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President Trump just made it a whole lot easier to drain the swamp. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order reclassifying roughly 8,000 senior federal employees into at-will positions, stripping away the bureaucratic armor that’s made firing incompetent government workers nearly impossible for decades.
These aren’t rank-and-file paper pushers. We’re talking about GS-15 level officials, the people making up to $200,000 a year to shape policy, draft regulations, and oversee how your tax dollars get spent. Directors, deputy directors, chiefs of staff, senior advisors, policy analysts, legislative affairs leaders, and the officials controlling federal grant disbursements. The ones who’ve been running the administrative state like it’s their personal fiefdom.
The new Schedule Policy/Career classification treats them like private sector workers. They can be fired without the endless appeals and bureaucratic circus acts that currently let underperforming federal employees drag out their removal for a year or more. As James Sherk of the White House Domestic Policy Council put it at the signing ceremony, “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.”
Think about that for a second. In what universe should government bureaucrats have more job security than the Americans paying their salaries?
This is just the latest move in Trump’s broader campaign to shrink the federal workforce and ensure the people remaining are actually aligned with the administration’s agenda and, by extension, the will of the voters. Since returning to office, he’s already cut more than 300,000 federal positions. The Office of Personnel Management had initially projected this policy could affect up to 50,000 workers, about 2% of the federal workforce, so don’t be surprised if this number grows.
Naturally, the federal employee unions are howling. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, claims this enables corruption and discourages dissent. But let’s be honest, what he’s really worried about is losing the ability to protect dues-paying members who aren’t doing their jobs. Real accountability isn’t corruption, it’s the antidote to it.
For decades, the administrative state has operated as a permanent government, immune to election results and insulated from consequences. Trump just put them on notice: serve the people effectively, or find yourself serving papers in the private sector.
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