Trump: Agencies should fire 'all' bureaucrats

Ahead of Trump's inauguration, transition officials touted that the new president would sign upwards of 200 executive actions Monday, including an expansion of immigration enforcement, pardons for those who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and a hiring freeze for much of the federal workforce.

In the Oval Office Monday night, Trump signed an order aimed at reinstating Schedule F, a proposal from the end of his first term that would convert tens of thousands of career federal workers in “policy-related” jobs out of the merit-based competitive service and into at-will positions, effectively stripping them of their civil service protections.

Former President Biden initially disbanded the initiative when he took office in 2021, and during his term, the Office of Personnel Management issued regulations defining “policy-related” positions as the current list of roughly 4,000 political appointments throughout government. Trump's edict tasked OPM with "promptly" unwinding those regulations, though it is unclear whether officials will go through the normal notice-and-comment period or simply proceed with an interim final rule.

“Most of those bureaucrats are being fired, they’re gone,” Trump said at a rally Monday afternoon while referring to his planned signing of a freeze on new federal regulations. “It should be all of them.”

And when an aide handed Trump the Schedule F order to sign on Monday night, Trump remarked: "We're getting rid of all of the cancer, the cancer caused by the Biden administration." 

Additionally, Trump is expected to sign orders to reduce federal employee unions’ role at agencies and federal workers’ collective bargaining rights. Though it is not yet clear what form those will take, Trump during his first term signed a trio of orders that made it easier to fire federal workers, reduced the scope of collective bargaining at agencies and severely restricting union officials’ access to official time.

In an executive order rescinding dozens of Biden-era initiatives, he cancelled executive orders reviving labor-management forums at agencies and requiring agencies to bargain with unions over “permissive” topics, as well as an array of edicts promoting diversity at federal agencies.

The Trump administration also indicated that it will target federal workers’ telework opportunities. In a memo outlining the president’s Day 1 priorities, White House officials cited GOP misinformation inflating telework’s prevalence in the federal workplace.

“President Trump is planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats,” the memo states. “The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The president will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.”

According to 2024 Office of Management and Budget data, 54% of the federal workforce works entirely in-person because their jobs are not portable. The remaining 46% who can telework still performed more than 60% of their work hours at traditional work sites, while 10% of the workforce is fully remote.

At Monday’s rally, an announcer claimed that Trump signed an executive order making it a “requirement" that federal workers return to full time in-person work “immediately.”

But typically, changes to policies like telework take time to be implemented among unionized workplaces, as agency managers must wait to renegotiate union contracts governing those policies. But House Republicans and conservative think tank operatives last week floated the idea of changing federal sector labor law to allow presidents to reopen collective bargaining agreements upon their inauguration.