President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that strips job protections from nearly 8,000 federal workers who are in policy-making roles, making it easier for the administration to fire them.
The Trump administration previously estimated that as many as 50,000 federal workers could lose job protections under this new policy.
Administration officials said Wednesday that there were no plans to include more than the nearly 8,000 positions outlined in an appendix to the executive order, but the president could decide to add more in the future.
The jobs covered by the executive order include the heads of agency components, those who run an office or a program, people who develop and write regulations, lawyers involved in setting agency policies and employees who determine which organizations receive grants.
The administration recently announced it was looking to restrict grant recipients to those who support the president’s agenda.
The order is a response to the resistance that Trump administration officials faced during the president’s first term, when senior career government officials routinely pushed back against policies that appeared to exceed legal boundaries.
“If you have employees who are trying to undermine the wishes of American people by pushing their own agenda or just incompetent in what they’re doing, agencies have a longstanding difficult time getting rid of them,” James Sherk, a member of the president’s Domestic Policy Council, said Wednesday as Mr. Trump was signing executive orders. “What this does is basically treats those employees like private sector workers. They’re going to be hired on the basis of merit and confidence, but if they’re messing up, then they can be removed quickly.”
In response, Mr. Trump said, “That’s good.”
Critics have said that removing job protections from these employees would allow the president to fire people perceived as disloyal and to further dilute the expertise of the federal work force. More than 300,000 federal workers have left their jobs or been fired since Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office.
“This is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement.
Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said that was not the case.
“This is very much about accountability,” Mr. Kupor said on a call with reporters. The president, he said, is elected by the American public, and career government employees in important policy-making positions are expected to direct or carry out the president’s policies.
This new policy, he said, does not mean workers must share the political views of the president. “But if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives of the administration, then this provides a mechanism,” for agencies to fire them.
Until now, only people appointed by the president, known as political appointees, could be fired at will. Historically, there have been around 4,000 political appointee positions. But the Trump administration has added even more, bringing the total to more than 4,600, according to an analysis by the Partnership for Public Service, an organization that promotes an effective civil service.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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