Questions raised about Trump’s ability to fire 50,000 federal employees

18 November 2024

A member of the White House General Services staff hanging a painting of Benjamin Franklin in the White House Oval Office on January 20, 2021 (Creative Commons)

One of the many controversial proposals in Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's widely criticized 920-page blueprint for a second Trump Administration — is firing tens of thousands of federal government employees and replacing them with an army of unquestioning Trump/MAGA loyalists.

Trump, during his 2024 presidential campaign, claimed that he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Yet the parallels between Project 2025 and his own Agenda 47 are easy to pinpoint, including a game plan for giving the United States' federal workforce a top-to-bottom MAGA makeover.

Author/journalist Jay Michaelson, in article published by MSNBC's website on November 18, grapples with the question: Just how easy — or difficult — would it be for Trump to fire 50,000 federal government employees and replace them with Trump loyalists who would take an oath to Trump and the far-right MAGA movement?

"One of the linchpins of Project 2025 — the collection of policy proposals that some in Trump World have now warmly embraced after spending six months claiming they had nothing to do with it — is the planned replacement of up to 50,000 career civil servants with political appointees loyal to President-elect Donald Trump," Michaelson explains. "But it's not an idea confined only to Project 2025: Trump's own 'Agenda 47' calls for an 'executive order restoring the president's authority to fire rogue bureaucrats,' and Trump himself said of civil servants, 'They're destroying this country. They're crooked people, they're dishonest people. They're going to be held accountable.'"

Michaelson continues, "This position is at odds with American public opinion. A survey conducted by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, released last March, found that 87 percent of Americans said that 'having a nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy.'"

The author/journalist goes on to say, however, that "there are good reasons to doubt that" Trump can fire tens of thousands of federal civil service workers.

"Statutorily," Michaelson notes, "the civil service as we know it today was created in 1883 by the Pendleton Act, passed to reform government and end the patronage system where political allies and donors were rewarded with cushy government jobs. The Pendleton Act envisioned a civil service made up of experts who knew their fields, had to pass exams to demonstrate competence and could not be fired without due process. But in 1978, another law, the Civil Service Reform Act, created a loophole, now contained in Section 7511 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code, that exempted from civil service protections anyone 'whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character,' the same language used in the Trump order from 2020…. At the very least, the purge won't happen overnight."

Michaelson adds, "Trump's order will be challenged immediately, a subsequent regulation will take months to draft and review. From there, what will happen is anyone’s guess — like so much else in this strange and unprecedented time."

Jay Michalson's full analysis for MSNBC is available at this link.

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