Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.
President-elect Trump’s plans to reshape the federal workforce would allow him to fire wide swaths of career employees and replace them with political appointees — a move that comes as he has demanded loyalty at every level of government.
Trump has said he will reissue an order released in the waning days of his first administration that ends merit-based hiring for a number of federal jobs that work on policy, instead creating a new class of federal employees — Schedule F — that could be hired and fired just like political appointees.
Section 7511: The Pendleton Act of 1883 envisioned a professional U.S. civil service made up of experts who knew their fields, had to pass competence tests & could not be fired without due process. But the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act included a provision (now Section 7511 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code ) that stripped civil service protections for those “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.” There are 2.2M full-time federal employees (chart). Can President-elect Trump dismiss tens of thousands of career civil servants based on Section 7511, as he has vowed to do? Stay tuned.
