Monitoring democratic institutions through public records
Government Worker Protections — Week of Oct 20, 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.
AI content assessment elevated
AI two-pass review flags anomalous content with P2 corroboration. Monitoring increased.
This week, President Trump signed an executive order that changes how the federal government hires career workers. Under Ensuring Continued Accountability in Federal Hiring, every new federal hire must now be approved by a "Strategic Hiring Committee" made up of political appointees within each agency. These committees must ensure hiring aligns with "the priorities of my Administration." Meanwhile, political appointees themselves are exempt from this new approval process.
This might matter because the federal civil service system exists to protect government workers from being hired or fired based on political loyalty rather than competence. When politically appointed officials control who gets hired into career positions — and must ensure those hires match the President's priorities — it could affect the independence of the career workforce that carries out government functions regardless of which party holds power.
Also this week, during an ongoing government shutdown, the Senate debated S. 3012, a bill intended to ensure federal workers get paid during the funding lapse. Senator Jon Ossoff warned that the bill as written would give the President sole authority to decide which workers receive pay and which don't — a power he said "could be abused by an executive determined to pay favored Federal workers and deny disfavored Federal workers pay."
There are reasonable alternative explanations. The hiring order most likely reflects a genuine effort to manage the federal workforce efficiently after a period of significant downsizing — many presidents have imposed hiring controls. The requirement to align with administration priorities may simply mean focusing hiring on stated policy areas like border security rather than screening individual applicants for political views. And the shutdown pay bill is a bipartisan effort to help federal workers, with Senator Ossoff's concern focused on improving the bill's design rather than opposing its goal.
Still, the combination of centralized political control over career hiring and potential executive discretion over employee pay represents a notable shift in how the federal workforce is managed. Limitations: This analysis is based on AI review of publicly available documents and cannot determine how these policies will be implemented in practice.