In October 2020, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encouraged expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category that the executive order created.
The administration claimed the authority to create Schedule F based on statutory language that exempted certain positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees.
Because Trump did not remain in office, it is unknown how many federal employees his administration would have swept into Schedule F, or how many would have been fired and replaced. Experts have put the possible numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The Trump official credited with the idea to create Schedule F estimated that it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers. Some Trump allies told Axios it would not be necessary to fire that many workers because firing fewer would produce the desired “behavior change.”
Other comments and actions by former Trump officials led one professor who studies public administration to conclude that the 50,000 figure “is probably a floor rather than a ceiling.”
Ultimately, the executive order calling for a new Schedule F was not implemented; the Biden Administration rescinded it before it could go into effect. On April 4, 2024, the Biden administration finalized a rule that aims to clarify and strengthen existing protections for civil servants, and to slow any future effort to undermine those protections.
Trump has announced his intention to reissue Schedule F “on day one” of his next administration. During his first term, government employees were frequent targets of public insults, threats, and retaliation. Echoing Trump, other elected officials have advocated “fir[ing] every single mid-level bureaucrat” and made campaign promises to begin “slitting [bureaucrats’] throats on day one.”
Scholars at the American Enterprise Institute have stated, “[Trump] has made it clear in countless ways that, if he were to win the presidency again, he would expect total loyalty — from cabinet secretaries down to the most junior agency employees.”
To assist him, the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative policy organization, has organized a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations under the banner of “Project 2025,” an effort to prepare policy and personnel for “the next conservative president.” The organization’s policy agenda advocates for a revival of Schedule F as part of a larger crackdown on the civil service, and the architects of Project 2025 have plainly said that their aim is “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
