Federal labor union sues Trump administration over reclassification
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In a ‘step backward’, Trump effectively reinstated Schedule F, reclassifying thousands of employees as political hires. One day after Donald Trump returned to office, a leading government labor union filed a lawsuit against his administration’s reclassification of thousands of federal workers as political hires.
An executive order signed by the president – making public sector workers easier to fire – amounts to a “dangerous step backward”, according to the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents federal government employees across 37 agencies and departments.
The move, one of several actions announced by Trump in the hours after his inauguration on Monday, was swiftly criticized as an attack on workers. As they plotted his return, Trump’s allies claimed to have identified 50,000 federal workers who could be fired.
“You have to go through the process before you can undo a regulation,” said Will Dobbs-Allsopp, policy director at Governing for Impact, a left-leaning thinktank. Upon returning to the White House on Monday, Trump effectively reinstated “Schedule F”, which sought to allow for the reclassification of tens of thousands of federal workers. Schedule F changed civil service rules to allow for a broad swath of career federal employees to be fired without civil service protection, reclassifying their jobs as political appointments.
“There’s really no such thing, in the vast majority of context, as the resident just saying, ‘I’m going to treat this law as void,’” added Jordan Ascher, a policy counsel at Governing for Impact, who predicted legal challenges at “every step … from rescinding the rule to creating these lists of employees to actually firing people.”.
