The Health and Human Services Department is moving hundreds of senior career staff to a new civil service classification that will make it easier to fire them.
President Donald Trump tinkered with the idea late in his first term and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, recommended the reclassification of career staff with policy-making responsibilities in its Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term. Trump dismissed that document during his campaign, but has since adopted many of its proposals.
The architect of Project 2025, current White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, has said career staff impeded Trump’s policies during Trump’s first term.
An official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an HHS agency, granted anonymity to reveal internal communications, told POLITICO some managers had received emails Friday that said some employees were moving to new, at-will employment classifications as part of a first phase of reclassifications that would grow in the future.
Another HHS official who would only agree to speak anonymously said the move was “intended to strengthen accountability for supervisors with significant policy-influencing responsibilities.”
Affected HHS employees will no longer benefit from protections granted to career civil servants that make them harder to fire.
Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office to create the new classification.
The White House Office of Personnel Management, which implemented a rule about the change that became effective in March, has said the rule “will principally affect removal procedures for employees in policy-influencing positions whose performance or conduct is judged to be deficient.”
OPM cited surveys it said show that a minority of federal supervisors believe they could remove an employee who engaged in serious misconduct, and only a quarter believe they could remove a seriously underperforming employee. “This is borne out by the fact that agencies rarely dismiss tenured employees,” OPM said in a document answering frequently asked questions on the new classification.
But Trump critics believe the new category is meant to purge the civil service of staffers who aren’t politically loyal to Trump.
OPM has said, however, that federal government employees under the new Schedule Policy/Career classification cannot be required to pledge personal or political loyalties to the president.
OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote in a memo to agency heads in February that the president must first issue an executive order to shift employees. As yet, Trump has not.
Other HHS employees received notices Friday that they will be laid off as part of a so-called reduction-in-force that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last year, according to the second HHS official and an HHS employee who received a notice. It was not immediately clear how many people received those notices and HHS did not respond to a question about the number.
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