Washington DC – President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order stripping job protections from about 8,000 federal workers by redefining their positions as "at-will."
Having returned in front of the cameras for the first time in a week, Trump signed a series of executive orders on Wednesday, including one to make senior civil servants "more accountable to the American people."
The executive order "reclassifies about 8,000 senior policy-influencing positions into Schedule Policy/Career."
Such positions are "at-will," meaning government agencies can remove employees "for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives without lengthy procedural hurdles."
Most of the people who were targeted by the order are currently sitting at the top of the civil service, as heads of policy offices, chiefs of staff, regional office managers, and officers overseeing various forms of government spending.
As a result, such civil servants are a potential risk to the Trump administration's agenda, as they have oversight over much of the government's day-to-day operations.
The move effectively triples the number of at-will government employees, who previously only made up only 4,000 of an approximately two-million-strong workforce.
Most federal employees are protected from firing by a robust process in which inadequate performance or misconduct is evaluated and acted on within the framework of a complicated and lengthy formal review.
"Personnel rules make removing Federal employees for any reason exceedingly difficult," a White House fact sheet argued. "Employees with significant policy-making responsibilities can stay in their jobs for years even if they perform poorly."
In a statement cited by NPR, Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman expressed concern that the order could see government employees fired without cause.
"When government experts can be fired without cause, it's not just federal workers who are harmed – it's the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day."