President Trump signed an executive order that stripped job protections from 8,000 federal workers, turning them into at-will employees.
The order moves those workers into a new excepted-service category called Schedule Policy/Career, an effort pushed under the first Trump administration as Schedule F, and formalizes a plan to make it easier to fire federal employees in policy roles; critics say it will be akin to political employees.
The White House published a directive titled "Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service."
Lawsuits allege the move is an unlawful attempt to dismantle the nonpartisan civil service.