Civil Service and Project 2025
Liz VanDerwerken, proactive root director for Mormon Women for Ethical Government, recently spoke with Erica Newland, counsel at Protect Democracy, about broad reforms to the civil service proposed in Project 2025. Here is a summary of their conversation.
What is the civil service?
The civil service is the civilian workforce of the federal government. For example, engineers at the Environmental Protection Agency and your local mail carrier in the U.S. Postal Service are civil servants.
Civil servants most often keep their jobs when a presidential administration changes, while political appointees are chosen by elected officials and change with administrations. For example, a newly elected U.S. president will appoint a new secretary of the interior, but the park rangers working under the secretary will not necessarily change.
The culture of the civil service is apolitical. Employees are recruited based on merit and given the latitude to carry out their duties based on their expertise rather than loyalty to a political party.
What are the benefits of having civil servants remain in their positions across changing administrations?
The longevity of career civil servants provides stability, consistency, and institutional knowledge to government operations across changing presidential administrations and policies.
Civil service employees provide specialty expertise, research, and guidance to political appointees and the public in general.
A nonpartisan civil service environment gives Americans confidence that they can access government goods and services independent of their political leanings and without fear of retaliation. Research and data from federal agencies run by industry experts are free from bias.
How do job protections differ for civil servants and political appointees?
Civil servants must be hired without regard to their political views, while political appointees are selected based on their politics. A civil servant can only be fired for cause (a justifiable reason) and can challenge an unfair termination, while a political appointee can be fired without cause.
What is Schedule F?
“Schedule” refers to the different employment categories within the civil service. Schedule F is a new employment category for federal civil servants created by executive order by President Trump in 2020. Civil servants classified under Schedule F would have many of their job protections removed.
Schedule F was never fully implemented because the Biden administration revoked the order when the presidency changed hands in 2021.
What effect would Schedule F have?
Schedule F would streamline hiring and firing by increasing the president’s power over civil servants. This efficiency may have some benefits, but it promotes personal loyalty to the president, removing the nonpartisan nature of the civil service. Allegiance to the president could help someone get hired, while perceived disloyalty could get someone fired.
Implementing Schedule F has the potential to incentivize civil servants to suppress truth contrary to party platforms and increase corruption. It may discourage qualified candidates from seeking civil service jobs.
What changes does Project 2025 suggest for the civil service?
Project 2025 outlines a restructuring of federal government agencies to consolidate executive power. Initiatives such as Schedule F and federal agency relocations could be implemented.
The threat of implementing these changes may be enough to cause employees to prioritize loyalty to party leaders over their day-to-day tasks. The changes would also allow more political loyalists to step into previously nonpartisan positions.
How could these changes take place?
Trump’s past actions indicate that these changes could again be made through executive order. Historically, changes with such broad scope and effect have not been implemented solely through the executive branch but have involved the deliberation of other branches of government, the general public, and all stakeholders.
Project 2025 states the intention to nullify the Office of Personnel Management’s rule to reinforce protections for nonpartisan career civil servants.
What are the biggest threats posed by Schedule F?
The breakdown of our trusted, independent civil service could have far-reaching consequences, from delaying critical services to depressing the economy. Changes at the federal level may impact agencies downstream, at the state and local levels.
An increase in executive power may subdue the historic checks and balances of our democracy. Ultimately, Schedule F redirects the government from effectively serving the American people to serving a president’s interests.
Watch the full conversation here.
Project 2025 also proposes broad changes to the ways many administrative agencies within the federal government function. Read more about what these agencies and departments do in this MWEG article.