Part One, The Impact of Trump’s Executive Actions: The Federal Workforce

Project Overview

This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy, explaining in practical terms what the administration’s executive orders and other executive actions mean for all of us. Each of these actions springs from the pages of Project 2025, the administration's 900-page playbook that serves as the foundation for these measures. The Project 2025 agenda should concern all of us, as it tracks strategies adopted by countries such as Hungary, which have eroded democratic norms and have adopted authoritarian approaches to governing.

Project 2025’s stated intent to move quickly to “dismantle” the federal government will strip the public of important protections against excessive presidential power and provide enormous and unchecked opportunities for big corporations to profit by preying on America's households.

In Part One of the series, we address attacks on the federal workforce, specifically, through the removal of protection for tens of thousands of federal workers under  Executive Order 14171 and through large-scale reductions in force directed under Executive Order 14201.

From Public Service to Presidential Loyalty

Beginning on Inauguration Day, President Trump has moved swiftly and steadily to dismantle the federal government. If successfully implemented, his stream of executive orders and related actions will result in the destruction of government as we know it, replacing it with a new operational system where conflicts of interest abound, checks and balances are gone, and government workers are chosen based on loyalty to the President instead of the duty to serve the public. Fact-based decisions made by professionals will become a thing of the past.

Project 2025 – The Destruction of Government Agencies

Executive Orders 14171 and 14201 come straight from the Project 2025 chapter entitled, Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy. The intent of this chapter is to essentially replace the federal workforce with a decentralized and privatized system.

Executive Order 14171 achieves the goals of Project 2025 by removing due process and other employment for thousands of federal workers by reclassifying as many as 50,000 members of the civil service as “Schedule F” employees. This enables the administration to fire these employees without due process and to replace them with political appointees. Media reports describe a process where hiring focuses more on loyalty to the President than on merit.

Executive Order 14201 complements that directive through mandated, large-scale, and widespread reductions in the federal workforce, without any requirement that such firings be based on performance, productivity, or merit.

Why This Matters

These Executive Orders empower the administration to fill positions that were once occupied by nonpolitical employees with unqualified loyalists. Although some high-level government workers are typically replaced following a change in federal administration, the vast majority are not. This stability enables the government to perform vital services without interruption, by people with expertise in health, safety, law enforcement, national security, and other crucial areas.

Civil service protections were created more than a century ago in response to the corruption of the “spoils system” in which government jobs were rewarded for political loyalty. They were designed to protect government workers from political interference, allowing them to serve the public while shielded from political pressure.

The executive orders ignore this history and will have direct impacts on the public by reducing the quality of government services and jeopardizing public health and safety. The examples are many and include:

•  Public safety is threatened when experienced federal workers are summarily fired and replaced with political appointees who may lack expertise in such vital areas as fighting infectious and chronic diseases; investigating deadly accidents; responding to natural disasters; ensuring airline safety; protecting our air and water and the safety of food and medicine; and safeguarding nuclear weapons.
• Eviscerating the workforce at such agencies as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration will gut services supporting those who served in the military and older Americans who rely on Social Security.
• The administration’s widespread indiscriminate firings, without regard to merit or function, even go beyond Project  2025’s directives, obliterating the traditional approach to terminating employees based on performance reviews, eliminating duplication, and implementing small strategic changes based on program effectiveness.

The executive orders will result in cuts to essential government services and increased costs for taxpayers.

• When needed functions are cut, the government may fill the vacuum with private contracts, often at a higher cost. This opens the door to private profiteering at taxpayer expense.
• When politics, not expertise, governs hiring and firing, new employees constantly need training due to increased turnover, raising costs.

The executive orders will open the door to patronage systems and corruption and will eliminate vital expertise.

• Politically motivated firings eliminate knowledgeable, skilled employees and reduce critical services.
• As we learned from the implementation of authoritarian playbooks in countries such as Hungary, dismantling the civil service leads to corruption and fraud as well as the loss of needed expertise.

They also threaten the independence and integrity of agency officials.

• These executive orders will enable the President, cabinet secretaries, and other high-level presidential appointees to fire large swaths of the federal bureaucracy at will. They will reward campaign donors and supporters with government jobs while punishing those who supported an opposing candidate but are otherwise qualified to serve.
• Federal employees whose boss is a public official run the risk of feeling pressured to benefit that official instead of the public.

Key Takeaway

This creation of a practice of governance that rewards supporters, friends, and loyalists and that reduces the size of federal agencies without regard to the services they provide will reduce needed services and threaten our health and safety. It should raise alarms for all those who believe that federal employees must be free to provide crucial services without political interference.

Lawyers Defending American Democracy is dedicated to galvanizing lawyers “to defend the rule of law in the face of an unprecedented threat to American Democracy.” Its work is not political or partisan.