Trump finalized his Schedule F policy, allowing him to remove job protections from career civil servants.

[In It to Win It]

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trumps-schedule-f-rule-finalized

The Office of Personnel Management announced a final rule creating Schedule F (now renamed Schedule Policy/Career). This allows Trump to remove job protections and fire tens of thousands of federal employees who hold policymaking roles, another step in politicizing public services under his personalist regime.

Here are some quick takes, which I will revise and expand as time goes on.

Even with extreme politicization, Schedule F still matters

When I started writing about the risks of a second Trump administration at the end of his first term in office I focused on Schedule F. Now, that focus seems a little naive. The degree of politicization we have actually witnessed is on a scale that I, who could be fairly counted as one of the biggest Cassandras on this topic, did not anticipate.

About 350,000 employees have been pushed out of government, disproportionately in agencies that are seen as more liberal. Federal hirings, annual performance evaluations, and even employee awards must now consider how loyal employees are to President Trump, and are closely monitored by political appointees.

As I’ve detailed previously, employees with stronger protections than those afforded by Schedule F have been fired because they are related to the wrong person, because the investigated abuses of power, because they were tagged by the MAGA online right as being disloyal, because they refused to break the law by firing others without cause, because they are trans, because they provided accurate information to a judge, because they made public statements about the effects of the President’s policies on their agencies, or, for no reason at all.

Even as politicized reprisals against career civil servants are a fact of life of life, internal protections against such reprisals, like the Merit Systems Protection Board, have been defanged to the point of toothlessness, meaning that an employee must now go to the courts if they are treated unfairly, even as the Supreme Court has offered little reason for optimism

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The President already effectively has an at-will work force.

New, from me: Trump finalized his Schedule F policy, allowing him to remove job protections from career civil servants.

The new rule is dishonest and unmoored from reality in its effort to formalize the politicization of the federal government 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trumps-sch...

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn.bsky.social) 2026-02-06T04:16:49.112Z

[Skittles]

1. only Trump whores need apply

yup