What Trump’s win means for the federal workforce

Donald Trump is projected to return to the White House next January, according to the Associated Press, and is poised to spur the most dramatic reimagining of the staffing of government in more than a century.

That’s because Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a controversial abortive effort at the end of his first term to strip the civil service protections of potentially tens of thousands of career federal workers in “policy-related” positions, effectively making them at-will employees. Trump and many of his former staffers have frequently bemoaned that “rogue bureaucrats” inhibited his policymaking power during his first stint in the White House.

Though President Biden quickly rescinded Schedule F when he took office in 2021—before any positions could be converted out of the federal government’s competitive service—that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from working on the initiative in absentia. Both the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute, which have organized dueling unofficial transition projects have endorsed reviving Schedule F, going so far as to creating lists of upwards of 50,000 current career civil servants to strip of their removal protections and threaten with termination.

And the America First Policy Institute, which The New York Times reported last month has recently gained favor with Trump after Heritage’s Project 2025 transition project and policy playbook proved unpopular with voters, has called for more sweeping changes, such as converting the entire federal workforce into at-will employees and outlawing collective bargaining at federal agencies altogether.

Though Biden has sought to install new safeguards against politicizing the federal workforce via Office of Personnel Management regulations defining “policy-related” workers as political appointees and requiring agencies that convert employees out of the competitive service to allow current workers to retain their civil service protections. But in interviews earlier this year, experts described the effort as akin to a speed bump.

“Of course, any effort to try to launch Schedule F again would immediately be met with an effort to stop it in courts,” Kettl told Government Executive in September. “But my conclusion is that it is probably constitutional. If unions and Democrats challenge it, they will probably lose. That path also would require finding a plaintiff with standing—someone who can prove they’ve been injured. It would take time to find the right plaintiff and to wait for the Trump administration to take action that frames the issues in just the right way . . . and then it goes through a tremendous maze of a process. It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions, which at that point, even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice.”

On labor issues, Trump is likely to revive a series of executive orders making it easier to fire federal workers and severely curtailing union access to the workplace, both by evicting labor officials from agency office space and cutting access to official time, a practice by which federal workers who serve as union leaders are compensated by the government for time spent on representational activities, such as collective bargaining negotiations and representing employees in disciplinary hearings and litigation.

Union officials say that their members are in a much stronger position than they were entering Trump’s first term, thanks in no small part to a series of Biden administration edicts encouraging agencies to work collaboratively with labor partners and expanding what topics unions may negotiate over with management. Over the last four years, many unions have negotiated contracts whose terms run until after the 2028 presidential election, making it harder for agencies to implement workforce policy changes unilaterally on their bargaining units, and unions representing workers at agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency secured “scientific integrity” provisions to protect employees from being retaliated against for doing their jobs.

But like with Schedule F, they acknowledged that in an all-out assault on organized labor in government, these provisions may not be foolproof.

"If they’re just going to disregard the rules, there isn’t going to be anything to protect anyone—not even just scientists, but anyone,” said Nicole Cantello, legislative and political coordinator for the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents EPA workers, in June. “Sure, that could definitely happen. That’s a concern for every federal employee, that they don’t know what [a second Trump] administration would put into action against feds.”