The House and the Senate are both in session this week.
An 18-hour voting session ended early last Friday morning with the Senate finally passing a reconciliation bill that funds ICE and Customs and Border Protection. The House now has its turn to pass the bill this week. If they do, it will be off to the president’s desk, where Trump has already indicated he will sign it into law.
In the interim, however, President Trump has signed an executive order that will make it easier for the administration to fire recalcitrant federal employees who refuse to advance his agenda.
This change could fundamentally transform the administrative state.
According to a Trump administration fact sheet, “When polled, a plurality of senior federal employees in Washington, D.C., said they would ignore a lawful order from President Trump that they considered bad policy, even though all executive branch employees report to the President.”
Trump’s new executive order, titled “Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service,” may be more familiar under its previous iteration in his first administration: “Schedule F.”
The new executive order reissues Schedule F, reclassifying senior federal workers—in the most influential, policy-related roles—as at will employees. It will enable swift accountability and the firing of federal workers who are unwilling to carry out lawful orders—something that wasn’t possible before and led to the soft power of “the deep state.”
Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (the agency that shapes the federal bureaucracy) said this about the new job classification:
“You can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, this provides a mechanism for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effective at-will.”
ICYMI…
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