President Expands His Power to Fire Federal Workers

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/05/us/trump-news


The Trump administration finalized a new policy on Thursday that would strip job protections from up to 50,000 federal workers, a move that would make it easier for President Trump to remove or discipline them, in his latest effort to dismantle the federal work force.

Until now, the roughly 4,000 people appointed by the president, known as political appointees, were the only federal workers who could be fired at will. The policy issued on Thursday allows the administration to expand that number to include career employees whom the administration considers to also have policy-related roles. For these employees, any whistle-blower complaints would now be handled inside their agencies rather than by the independent Office of Special Counsel, as they had previously.

-----

The rule amounts to “a huge increase of at-will employment with an administration that has demonstrated a contempt for nonpartisan expertise,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes an effective federal work force. “Their track record does not justify trust, and our history as a country demonstrates that these kind of changes lead to worse government results, not better.”

The new rule, said Don Kettl, an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland who studies the civil service, “sweeps away all of the pillars of accountability except responsiveness to the president.”

He added, “That, of course, is patronage under a different name.”