Donald Trump hopes you won't notice his latest attempt to purge civil servants
The Trump administration buried notice of a plan to reclassify up to 50,000 federal workers in favor of political loyalists in dry, bland legalese. Here's how to act.
The Trump administration’s recently proposed rule in the Federal Register doesn’t exactly scream “threat to tens of thousands of U.S. government workers.”
But that’s exactly what it is, according to a Princeton University legal scholar who studies how authoritarian regimes bury drastic changes to the government in plain sight.
“Autocratic Legalism”
Princeton Professor Kim Lane Scheppele has studied what she calls “autocratic legalism” at work in Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Donald Trump’s attack on the 2020 presidential election.
She sees that pattern reemerging now that Elon Musk appears to be retreating from the Trump administration’s slash-and-grab campaign gutting government agencies.
“If you come in like Elon Musk brandishing a sword with all of your guys who have social media profiles with funny nicknames — and then they terrorize the people in the building — that's one kind of problem, but it gets a lot of attention,” Scheppele told All Rise News in a phone interview.
The Trump administration soon learned that the shock-and-awe approach has its drawbacks.
“Elon Musk's numbers tanked,” Scheppele noted, referring to his plummetting poll numbers and Tesla stock value. “There were lots and lots of people, including a non-trivial numbers of Republicans, who thought that this was going too far.”
Trump is taking a quieter approach in seeking to pass a rule with this language:
“Grantmaking is an important form of policymaking, so employees with a substantive discretionary role in how federal funding gets allocated may occupy policymaking positions.”
“This so-called rule says anybody who's in a policymaking position can be a political appointee, rather than a career civil servant,” Scheppele said.
Sure, the information is public. There’s even a White House fact sheet on it, but it’s filled with such bland and euphemistic puffery that only the most vigilant public citizens might see and understand it.
Possible Action Item: Notice and comment
Agencies must provide notice of a proposed rule and give the public a chance to comment before implementing a final rule. Readers can submit comments on this rule, titled “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service,” by clicking here.
“Centered on political loyalty”
The proposed rule’s language could have a wide reach. Trump’s Office of Personnel Management estimates that 50,000 positions, or about 2 percent of the federal workforce, will be reclassified under the new rule as policymaking positions.
In effect, the measure would replace the lifelong public servants Trump always vilified as the “deep state” into political loyalists, and it’s been an openly stated ambition long before his second term. The White House frames it around “accountability” and “draining the swamp.”
Political scientist Donald Moynihan noted in Brookings that Trump unveiled an executive order weeks before the 2020 election invoking the so-called “Schedule F” to create a new class of political appointee.
“The overt purpose of Schedule F is partisan politicization, centered on political loyalty to the president. But the oath that public employees take is to serve the Constitution, not the president,” Moynihan wrote in 2023. “Schedule F frustrates the institutional design of checks and balances, especially weakening legislative power.”
Former president Joe Biden rescinded the Schedule F order from late in Trump’s first term, but Trump never abandoned the idea, which featured prominently in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump has tried to distance himself from the Heritage project in the past, in light of its unpopularity even among GOP voters, but observers could not help but notice a significant overlap between Project 2025 and what Trump’s White House actually does.
How and why to comment
Submitting comments on proposed rule changes to the Federal Register could be a high impact form of civic engagement by enhancing the litigation position if the Trump administration implements the change.
“Then, you have a possibility if you objected to go to court and say, ‘They didn't answer these objections that they have a legal obligation to respond to,’” Scheppele said. “There were all the serious things that we said about this regulation and they didn't address them fully, and now, we want to sue to get a revocation of the rule.”
All Rise News observed that the website for submitting comments occasionally experienced technical issues, and Scheppele said that it appeared to have been down for multiple days in the past.
The Office of Personnel Management’s point of contact on the proposed rule did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on whether the government would extend the deadline for submissions by every day the website was inoperable.
By press time, the comment page appeared to be operational.
The submission deadline on all comments is May 23, 2025.
How do I write a comment?
It’s easy.
Don Moynihan publicly shared his comment in support of a Biden-era proposal to strengthen civil servant protections, but yours doesn’t need to be that elaborate. Here’s one of more than 2,300 comments responding to the proposal in the Federal Register.
Speak your mind by clicking here. Keep it as short or long as you want.
Comment submitted. Thank you for the link and samples.