Say goodbye to federal protections and hello to Trump’s advancing loyalist army 

Among Donald Trump’s many disconcerting campaign promises is a pledge to fire tens of thousands of federal employees and replace them with loyalists. Some people have dismissed some of his other threats of political prosecutions and mass deportations as empty rhetoric that won’t materialize, but this one is real. We know it because Trump took steps in that direction during his first presidency with an executive order known as “Schedule F.”  

Upon taking office, President Biden overrode Schedule F with a more permanent regulation protecting workers. Yet revamping the federal workforce appears to be within Trump’s constitutional and statutory authority once he is inaugurated again. And it would serve an objective he has long made known: instilling loyalty through fear. 

Although George Washington made hiring decisions based on merit, the “patronage” or “spoils” system had taken hold by the time of Andrew Jackson’s electoral victory in 1828. Under the spoils system, federal appointments flowed from affiliations with the political party in power rather than from competence. With the change of each administration, federal employees were fired en masse and replaced with supporters of the new president and his party.   

President Theodore Roosevelt described the spoils system as a “more fruitful of degradation in our political life than any other that could possibly have been invented” because “[t]he spoilsmonger, the man who peddled patronage, inevitably bred the vote-buyer, the vote-seller, and the man guilty of malfeasance in office.” The system erupted in 1881, when President James Garfield was assassinated by a man upset that he was turned down for a federal job after working for Garfield and the Republican Party. 

Congress responded with the Pendleton Act of 1883, which replaced the spoils system with one based on competition and merit — what is now known as the “federal civil service.” Today it comprises more than 2.2 million people. Congress passed a series of additional laws over the intervening 140 years, including the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which created a comprehensive system of protections for federal workers, including procedures for challenging adverse personnel actions. The law also imposed protections for whistleblowers and made clear that differences in political ideology are not grounds for dismissing an employee. 

The 1979 law established the Merit Systems Protection Board for hearing appeals of employee firings, among other things. The board is an independent agency headed by three people appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for a term of seven years. Its members can only be fired by the president “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”  

The board was hamstrung throughout all four years of Trump’s first presidency because he refused to fill vacancies, leaving it without a single member for two years and creating a backlog of more than 3,000 cases. Affected federal workers were left in limbo, some without jobs, until the Biden administration took steps to fill the vacancies and address their claims. 

Here’s the problem: The Civil Service Reform Act also allows for carve-outs from the civil service for special categories of employees, such as people with disabilities or purely political appointees. The traditional civil service procedures and protections do not apply to those who fall under the so-called “excepted service.” The carveouts are known as “Schedules.” Before Trump, there were five: Schedules A through E. In his first term, Trump added Schedule F by executive order, creating a new category: “men and women in the Federal service employed in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” It’s a broad definition that likely captures thousands of employees.

The executive order was also carefully written in lawyerly prose to highlight the president’s prerogative to ensure “[f]aithful execution of the law” through “appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals.” In light of the Supreme Court’s intervening ruling creating immunity for presidents who commit crimes through the Justice Department under Trump v. U.S., a challenge to the constitutionality of Schedule F as exceeding the president’s Article II authority to execute the law would likely fail. 

What’s more, the Civil Service Reform Act also gave presidents express authority to “ascertain the fitness of applicants [into the civil service] as to ... character, knowledge, and ability for the employment sought” and “prescribe the duties of individuals to make inquiries for” that purpose. This means that presidents have broad statutory authority to make new rules for the civil service — including additions to the schedules exempting employees from protections from being fired over their disloyalty or politics. Further, Trump has the power to direct any civil service position be reclassified to Schedule F, with an appeal to the Office of Personnel Management.

Whether Trump gets away with firing thousands of federal workers and replacing them with loyalists probably has more to do with pragmatism than the rule of law or fidelity to the spirit of the law. Despite far-right suspicion of the “deep state,” Americans depend on the federal workforce for basics that range from making sure airplanes don’t crash to sending out Social Security checks on time. Finding loyalists to replace 2.2 million jobs would also take a lot of time.

But the goals of Schedule F could be achieved by using it against just a handful of people while striking fear in the rest.  

Project 2025’s online questionnaire for landing job in the next Trump administration asks about the influences on applicants’ “political philosophy.” According to one alumnus of the first Trump administration, the idea is to “see that you’re listening to Tucker, and not pointing to the Reagan revolution or any George W. Bush stuff.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s shadow president-elect, Elon Musk, has taking to doxing career federal servants he wants gone on his social media platform, X, prompting reports that “they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed.”  

The fear, of course, is the point. 

Kimberly Wehle is author of the new book “Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works — and Why.”