Monitoring democratic institutions through public records
Government Worker Protections — Week of Jul 21, 2025
Are career government workers protected from being fired for political reasons? 'Schedule F' is a rule that could let the President fire thousands of workers who aren't loyal to him.
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New Executive Order Creates Path to Replace Career Government Workers with Political Appointees
On July 23, the White House published an executive order titled Creating Schedule G in the Excepted Service, which creates a new category of government jobs that can be filled with political appointees rather than career civil servants. These "Schedule G" positions would cover roles described as "policy-making or policy-advocating"—a broader description than existing rules use—and workers in these positions would lose the job protections that normally prevent government employees from being fired for political reasons.
This might matter because the career civil service system exists to ensure that government workers are hired and retained based on expertise and merit, not political loyalty. Schedule G could affect this system by giving the President authority to reclassify protected career positions into a new category where employees can be removed at will. The same week, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia described on the House floor how federal workers in his district continue to receive abrupt termination notices—in one case, an HHS employee got a termination letter "just hours before it went into effect" with no information about severance or next steps.
There are reasonable alternative explanations to consider. Most plausibly, this order may simply formalize a category of positions that already existed informally, bringing more transparency to how political appointments work. The order itself does not immediately reclassify any specific jobs—its real-world impact depends on which positions agencies and the Office of Personnel Management decide to place in Schedule G going forward. Additionally, the floor speech from Rep. Subramanyam reflects one lawmaker's account and political perspective, though the specific details he describes are consistent with reports from prior weeks.
That said, the combination of a new legal tool to strip job protections from career workers and ongoing reports of mass firings across federal agencies represents a pattern worth watching closely.
Limitations: This analysis draws on a small number of documents from a single week and is AI-generated, not an independent investigation.