If former President Trump returns to office and tries to resurrect an executive action making it easier to fire federal employees, that effort could sweep up far more employees than previously thought, according to the National Treasury Employees Union.
Newly released documents obtained by the NTEU from the Trump-era Office of Management and Budget suggest that his administration was contemplating removing civil service protections from tens of thousands more federal government employees than originally estimated.
Trump’s Executive Order 13957, which was issued in the waning days of his administration, proposed allowing federal service managers, including those with the IRS, to reclassify specific employees under a new Schedule F, enabling expedited hiring, discipline, and termination outside the normal rules of the civil service. President Biden rescinded that executive order shortly after he took office.
As written, Trump’s order would have applied only to federal employees in confidential or policy-related positions, which was originally thought to have a limited scope. But the newly released records show OMB’s determination of which positions under its purview are considered policy-related, revealing that Trump had a much broader vision in mind, NTEU President Doreen P. Greenwald told reporters February 27.
“Looking at the OMB list, they stretch the definition of confidential or policy positions to the point of absurdity,” Greenwald said. She warned that tens of thousands of frontline federal employees could fall under the executive order, many of them in lower-grade positions, including positions identified as office managers, administrative support assistants, cybersecurity specialists, IT specialists, and more.
“The reason isn’t being hidden,” Greenwald continued. “It is their view to make them easier to fire. This is a wake-up call for those who think Schedule F isn’t that big of a deal.”
Each federal agency would’ve had to determine which positions fall within the Schedule F scope, and the released records cover only positions within the OMB. Nevertheless, the records “provide a really good vantage point of what they were thinking and how they plan to implement it in other agencies,” Greenwald said.
Greenwald declined to estimate how many IRS employees might be affected, but said that based on the covered job titles at the OMB, the number of similar positions at the IRS is alarmingly high.
A coalition of Trump-affiliated groups led by the Heritage Foundation have organized an effort, dubbed Project 2025, that aims to recruit and maintain a database of personnel to replace fired federal workers after Schedule F is reinstated if Trump is elected in November.
“Ironically, Schedule F would insert politics into the workforce by replacing civil servants with partisan loyalists. They’ve come right out and admitted that. They want a partisan workforce. That should scare every American,” Greenwald said.
Shutdown Mystery
Greenwald said that the NTEU, like the public, is still waiting to see what the IRS’s contingency plan looks like if Congress fails to reach a budget deal before the funding lapses for the IRS March 8.
“We should never be brought to the brink of a shutdown, never,” Greenwald said. “And yet, here we go again.”
The IRS has weathered its fair share of government shutdowns over the years, but never during the filing season. IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel assured reporters during a January 11 call that the IRS would “get the job done” if there were a mid-filing-season lapse in funding, but he added that a shutdown inevitably raises the prospect of disruption — a sentiment that Greenwald echoed.
The IRS’s most recent shutdown contingency plan, released in September 2023, indicated that only about a third of its employees would remain working if there were a lapse in funding; however, that applied to the nonfiling season, which runs from the beginning of May through the end of December. That plan gave no indication of how many IRS employees would be deemed essential during a potential mid-filing-season shutdown.
The IRS’s fiscal 2023 contingency plan said it could siphon funds from the Inflation Reduction Act to keep it afloat if congressional appropriations lapsed, but the agency reversed course a year later, saying IRA funding would be used only for limited categories.
The best analogue from recent years may be the IRS’s fiscal 2022 contingency plan, in which the agency said it would keep 57.6 percent of its employees working if a shutdown were to occur during the filing season.