The Purge

When Donald Trump issued the original executive order known as Schedule F in late 2020, it was widely condemned by a broad spectrum of critics as a thinly veiled effort to install loyalists throughout the federal bureaucracy. Under the pretense of “restoring accountability,” the order created a new “exempted service” in the federal workforce that effectively stripped career employees working on policy of their civil service protections. At the time, experts estimated that the order could impact hundreds of thousands of federal workers, instantly making them at-will employees who could be easily dismissed by the president without cause or any due process.

While presented as an honest effort to hold federal employees “more accountable” for their performance, critics like Ron Sanders were deeply skeptical of this claim. Though a lifelong Republican who had been appointed by Trump as chair of the Federal Salary Council in 2017, he could not condone what he saw as a transparent ruse to politicize the civil service. In his resignation letter, Sanders described Schedule F as a clear attempt to “replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance” and to “make loyalty to [the president] the litmus test for many thousands of career civil servants.”

Though Schedule F never got past the initial planning stage — Trump was defeated a few weeks after he signed it, and Biden quickly rescinded the order — it has since become de facto doctrine on the right. For conservatives, the creation of a new “exempted service” is now seen as an essential policy tool in their project to root out “disloyalty” and, ultimately, to “deconstruct” the “administrative state.” During the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, virtually all of the candidates supported the policy, and frontrunner Trump vowed to reinstate it on his first day back in office.

Sure enough, Trump kept his word, reviving Schedule F on Day 1, albeit with some alterations, including a name change to “Schedule Policy/Career” and several amendments that appear to have been added in response to criticisms of the original order. In an effort to get ahead of the inevitable accusations of politicizing the civil service, the new order includes a provision that explicitly denies that federal employees will be required to “personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration.” In the new language, employees will be required to “faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability.” In guidance issued last week, the Office of Personnel Management further included a section titled “Patronage Remains Prohibited,” stating that positions under the new classification “remain career positions.”

At least one critic of the president is hopeful the new text will prevent some of the worst abuses he had feared in the original Schedule F. In a conversation last week, Sanders told me that the new provision “alleviates a lot of the concerns” that he had in 2020. While the order could still ultimately be used to install loyalists — and the “proof will be in the implementation” — Sanders believes the new language about political loyalty tipped the scales in favor of “policy alignment,” which he believes is a “good thing.”

Few other critics share Sanders’ optimism. “It’s not because they had a change of heart in what they wanted to accomplish,” the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, Max Stier, told me. “You have a large number of actions taken by the new administration that have one common thread when it comes to personnel, and that is to blow up the existing system and replace it with people who are loyalists,” he said. 

Also skeptical is Joe Spielberger, senior policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, who dismissed the new language about political loyalty as a disingenuous ploy intended to “stave off legal challenges.” If anything, he says, the order is even “more dangerous” than the original, as it “dramatically expands” how many employees could be impacted by authorizing the director of the OPM to reclassify as many positions as they deem appropriate.

Many of the administration’s actions in its first few weeks support Spielberger’s critique. Since entering the White House last month, Trump has initiated targeted purges at agencies and departments across the federal government, almost all for the purpose of rooting out perceived “disloyalty.” The president has dismissed 18 inspectors general, fired at least a dozen career Justice Deptartment lawyers who were involved in the Jack Smith prosecution, ordered a purge at the FBI and targeted Democrats at independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

“You don’t fire independent IGs en masse because you’re interested in reducing waste in the federal government,” observed Stier. “You don’t sideline your top experts and vet them for loyalty or chase them away because you’re doing anything but getting rid of the spirit of what we’ve had for 140 years, which is an apolitical merit-based system.”

Though the administration’s early actions have been largely concentrated on senior career officials and political appointees, the broader federal workforce appears to be next in line.  Here Schedule F will come fully into play. Top officials inside the administration have demonstrated a deep hostility toward career bureaucrats that borders on the pathological. Incoming OMB Director Russ Vought has said that he wants to put federal workers “in trauma,” while last week Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, demonized the government’s more than 2 million career employees as “overwhelmingly … far-left.” This belief that the federal workforce is teeming with radical leftists has become dogma on the modern right, and ties into the broader goal of achieving “mass headcount reductions” and dismantling entire swaths of the federal bureaucracy.

The opening salvo of this coming assault on the federal workforce came last week, when the OPM — essentially the federal government’s human resources department — sent out an email to almost all federal employees offering them the option of eight months paid leave if they resigned by Feb. 6. Modeled after an email sent by Elon Musk to Twitter employees shortly after he took over the company in late 2022, the OPM letter seeks to pressure civil servants into leaving, warning that most agencies will be downsized in the near future.

The letter is a good indicator of what’s to come. Though traditionally a nonpartisan office, the OPM has already been captured by a goon squad of Musk loyalists, who will now be responsible for implementing Schedule F and a host of other policies related to federal employees. Musk and his cronies have approached the takeover of OPM and other agencies like corporate raiders looking for plunder, with plans to illegally dismantle entire departments and agencies created by Congress. In a widely shared and since deleted post on a Reddit page for federal employees, a person claiming to be an employee at OPM for the past decade documented the “hostile takeover” of the influential office. “In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President’s henchmen,” it reads.

Ultimately, the “deferred resignation” letter may not lead to the massive headcount reductions that Musk and his allies are hoping for. According to one report, some in the White House expect hundreds of thousands of federal employees to accept the offer, which they say they expect will save up to $100 billion. But this likely “grossly overestimate[s]” the number who will accept the offer and the impact on the federal budget, Sanders told me. The entire federal payroll for the eligible employees barely exceeds $100 billion, meaning that even if 10% of employees took the offer, it would translate to just over $10 billion in annual savings (a drop in the bucket of the $6.75 trillion federal budget, most of which goes toward entitlement programs and the military).

The next step for the administration will probably be to implement Schedule F as expansively as possible to empower the president (and Musk) to fire federal civil servants without cause. According to Judd Legum and Caleb Ecarma at Musk Watch, the small team of Musk allies now running the OPM has obtained “unprecedented access to federal human resources databases containing sensitive personal information for millions of federal employees.” The team can now extract information from these databases, which include medical histories, workplace evaluations and other private information to carry out their purges.

Two equally destructive forces seem to be at work in this escalating assault on the federal workforce. On the one hand, there is the Trumpian goal of installing loyalists and transforming the federal bureaucracy into an extension of the president’s personal power. On the other hand is an ideological project to drastically downsize the federal government, now represented by Musk and his minions scattered across agencies (some of whom are barely out of high school). The new administration is currently using “every tool at its disposal,” said Speilberger, to “get rid of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with loyalists — or to simply “shut down certain programs or departments unpopular with this administration’s ideological agenda.”

Ultimately, there is “no legitimate management principle that would explain what is happening right now,” Stier told me. Unless, of course, destruction is the point. In a follow-up letter sent out to federal employees a few days after the OPM’s initial deferred resignation offer, the office further encouraged workers to “find a job in the private sector,” stating that the “way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” This message, dripping with disdain, reflects Musk’s libertarian belief that the government is an “inefficient operating system” whose functions should be mostly outsourced to the private sector, or otherwise eliminated. The world’s richest man has a direct financial interest in making this happen, as his companies are largely dependent on government contracting and also face regulatory oversight that he hopes to eliminate altogether.

This onslaught on the federal workforce will probably have devastating consequences far into the future, whether intentional or not. For one, it could make recruiting much more difficult for years to come. If the administration goes ahead and fires employees en masse, “no self-respecting applicant is going to apply for federal jobs in the near future as a result,” Sanders told me. “Recruiting is pretty much dead.”

Mission accomplished.