Donald Trump’s return to office sets the stage for harassment, intimidation and “old fashioned corruption” to spread throughout the US federal government, a top union leader has warned.
The president-elect and his allies have expressed support for the mass firing of civil service workers and abolishing certain government agencies upon his return to the White House.
Officials at the heart of Trump’s first administration have spoken of purging thousands of federal workers by using controversial powers to reshape the bureaucracy. Now, inside dozens of government agencies, staff are bracing for Trump’s second administration.
“It’s pretty bleak,” said Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents 110,000 employees at various agencies around the US. “It’s pretty grim.”
The former president attacked federal employees on the campaign trail, claiming they were “destroying this country” in an August podcast interview. “They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people,” he said. “They’re going to be held accountable.”
Trump has signaled his support for reviving the Schedule F executive order he issued in the final days of his last administration, under which swaths of the federal workforce could be stripped of their civil servant protections and redefined as political appointees. Advocates of the policy claimed to have identified 50,000 employees that could be fired.
“It’s probably been 150 years since we had something like this happen,” Lenkart said, pointing to the Pendleton Act, which in 1883 mandated that federal employees be hired based on merit, subject to competitive exams, and protected from political influences.
“One hundred and fifty years of hard lessons learned are all erased,” he said. “And now you’ve taken away that ability for federal employees to report bad things they see; you take away the ability of an employee to resist an illegal order, or an order that’s a political overreach of some kind, or simply a threat of old fashioned corruption, stealing stuff, helping someone gain a market or consolidate their personal wealth.
“It’s old fashioned corruption that is going to come back, too, because of people looking to make money off of this authority that federal employees have.”
Schedule F allows an unlimited number of political appointees to be hired into the federal government, as direct hires with no expiration date based on presidential terms, Lenkart said.
The success of Project 2025, the rightwing plan for Trump’s presidency, “revolves around” the implementation of Schedule F, he added: reclassifying roles typically filled by career government employees as political, “and having the ability to, you know, threaten, harass, intimidate or fire them”.
Emboldened by a supreme court decision earlier this year that former presidents are entitled to some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump is “going to do some…
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