fame fueled by his reality TV catchphrase, “You’re fired!,” President Donald Trump’s ambitious plan to reshape the federal government’s workforce in his second presidential term came as a surprise to very few people. And he’s wasting no time.

“Most of those bureaucrats are being fired, they’re gone,” Trump said after his inauguration last Monday. “It should be all of them, but some sneak through. We have to live with a couple, I guess.”

Trump returned to office with arguably more open hostility toward the federal workforce than any other modern president, describing the bureaucracy as “cancer” last week. He campaigned on destroying the so-called “deep state” and his tech-bro advisers have pledged “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.” 

Over the last nine days, the Trump administration has issued a blitz of executive actions designed to reshape and reduce the federal workforce. Some of the measures fall within the traditional shakeups of a new administration, while others aim to greatly expand the number of government jobs exempt from civil service protections and rely on untested legal footing. Several lawsuits have already been filed challenging the moves. 

Proponents argue the wave of initiatives is necessary to make a sclerotic bureaucracy more responsive to the president’s agenda, while critics see the changes as a ploy to install compliant personnel who will ultimately erode the independence of a workforce crucial to ensuring competent governance across presidential administrations. But, as tends to be the case for sweeping executive action, administrative law analysts and civil service researchers believe the crux of the issue will hinge on how the changes are actually implemented. 

As expected, Trump reinstated a federal employee classification change known as Schedule F, introduced at the tail end of his first administration but quickly revoked by former President Joe Biden. The new schedule would vastly expand the number of federal employees eligible for dismissal, but to fully appreciate its significance we’ll need to get a little wonky. The non-military federal workforce—about 2.4 million strong, excluding the U.S. Post Office personnel—falls into three broad buckets. 

First, there’s the competitive service, where employees are hired according to a merit-based system that usually involves examinations and competency standards. Employees also have legal protections against firings on a partisan or political basis. Second, the excepted service includes roles that are largely exempt from those protections. These are effectively “at will” positions that people can be quickly hired for or fired from—although, excepted service employees who are not political appointees and who have had sufficient tenure enjoy the same firing protections as the competitive service. And third, the Senior Executive Service (SES) encompasses high-level leadership positions that are also exempt from competitive service protections. 

There are currently five categories of excepted service employees, Schedules A to E. These exempted categories are designed to allow the executive branch to hire people when it is “impracticable” to do so through the competitive service—for example, for some types of jobs it’s often necessary to hire applicants more quickly than the competitive service process allows, particularly for roles that are in high demand in the private sector. Schedule C allows executive agencies to hire political employees who serve at the pleasure of the president. These positions, in combination with presidential appointments and the SES, make up the approximately 4,000 federal jobs that typically turn over with a new presidential administration. 

Schedule F was designed to create a new exempt category that could apply to upwards of tens of thousands of employees, making a much larger chunk of the federal workforce subject to “at-will” removal. In a Day 1 executive order, Trump reinstated Schedule F, now called Schedule Career/Policy, with a few adjustments. Like Schedule F, the order uses language from the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 to define the new class of excepted service as “positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” and it exempts these roles from civil service removal protections. The new order also added the following stipulations:

Employees in or applicants for Schedule Policy/Career positions are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration. They are required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability, consistent with their constitutional oath and the vesting of executive authority solely in the President. Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal.

To some observers, the section offers positive signs to those who worry the new schedule is simply a way to install political loyalists. “That’s an important [addition] because that suggests this new revised Schedule F is mainly about achieving policy alignment, rather than political loyalty,” Ronald Sanders, a former career senior federal executive who served as associate director of the Office of Personnel Management in the George W. Bush administration, told TMD. 

Sanders, who chaired the Federal Salary Council in the first Trump administration, resigned in protest of the original Schedule F order. He wrote in a letter at the time that the move was “nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process.” 

But Sanders is also a proponent of civil service reform, particularly when it comes to policy obstructionists. “If you have a civil servant that crosses his or her arms and says, ‘Make me,’ that’s one of the problems I have with the current system,” he said, adding that, ideally, Congress would be the body to implement any needed changes. “It is just too damn hard to make somebody follow orders.” 

Other analysts are more skeptical of the new schedule. Nick Bednar, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who’s written extensively on personnel policy, told TMD the “faithfully implement” language is ambiguous and could be liberally interpreted by the administration to justify dismissals on political grounds.

Officials involved in the first Schedule F order reportedly estimated that 50,000 federal employees could be re-classified. Records obtained by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) revealed plans by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to interpret the “policy-making” classification so broadly as to include IT specialists. 

But much will be left up to how the new order is interpreted and ultimately implemented. “A generous interpretation of [policy-making positions] could be a much larger number than 50,000, but it’s difficult because it depends on how agencies themselves will interpret how close a connection to policy-making you have to have to be moved into this new schedule,” David Lewis, a professor and political scientist at Vanderbilt University whose research focuses on federal bureaucracy, told TMD. The Office of Personnel Management sent out a memo Monday directing agencies to begin reviewing which employees could qualify. 

The NTEU and other large unions like the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees have already filed lawsuits challenging the order. And Bednar believes the expanded interpretation justifying the new classification is ripe for legal challenge. The new order also declared a Biden administration final rule preempting the return of Schedule F to be “inoperative without effect.” This move likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires executive agencies to go through a rulemaking process in order to overturn regulations. 

“Part of this is a Trump administration that’s throwing a bunch of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks,” Sanders said. But taken together with the administration’s other personnel policy changes, the schedule change seems part of a broader effort to flush as many people out of the federal workforce as possible. 

In addition to ordering federal personnel working remotely to return to their posts, Trump has already fired hundreds of federal employees, including 17 inspectors general—officials that function as independent watchdogs providing oversight to federal agencies. More than a dozen Justice Department employees who worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s team were fired this week—a move that followed the reassignment of 20 career DOJ officials. Trump fired commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, and both moves are likely to face legal challenges. Trump also issued a Day 1 hiring freeze and directed OMB, in consultation with the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to develop a plan to “reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce through efficiency and attrition.” 

“There is no doubt that even losing on legal issues, they may look back and say that they accomplished some of their disruption intention, and they got more quits,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TMD.  

Trump administration officials have been pretty explicit in their hostility toward the civil service. Take Russell Vought, who worked closely on Schedule F as Trump’s former OMB director and is set to reprise that role if confirmed by the Senate. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in private remarks in 2023. “We want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” When asked about those comments at his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month, he said he was referring to the bureaucracies he believes have been weaponized.  

And if the stick doesn’t work, Uncle Sam is now offering a pretty big carrot. On Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email to federal employees offering them a voluntary deferred resignation package that would allow workers to resign but continue to collect pay for the next eight months, until September 30. (The message, including the title, matches a memo DOGE leader Elon Musk sent to Twitter employees when he bought the company.) OPM said the offer is available to all federal employees with the exception of military personnel, U.S. Postal Service workers, and roles related to immigration enforcement and national security. Employees have until February 6 to decide whether to take the offer.   

Bednar told TMD that the legal authority of the initiative is uncertain. He cited several potential issues, including a statutory 10-day cap on employee administrative leave and the lack of authorized funding for most federal agencies beyond March, when the continuing resolution funding the government expires. But he also noted that Congress could potentially ratify the deferred resignations during the appropriations process. Some federal union officials have advised their members to not accept the offer, arguing the administration could renege on the promised pay once employees have voluntarily resigned. 

The effects of the buyouts and the reclassifications will ultimately depend in part on how many people exit the federal workforce. Musk seems to hope that 5 to 10 percent of the workforce will quit, but a large wave of exits could risk disruption to government services. “If people accept this buyout,” Lewis said, “and then people can’t get their patents or people can’t talk to somebody at Social Security or people trying to go overseas can’t get their passports renewed, that’s a big deal for many Americans.” 

Worth Your Time

• In his Substack Noahpinion, Noah Smith penned a convincing explanation of why Americans shouldn’t be scared of the future—that is, if bad governance doesn’t stand in the way of progress. “Americans are rising to meet the challenge of a risky, uncertain future, rather than hunkering down and protecting their wealth. Perhaps the ‘roaring 20s’ are really seeing a shift back toward the bold optimism that the Progress Studies people have been hoping for. But if so, the shift is still very incomplete. There are still a lot of important ways in which Americans — especially the leadership and the politically engaged class — are trying to resist the future instead of riding the wave,” he wrote. “The Democrats’ desire to hobble the software industry doesn’t seem too different from the Republicans’ attempts to hobble the green energy industry. In both cases, fear that the technology will empower the wrong people — hippies and commies in the case of hardware, ‘bro-ligarchs’ in the case of software — ends up translating into antipathy toward the technologies themselves. This stands in contrast to the mid-20th century, when Americans, recently unified by World War 2, simply assumed that new technologies like vaccines, airlines, and TV would be created for their own benefit.”

Presented Without Comment 

Politico: The West Is Trying to Interfere in Our Elections, Russia Moans

Also Presented Without Comment

New York Times: Justice Dept. Is Said to Discuss Dropping Case Against Eric Adams

Also Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Texas man pardoned over Jan. 6 attack is wanted on 2016 charge of soliciting a minor

A Texas man released from prison under President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is wanted by authorities on a 2016 charge of soliciting a minor online, prosecutors say.

Andrew Taake, 36, was accused of attacking police officers with bear spray and a metal whip during the Capitol assault.

In the Zeitgeist 

If you’re curious about Gen-Z’s take on rock music, look no further than MJ Lenderman, the 25-year-old breakout artist from Asheville, North Carolina, whose 2024 album Manning Fireworks made its way to the top of several major publications’ “Best Albums of 2024” lists. He expanded his tour on Tuesday after playing sold-out shows across the country, but he made time for this fantastic NPR Tiny Desk concert. 

 Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Scott Lincicome argued (🔒) that Donald Trump’s deportations could have negative reverberations for American workers, Jonah Goldberg lamented (🔒) the right’s warped definition of patriotism, and Nick Catoggio wrote about (🔒) the “postliberal revolution” guiding the new administration’s individual policy decisions. 
• On the podcasts: Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, Sarah Isgur, and David French discuss the unitary executive theory on Advisory Opinions, and Ross Douthat joins Jonah to chat about his new book and indulge in some rank punditry on today’s Remnant. 
• On the site: John McCormack profiles the House Freedom Caucus 10 years after its founding and Michael Brown explains what DeepSeek means for U.S. AI companies and national security.  

Let Us Know

Do you see apparent efforts to oust federal employees as an overstep or as overdue?

Correction, January 30: Due to a typographical error, a reference to renewal of passports was mistakenly referred to as “passwords.”