Donald Trump‘s purge of the federal bureaucracy escalated Wednesday with an executive order making it easier to fire 8,000 federal workers.
The order reclassified the workers as at-will employees, meaning the government can now terminate them without offering a reason.
A rule finalized by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) earlier this year established a new category of these workers, known as ‘schedule policy/career.’
Trump’s order Wednesday put those 8,000 workers, generally senior policymakers, into the new category.
‘It’s been a long-standing problem that it’s almost impossible to fire a federal employee, even in cases of serious misconduct,’ said James Sherk of the Domestic Policy Council at the public signing of the order. ‘And that’s a particular problem if you’re in a senior policy-influencing role.’
The President lauded Sherk as a key architect of the order.
‘What this [order] does is basically treat those employees like private sector workers,’ Sherk added.
Previously, only around 4,000 federal employees could be hired and fired using the at-will procedures. Under the terms of Trump’s order, that number triples to 12,000.
All SES, supervisors, and higher-grade (GS-10 and above) need to be in this category.