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Unions Condemn Executive Order Allowing Trump to Replace Federal Workers With 'Political Loyalists'
The head of America's largest federal workers union called it "a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
Jun 05, 2026
Labor unions are warning that an executive order signed this week by President Donald Trump will allow his administration to replace thousands of career civil servants with "political loyalists."
The order, signed on Wednesday, converts around 8,000 federal workers—most of whom are at senior levels in the civil service with major influence over policy decisions—to Schedule Policy/Career (P/C) status, formerly known as Schedule F, effectively making them "at-will" employees whom the president can fire at his discretion.
While a small number, around 4,000, of the roughly 2 million federal workers are considered political appointees, most federal employees cannot be removed purely for failing to serve the agenda of the president and can usually only be fired for issues like inadequate performance or misconduct, which involves an appeal process.
But as part of the Trump administration's effort to dismantle what it's described as a "deep state" of disloyal bureaucrats, a major objective of the Heritage Foundation's right-wing manifesto Project 2025, those 8,000 employees may now be fired for "subversion of presidential directives."
According to the US Office of Personnel Management, this could be just the beginning—with as many as 50,000 employees potentially in consideration to be rescheduled.
A fact sheet released by the White House said that despite the reclassification, “these remain ‘career’ positions and the non-partisan hiring processes, competitive status, and other aspects of these roles will not change,” while “removal decisions will also be made without respect to political affiliation.”
But Trump-loyal department heads—everywhere from the Department of Justice to the Pentagon—have systematically purged employees across executive departments that are perceived as Trump's political enemies.
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said on Thursday that "Schedule P/C is the next phase in Trump’s anti-worker agenda to replace government workers with political loyalists who answer only to him."
"As we’ve seen from his first day in office, the president is determined to tear down the architecture of our federal government and replace it with a system of corruption to benefit powerful CEOs and billionaire union-busters," she said.
It's part of a broader attack on the federal workforce in Trump's second term. Through a combination of firings, layoffs, and forced resignations, he has reduced the number of government employees by nearly 300,000, causing chaos and understaffing at many agencies. He's also stripped more than 1 million unionized federal workers of their right to collective bargaining, though courts have blocked the implementation for some workers.
Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 800,000 federal workers, said Wednesday's order was "a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
"The practical implications of this action are clear. Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out," he said. "That is a disservice to them and to the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government every day."
William Shackelford, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, added that the order "threatens expanded political cronyism, increasing the risk that executive actions will be decided by the size of political contributions rather than the faithful execution of the law."
"That increases the risk of politically motivated enforcement of laws, threatening individual liberty; politically determined tariff exceptions and contract and grant awards, threatening greater corruption and waste of taxpayer dollars; and politically selective provision of services, threatening failure of government operations for disfavored groups or localities," he said.
The legal watchdog Democracy Forward has filed a lawsuit against Trump's rebranding of Schedule F as Schedule P/C at the start of his second term, which the group argued allowed several positions in the traditional nonpartisan civil service to be effectively recast as political appointees.
"For generations, our country has relied on a professional, nonpartisan civil service," said Skye Perryman, the group's president and CEO on Wednesday. "The people responsible for protecting our public health, safeguarding our environment, delivering our mail, managing our airports, protecting our public lands, and enforcing our laws should be allowed to do their jobs, not targeted by the same government they serve."
“When government experts can be fired without cause,” she added, “it’s not just federal workers who are harmed—it’s the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day.”
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‘Disgusting’: Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Brags About Killing 300,000 ‘High-Paying’ American Jobs
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," one public employee union official told Common Dreams. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
Apr 10, 2026
President Donald Trump's top economic adviser boasted on Fox Business Thursday that the government had slashed more than 300,000 "high-paying" jobs from the federal payroll during the president's first year back in office.
Asked by anchor Maria Bartiromo about the administration's efforts to cut government spending, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said it had made "a huge amount of progress."
"I think the biggest thing that we can point to is that we've cut government employment by 300,000 workers," he said. "Those are jobs that are very high-paying that are gone forever."
He claimed the cuts reduced government spending by "an unthinkable amount of money," perhaps $1 trillion over the next ten years.
He also said that the administration "reduced the deficit last year by $600 billion" through a combination of higher-than-expected economic growth, tariff revenues, and "supply side effects" of Trump's massive tax cut, which mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans while gutting the social safety net.
Dean Baker, a longtime collaborator of Hassett’s despite their opposing political beliefs, wrote on social media that Trump’s economic adviser was dramatically exaggerating the deficit reduction that occurred during the administration's first year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the deficit was about $1.8 trillion for fiscal year 2025, just $41 billion less than the previous year and $56 billion lower than the $1.9 trillion deficit CBO projected in its most recent baseline.
"In the real world, the deficit fell... less than one-tenth of what Kevin claims," Baker said.
Trump has touted the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees from their "boring federal jobs" as one of his crowning achievements.
Among the agencies hit by mass layoffs were the Department of Veterans Affairs, where more than 12,700 employees got the axe; the Department of Health and Human Services, which lost more than 14,400 workers; the Social Security Administration, whose staff shrank by more than 6,600; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which lost more than 4,000 employees.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest labor union representing federal workers, told Common Dreams that even if slashing jobs did reduce the deficit as Hassett claimed, the harm far outweighs any such benefit—not only for the fired employees, but for the millions of Americans who depend on services they provide.
"When you say 300,000 jobs, it is a nice round number, and you link it to deficit reduction, which he was lying about," Simon said. "The fact of the matter is, the disappearance of those 300,000 jobs means degraded healthcare for our veterans; slower or nonexistent service at the Social Security Administration for the elderly and disabled who rely on Social Security for their income; and the elimination of huge swaths of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that help ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink."
"You have federal prisons absolutely overwhelmed by too many inmates and too few corrections officers, endangering public safety," she continued. "Consumer product safety has been eviscerated. There are also serious public health concerns involving substance abuse, childhood nutrition, and vaccinations."
She decried Hassett's comments as "ignorant" in light of his false claims about deficit reduction, but also "just demonstrably pretty cruel and disdainful" given the impact these job losses have on individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole.
"It's cruel," Simon said, "not only on the people who held those jobs—about a 100,000 of whom are military veterans—but the impact of the disappearance of those jobs also falls on children, the elderly, anybody who consumes agricultural products, breathes air, or relies on clean water."
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," she added. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
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‘We Are Not Letting Up’: Advocates Say Much More Work to Do as Bovino Exits Minnesota
The ACLU said it plans to keep up the pressure and won’t stop “until ICE and CBP stop terrorizing our community.”
Jan 27, 2026
Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino has reportedly been pushed out of his role leading President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign amid a torrent of backlash against immigration agents' lawless behavior in Minnesota in recent weeks, particularly the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis this month.
The Atlantic, which was the first to report Bovino's departure, describes it as one of the first times that a White House prone to quadrupling down on even its most outrageous excesses has buckled in the face of public outrage, with Trump reportedly mulling "a tactical shift in the administration’s mass deportation campaign."
This has not only led to Bovino—who baselessly claimed Pretti intended to "massacre law enforcement"—being demoted and sent to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire. Some of the administration's other, more aggressive anti-immigrant zealots, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, are also reportedly on the hot seat.
"To be clear, this is a victory, which was won by ordinary people putting their lives on the line in the streets of Minneapolis while almost all their elected leaders kept quiet or made only muted criticism," said Jeet Heer, a writer for the Nation.
But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been at the forefront of legal resistance to the Trump administration's attacks on civil rights, warned on Monday evening that while ousting the face of the operation represented "progress," it must not breed complacency.
A spokesperson for the group noted in a video posted to social media that Bovino's demotion came shortly after the announcement that some Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents were being withdrawn from Minneapolis "as a result of public pushback," in response to its and Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) tactics.
"These are clear signals that the Trump administration is feeling our pressure," they said. "This is progress, but we are not letting up until ICE and CBP stop terrorizing our community."
"Part of how we achieve this is by telling our senators to vote no this week on a bill that would continue funding ICE without doing anything to keep our community safe," they continued.
Ezra Levin, the co-director of the progressive advocacy group Indivisible, said that the exit of Bovino shows that "the people of Minnesota won and the regime is losing."
However, he said that while "we are all happy to say good riddance to Greg Bovino... our work is still not over."
"This was never about one individual," Levin said. "It is about a system of terror driven by Donald Trump and his regime. The people on the streets are doing their part, but it is up to Democrats to hold the line and follow through. The DHS funding bill cannot pass in its current form, and there must be real constraints and accountability for DHS moving forward."
After Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, was gunned down this past weekend by a band of federal agents—whose identities the Trump administration has still refused to release to the public and has allowed to remain on duty—Democratic lawmakers have largely stated their intention to block a bill that would fund the government after a January 30 deadline.
That bill—which narrowly passed the House last week with seven Democrats in support after party leadership refused to whip votes against the measure—provides another $64.4 billion to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including another $10 billion for ICE. This is on top of the $170 billion in new DHS funding approved last summer when Congress passed Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Zeteo reports that as of Monday, 44 Democrats have stated their intention to vote against the bill. With seven Democrats needed to vote for the legislation in addition to all 53 Republicans, this is enough for it to be blocked. According to the report:
Senate Democrats appear to have coalesced around several demands for cleaning up ICE. While the exact language isn’t final, Democrats are prepared to demand the following, according to the [American] Prospect: an independent, federal-state investigation of the murders by DHS in Minnesota and agents’ tactics; a ban on ICE agents wearing face masks; a requirement that ICE agents wear body cameras; an end to arrest quotas and agents’ roving patrols, where they racially profile people; and a prohibition on agents illegally and unconstitutionally entering people’s homes based on “administrative warrants” that haven’t been signed by an actual judge.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), America's largest federal workers union, of which Pretti was a member, said that other Trump administration officials who smeared his name in order to defend his killing must also face accountability.
“In the immediate aftermath of Alex’s killing, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem betrayed the public trust by slandering the good name of our union brother and calling him a 'domestic terrorist,'" said AFGE national president Everett Kelley. "Alex Pretti was a patriotic ICU nurse at a [Department of Veterans Affairs] hospital who devoted his life to serving America’s veterans. That claim was reckless, defamatory, and unsupported by the facts. Noem was preceded in this false statement by Stephen Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, who is also the architect of the chaotic and failed immigration policy in Minnesota."
"Our demand is clear: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was responsible for carrying out the policy that led to Alex’s needless killing, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of that policy, must resign immediately," Kelley continued. "If they refuse, President Trump must dismiss them."
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