Trump administration’s new rule makes it easier to fire career civil servants | Government news

Under the new rules of the Office of Personnel Management, high-ranking officials will be reclassified at will and can be fired for ‘willful violation of presidential directives’.

United States President Donald Trump’s administration has finalized an overhaul of the US government’s civil service system, giving the president the power to hire and fire roughly 50,000 career federal employees, according to a government statement.

The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Thursday will create a new category for high-ranking career employees involved in carrying out administration policies, the Wall Street Journal reported. Employees in that category would be exempt from long-standing civil service protections that make it harder to fire federal employees.

OPM officials said the rule was intended to “discipline” federal employees who stand in the way of Trump’s policies, the paper said. It added that the new category applies to senior positions that are policy-setting, policy-making or policy-advocating in nature.

OPM Director Scott Kupor said in an interview with the WSJ, “People cannot be conscientiously objecting to employees in a way where it interferes with their ability to carry out their mission.”

“These positions will remain career jobs filled on a nonpartisan basis. They will still be at-will positions, except through adverse action procedures or appeals. This will allow agencies to immediately remove from critical positions employees who misbehave, perform poorly, or obstruct the democratic process.

The federal government has long been viewed as a stable employer, with employees typically working at US agencies for decades. Trump and his team tried to change that at the start of his second term, as he argued that the federal government was bloated and inefficient.

In 2025, the White House announced aggressive cuts to the federal workforce, with more than 300,000 people leaving the nation’s largest employer.

OPM did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.