\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump has signed an executive order making it easier to fire thousands of the best-paid workers in the US government aspart of a broader drive by his administration to overhaul the federal workforce.<\/p>\n
The order, released by the White House and the office of personnel management (OPM) on Wednesday, strips job protections from a mostly senior group of federal workers \u2013 about 8,000 employees \u2013 earning up to almost $200,000 a year,<\/strong> and who are deemed to be \u201cinfluencing\u201d government policy.<\/p>\n In a call previewing the move, Scott Kupor, director of the OPM, which oversees the government\u2019s human resources policies, said the administration needs to employ people willing and able to carry out orders to achieve the administration\u2019s policy priorities.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism obviously for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n About 348,000 employees, over 11% of its overall workforce, have left the federal government since October 2024.<\/p>\n The latest order shows Trump is persisting in his efforts to discipline and fire career employees whom he sees as undermining his political goals, a year after billionaire Elon Musk left his post overseeing an effort to slash government spending and payrolls.<\/p>\n Trump believes his agenda was hampered by career federal workers who opposed his policies during his first term.<\/p>\n During Trump\u2019s first term, his administration attempted to reclassify federal employees to \u201cat will\u201d under schedule F, but the rule was rescinded by the Biden administration before it took full effect.<\/p>\n Labor union leaders have argued the reclassification serves as a step backward to the 19th-century spoils system, where jobs were given to loyalists rather than based on merit.<\/p>\n The number of workers affected by the order is well below a ceiling estimate of up to 50,000 who could have been subject to new rules. Senior administration officials on the call said Trump could expand the grouping but had no immediate plans to do so.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Trump-Vance administration\u2019s attempts to dismantle civil service protections would make it easier to purge experienced public servants,\u201d said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, in a statement on the executive order. \u201cWhen government experts can be fired without cause, it\u2019s not just federal workers who are harmed \u2013 it\u2019s the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day.\u201d<\/p>\n Democracy Forward is representing several federal worker unions and their allies in a lawsuit, filed in January, to strip civil service protection from thousands more workers. Federal judges paused the litigation while the Trump administration finalized changes.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees\u2019 due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons,\u201d said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, in a statement on the executive order.<\/p>\n \u201cThousands of employees who were hired under the nonpartisan, professional civil service will be converted to a new hiring schedule where they can be fired \u2018at will\u2019 by political appointees or other overseers with essentially no procedural or appeal safeguards that have long protected the integrity of government operations.\u201d<\/p>\n Reuters contributed reporting<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Donald Trump has signed an executive order making it easier to fire thousands of the best-paid workers in the US government aspart of a broader drive by his administration to overhaul the federal workforce. The order, released by the White House and the office of personnel management (OPM) on Wednesday, strips job protections from a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[964,6485,319,77,4928,1435,3716,181,81,1438],"class_list":{"0":"post-50039","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-donald","9":"tag-easier","10":"tag-federal","11":"tag-fire","12":"tag-highly","13":"tag-order","14":"tag-paid","15":"tag-signs","16":"tag-trump","17":"tag-workers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}