From meat inspectors to border patrol officers, many Americans who work for the federal government could soon see their jobs reclassified into at-will positions, meaning they can be dismissed for nearly any reason.

In a related development, the White House expects up to 10% of federal employees to quit in September in a program meant to end work-from-home practices, senior administration officials told CBS News. 

Depending on future court rulings and how effective the Trump administration proves to be in overriding existing federal regulations, an executive order signed by President Trump revives a policy from his first administration known as Schedule F. The Jan. 20 directive creates a new employment classification for many career civil servants, effectively stripping them of job protections.

Likely to impact tens of thousands of civil servants, and potentially more, the order defines policymaking positions to include mundane tasks such as viewing and circulating proposed government regulations. 

“We think this order affects at least 50,000 people who are currently protected, but the number could be much bigger,” Nick Bednar, a University of Minnesota Law School associate professor, told CBS MoneyWatch. “Some scholars think it could reach into the hundreds of thousands. At the end of the first term, when the Trump administration sought to reclassify positions, it included executive assistants, toxicologists and scientists — it’s not clear who this doesn’t reach.”

“Individuals in these policymaking positions don’t have the same due process protections as other employees. They can be more easily removed,” Bednar added. “There are 2.8 million civilian employees in the federal government. Most, or the vast majority, enjoy some kind of protection from removal.” 

For now, it remains unclear how far the Trump administration plans to go in implementing the order, said Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE-IAM), a union representing 100,000 government workers. 

“Technically, if you’re a maintenance person pushing a broom on the floor, you are executing a policy,” said Lenkart in offering an example of how virtually any government worker could be defined as being engaged in work that falls under Schedule F.

“President Trump has the executive power to make decisions to implement a government that reflects the will of the American people,” Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary at the White House, told CBS MoneyWatch in an email. “If an individual in the administration is working on policy, then they should align with President Trump’s mission of putting America first.”

Hit to morale?

President Trump is not unique in looking to have a stronger hand over the federal workforce, according to Bednar. 

“A common strategy of presidents is trying to politicize federal employment positions so they have greater control over executive branch hiring and firing,” said Bednar, who lists Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter among previous presidents who have sought to exert such influence. Still, he noted “we haven’t seen something that tries to reach this deep into the career staff.”

While Mr. Trump’s Schedule F plan and other administration orders aimed a reshaping the federal workplace are being challenged in court, the Trump administration may succeed in its goal of downsizing government, regardless of whether it wins on the legal front, Bednar said. 

“Even if the lawsuits slow down this process, there are many civil servants who might leave government fearing continuing to work in the Trump administration — employee moral is really affected,” he said. “They want a smaller government, and they view this as an opportunity to pursue that.”

Bednar also cautions that a smaller government workforce could hinder some Trump administration policy goals, including fewer agents to patrol U.S. borders and reduced staffing in immigration courts, adding to the current backlog.

The case for and against Schedule F

Mr. Trump originally implemented the Schedule F policy in 2020 as his first term was nearing an end, but it was repealed after former President Joe Biden took office. Mr. Trump said last week that the revived order is necessary to ensure that federal workers in roles that affect government policy remain accountable to the public. 

“In recent years … there have been numerous and well-documented cases of career federal employees resisting and undermining the policies and directives of their executive leadership,” Mr. Trump’s order states. “Principles of good administration, therefore, necessitate action to restore accountability to the career civil service, beginning with positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.”

But critics of Schedule F argue it undermines the traditional principles behind civil service, which emphasize hiring based on professional qualifications. Should Schedule F survive legal challenges, they say, millions of government workers hired based on merit could be fired at will, including if they are deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump. 

“Is this really about making government more efficient and smaller, or targeting regulatory and law enforcement people?” asked Lenkart, who noted that the number of workers employed in the executive branch has remained roughly the same for more than 70 years even as the nation’s population has doubled.

Unions representing public workers have blasted Schedule F. The policy is among a slew of executive orders “designed to intimidate and attack nonpartisan civil servants under the guise of increasing efficiency,” Randy Erwin, national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), said in a statement last week. “However, these orders will do the exact opposite.”

Members of the 100-year-old NFFE are employed by dozens of federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Federal Aviation Administration and Social Security Administration. 

On Wednesday, the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) filed suit against the Trump administration, saying it was exceeding its authority in rolling back protections for workers.

“We can stop the efforts to fire hundreds of thousands of experienced, hard-working Americans who have dedicated their careers to serving their country and prevent these career civil servants from being replaced with unqualified political flunkies loyal to the president, but not the law or Constitution,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

The National Treasury Employees Union also filed a suit to block Schedule F, calling it “contrary to congressional intent.” The complaint, filed Jan. 20 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that Mr. Trump’s order reinstating Schedule F “wrongly applies employment rules for political appointees to career staff, deprives federal employees of due process rights that they were promised when they were hired, and ignores Office of Personnel Management regulations.” 

NTEU represents about 150,000 workers in 37 federal agencies and departments, including staff at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services.