Trump Implements Key Project 2025 Strategy To Expand Federal Worker Purge
The Trump Admin is now executing Trump's revived Schedule F executive order to strip civil service protections from 50,000 federal workers, making them easier to fire and replace with loyalists.
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On Friday, the Trump Administration made a move that is verbatim from Project 2025.
Trump’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is now moving forward with its proposed rule to strip civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal workers, making them easier to fire.
As I outlined in the first explainer I wrote on Project 2025 in November 2023, Project 2025 called for reclassifying thousands of civil servants into a new “Schedule F” category of federal employee. The Heritage Foundation President, Kevin Roberts, who led the Project 2025 effort, explicitly called for 50,000 federal workers to be initially reclassified. That’s exactly what the Trump Administration estimates. This is directly from the fact sheet the White House released on Friday:
“OPM estimates 50,000 positions will ultimately be moved into Schedule Policy/Career, approximately 2% of the Federal workforce.”
They’re following Project 2025 like a checklist. Stripping civil servant protections from tens of thousands of civil servants is a focal point of Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47. The key objective is to use the threat of firing to engineer loyalty, and if federal workers do not go along with President Trump’s radical agenda, then they can be fired and replaced with people who will.
Civil service protections exist for a reason. They ensure that federal employees can serve the American people, not the president’s ego. These protections were designed to shield public servants from political retaliation and preserve the basic functioning of government regardless of who’s in power. Stripping them away doesn’t make government more effective—it makes it more obedient to one man.
This move comes after the Trump Administration has already pursued mass firings of hundreds of thousands of probationary employees, sought to dismantle agencies like the Education Department, and attempted to unilaterally freeze congressionally approved funds.
Many of these moves have been blocked in court, as the Trump Administration’s initial sloppy, frenetic, Musk-led approach backfired politically. But now, they’re moving to a more methodical, Russell Vought-led phase of this effort to reshape the federal government into a tool of the far-right.
This proposed new Schedule F rule is set to be posted to the Federal Register on Wednesday. The rule implements an executive order Trump signed on the first day of his second term, which revives his Schedule F executive order from his first term, and renames the classification “Schedule Policy/Career.”
This is part of a long-planned effort to remove all pockets of independence from the executive branch and eliminate the guardrails that restrained Trump’s worst impulses in his first term.
President Trump blames the chaos of his first term not on himself, but on career civil servants who kept the government running smoothly. Trump has for years been talking about how he wants to “dismantle the Administrative State” or “dismantle the Deep State,” as Trump described it in his Agenda 47 platform. Before he left office in 2021, Trump made his first attempt to root out this “deep state” he falsely claims exists.
In October 2020, during the final months of his presidency, Trump signed a Schedule F executive order that reclassified tens of thousands of federal workers as “at-will” employees, making them easier to fire for no cause. Non-political federal workers usually have civil service protections that prevent them from being directly fired by the president. This protection prevented Trump from purging vast swaths of federal workers who, at times, questioned or refused to implement some of his often illegal proposals. President Biden rolled that executive order back when he took office.
In April of last year, President Biden went even further and announced the finalization of a rule that sought to protect 2.2 million civil servants from political firings. The rule, issued by Biden’s Office of Personnel Management, had been in the works since September 2023 and was a direct response to Project 2025’s proposed plans to purge civil servants and Trump’s endorsement of the plan.
But, given that this rule change was an executive action, it was an effort that Trump could undo, although with a slight delay. And that’s what we’re seeing now with Trump’s reinstatement and renaming of the Schedule F reclassification order.
Moving beyond probationary employees and seeking to fire civil servants with more robust legal protections is a new phase of the Trump Administration’s effort to reshape the federal bureaucracy in his image.
The next part of the plan, after the purge, as Project 2025 outlines, is to replace these thousands of civil servants with loyalists. Project 2025 has a detailed plan for how to accomplish this quickly. That is why they created their database of conservatives eager to serve in the federal government. They spent the past two years recruiting and training thousands of right-wing professionals so they’d be ready for this moment. I discussed this recruitment effort in October on MSNBC.
This doesn’t remove a fictional “deep state.” It creates a real one.
Leading this effort to reshape the executive branch is Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, who is a big proponent of Schedule F and has been making moves to further Project 2025’s agenda in a quieter manner than Elon Musk.
Vought is a self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist and was the key connective point between Project 2025 and Trumpworld. Vought wrote the Project 2025 chapter on expanding executive power, was in charge of crafting Project 2025’s first 180-day plan, and he was also the policy director of the RNC’s 2024 platform writing committee.
In March, Vought made a move that takes the Trump Administration’s purge of federal workers into its next phase. Vought sent an OMB memo that instructed federal agencies to plan for mass firings and included guidance for screening new hires. As I outlined in my article covering this move, Phases 1 and 2 of Vought’s memo mirror the Project 2025 plan to purge nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with trained loyalists.
Since then, we’ve seen new cuts at the Education Department, Health and Human Services, and new cuts planned at the State Department.
In February, President Trump also signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies,” which seeks to bring independent government agencies under direct White House control, with Russell Vought being given direct oversight. This is also straight from Project 2025.
The agencies impacted include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Labor Relations Board. The executive order only partially applies to the Federal Reserve, maintaining interest rate decisions at the Fed’s Board of Governors.
Taking all these moves together, you see a clearer picture of a more methodical approach to the Trump Administration’s efforts to twist the executive branch into an arm loyal to President Trump’s whims.
Elon Musk may not be loudly wielding a chainsaw anymore, but Trump is still consolidating power and gutting agencies, with a more mild-mannered Russell Vought leading the charge.
The faces and demeanors may have changed, but the mission is the same—turn the federal government into a mechanism of loyalty, not of law.
Absolutely terrifying, Ahmed. And I still can’t get over the fact that Vought pronounces his name as “Vote” — we certainly didn’t vote for this dismantling of the entire government.