How Will Trump's Executive Orders Change Government?
What the New Orders Mean for a New Order
President Trump issued a wave of executive orders in his first day in office, too many to make sense of them all in one sitting. Here, I focus on the changes that relate to the organization and delivery of public services, and how they matter for public employees. Please note, my interpretation here is provisional, I am not a lawyer, and there will be stuff I will miss or speculation that might be disproven in the future. It’s my best effort to give a quick read on what the future will look like, and I will update as I go.
A couple of observations. This was better organized than before. Trump had his orders ready. Acting officials (usually career employees) were in key positions, and some of those officials had pre-drafted memos on hand. The reflects the fingerprints of the secret 180 Day Playbook aspect of Project 2025, led by Russ Vought. While tracking the hiring of people involved in Project 2025 is one way to assess its impact, the blueprint for governing is just as important. Presumably, these orders were revised by the transition team, but thematically they are consistent with key goals of Project 2025. This is how Vought described the work to undercover journalists last year:
We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration. For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation.’” What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.
While Trump’s first administration was famously leaky, the new wave of orders did not leak until shortly before the inauguration, when incoming officials started to share the outlines to favored outlets like Fox News and The Free Press. It was an impressive display of message discipline.
So, what is in the orders?
Hiring Freeze for Civilians; Hiring Spree for Appointees
Trump imposes a new hiring freeze on federal civilian employees. There are exceptions for essential positions, and the Director of OPM may grant exemptions. Departing positions cannot be backfilled, and contractors cannot be hired to fill gaps. The EO specifies it should not impact services for some agencies (Social Security, Medicare and Veteran’s Affairs), and exemptions were identified in an OPM memo for military personnel, immigration enforcement, national security, public safety and the postal service. Offers to new hires are being rescinded, with any new hire with a start date offer of February 8th or later being revoked.
The hiring freeze expires in 90 days for all agencies except the IRS, which seems like a clear signal that Trump will abandon the much-needed project of rebuilding IRS capacity after years of neglect. This will contribute to revenue shortfalls down the line, but at this point kneecapping IRS seems to be viewed as backdoor tax cut for Republicans.
At the end of the 90 days, look for some changes in hiring practices. Another hiring EO lays out some broad principles for changing current practices. Some of these are good, such as speeding up the hiring process. Some are consistent with Trump’s opposition to equity and inclusion practices. Other parts imply bigger changes down the line:
Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, in consultation with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, and the Administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), shall develop and send to agency heads a Federal Hiring Plan that brings to the Federal workforce only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests.
The thing that jumps out for this section is that the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy is James Sherk, the first term staffer who crafted the Schedule F Order. This implies that Sherk has big enough plans to change hiring practices, perhaps to bring in more loyalists who share Trump’s vision of “American ideals, values, and interests.” Watch this space.
A new OPM memo also requires the creation of lists of federal employees still on their probationary period (usually 1 year) to be reported to OPM by January 24. This is because those employees do not have full civil service protections and can be easily fired. Alongside revoking offers, this is bad HR policy. The federal government has a bigger hiring than firing problem, and targeting the newest and youngest hires in an aging workforce is a terrible idea, unless the goal is simply to cut people. Which it is.
The hiring freeze may indicate a policy of cost-cutting for civil servants, but in other ways efficiency is clearly not a concern. The same OPM memo encourages agencies to use paid leave to remove employees they want to get out of the way or fire in the future.
Placing an employee on paid administrative leave may be an appropriate action where the agency component in which the employee works is being eliminated or restructured, or where the agency weighs changes to the individual’s role at the agency as part of a workforce realignment. It also may be appropriate when a new agency manager determines that the absence of the employee from the office “is in the interest of the agency or of the Government as a whole.”9 Agencies are encouraged to use flexibilities associated with paid administrative leave as they implement agency restructuring initiatives or determine the best ways to manage agency components going forward.
Obviously, paying people not to do anything is not efficient. With the promise of Schedule F (see below) coming in a few months, administrative leave offers a credible means to remove the disfavored employees from the office with the plan to later remove them when they are reclassified out of civil service status. In other words, administrative leave can work in lock-step with Schedule F to facilitate politicization and purges.
This use of administrative leave to facilitate purges has already begun. Trump has ordered all DEI staff across government to be put on paid leave before they can be fired. While DEI has gotten the most attention, the executive order also calls to fire staff who work on environmental justice, as well as projects they have funded, which would include funding to local governments (which turn out to be mostly Republican districts) facing environmental risks. These employees are not being fired for poor performance, but for doing what they were asked to do by the prior administration.
For political appointees, there is no limit on hiring. Another new OPM memo removes the traditional cap on Schedule C appointees for 240 days. As a reminder, the US government has about 4,000 political appointee positions, about 1,300 of whom are Senate-confirmed. This change could see the number of non-Senate confirmed appointees increase significantly. It fits with the broader pattern of politicization.
The same memo also offers a back-door path for Senate-confirmed appointees to join the agency in an “advisory or consultative capacity.” This is not wholly unusual, but does diminish advise and consent power of the Senate. It puts nominees in de facto acting capacity from Day 1 of the administration, even if they cannot formally occupy the position they are nominated for. It is also a response to the Senate doing a woeful job in confirming less visible appointees in a timely fashion, or simply putting holds on appointees for reasons completely unrelated to the candidate. While this is an executive branch aggrandizement, the Senate asked for it by its incompetence and pettiness when it comes to the conformation process.
Return-to-Office
Trump issued a return-to-office policy asking agencies to:
take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.
As I’ve noted before, I think this is a dumb, politics-of-resentment type of policy that Musk and Ramaswamy implied was there mainly to encourage people to quit. The best evidence that we have on the use of work-from-home in the public sector, a study of the Patent and Trademark Office, found that it increased productivity, and reduced hiring and office costs. A study of the administration of policing tasks from the UK also shows that work-from-home is associated with greater productivity.
But the federal government is now being told to give up on a tool that can help it hire and retain employees. Government typically pays less for white-collar talent. The federal government does not use telework at a different rate from the private sector, and this policy simply makes it less competitive in hiring talented employees.
The process does allow for exemptions, and contracts with employees may make it difficult to extend this immediately or quickly, but the intent is clear. Trump also seeks to undermine collective bargaining rights, in a sprawling executive order that undid many Biden initiatives, including on DEI.
Schedule F Returns
Schedule F, the Trump EO that allows him to convert career employees into political appointees, and in doing so removes their job protections, has returned. The Biden administration rescinded Schedule F and issued a rule to further constrain its return. The Trump administration is claiming they can ignore the Biden rule. In the hierarchy of laws, rules trump executive orders. But in this case Trump executive orders break rules. Public sector unions have already sued.
There are some amendments to the original Schedule F order. One superficial one is that they rename the category from “Schedule F” to “Policy/Career.” This has no legal significance I think, but does signify that these class of employees will blur the distinction between political appointee and career civil servants in an unprecedented way. Renaming it will also, annoyingly, create more confusion about what Schedule F is, making it harder for the public to understand.
The new EO also expands mechanisms by which Schedule F could occur. Previously, only agency heads could nominate which of their employees would be reclassified. Now the head of the Office of Personnel Management can also do so, being empowered to “issue guidance about additional categories of positions that executive departments and agencies should consider recommending for Schedule Policy/Career.” (For example, OPM might classify all DEI staff to be Schedule F in order to fire them). This has a couple of obvious impacts. One is that efforts to politicize agencies are no longer just in the control of agency heads, but can be pushed by OPM also. Which has the related effect of expanding the reach of Schedule F. Initial estimates have suggested 50,000 employees to be reclassified, but it could end being much higher.
Other revisions of the EO that struck out to me is that this is one of the EOs where the Trump administration is more explicit in relying on unitary executive theory (the novel legal theory that the Founders wanted a President with King-like powers).
The order begins by evoking Article II powers:
Article II of the United States Constitution vests the President with the sole and exclusive authority over the executive branch, including the authority to manage the Federal workforce to ensure effective execution of Federal law.
Later, the order specifies that employees will be fired if they do not go along with executive authority (emphasis added).
They are required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability, consistent with their constitutional oath and the vesting of executive authority solely in the President. Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal.
Employees who may be forced to choose between their oath to the constitution and loyalty to the President are being told that these are of equivalent importance, and indeed, that the constitution itself demands such loyalty. This makes it harder for employees to raise objections about illegal behavior, such as during the first Trump impeachment, which Trump officials still say was unjustified, since the President was acting within his Article II powers.
There is little doubt about the purpose of Schedule F. At a Monday afternoon rally, Trump talked enthusiastically about firing employees who created regulations: “Most of those bureaucrats are being fired, they’re gone. It should be all of them.” When signing Schedule F, he reiterated "We're getting rid of all of the cancer, the cancer caused by the Biden administration."
If the mass politicization of the public service, without clear Congressional intent, is not a “major question” for the Supreme Court to address then the major questions doctrines has no real meaning other than as a form of constitutional Calvinball, a fancy sounding philosophy to curb executive overreach of Democratic Presidents while giving Republican co-partisans a green light to do that they want.
Senior Executive Service
There is a separate Presidential memorandum directed just at the Senior Executive Service, which declares that all SES officials serve “at the pleasure of the President.” The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that created SES had fewer protections than other employees, but there was a clear separation between career and appointees, and there was always an expectation that dismissals would have to be performance. Making them at will in this matter is clearly at odds with the intent of the Act. It is also unnecessary: the intent of the SES was that senior managers would be moved around, and so the employees fired could easily have been reassigned.
The SES memo is framed in terms of unitary executive theory rather than statute, and so is begging a court case to test the limits of that theory:
As the Constitution makes clear, and as the Supreme Court of the United States has reaffirmed, “the ‘executive Power’ — all of it — is ‘vested in a President,’…The President’s power to remove subordinates is a core part of the Executive power vested by Article II of the Constitution and is necessary for the President to perform his duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Because SES officials wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the President.
For example, Trump fired four senior Department of Justice SES career employees working on immigration issues. One told reporters that she had only ever received “outstanding” performance evaluations. She was fired via email, and the only explanation for her removal was: “Title II of the Constitution.”
In this case, the person fired was a General Counsel, and I suspect other General Counsels will have targets on their back. Why? Because one lesson from Trump’s first term is that he needed more lawyers who would not push back with questions about the legality of his actions.
DOGE Becomes an Agency by Occupying the US Digital Service
Trump is renaming the US Digital Service, an existing unit within the Executive Office of the Presidency, into the US DOGE Service. The USDS was created in 2014 by Obama to help modernize tech services within the federal government. Notable achievements have been helping fix the Obamacare website, the problematic new FAFSA system, and build online passport renewals and the new IRS DirectFile tax reporting system. It has earned a reputation as a source of innovate and customer-focused fixers inside of government. Previously it was reported that DOGE employees would sit in USDS, but now it seems that they are taking control of the shell of the organization.
So, DOGE, the joke pun on a crypto currency, becomes a real thing. It is still not a Department in a legal sense (which can only be created by Congress) but it is an agency called a Department, or more accurately, the US Department of Government Efficiency Service. If this strike you as confusing and stupid, well, you are not wrong.
To make matters even more confusing, there is also “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization” which is also placed within the USDS, and will exist for only 18 months. The temporary organization allows the placement of unlimited number of volunteers facilitating the short-term Special Government Employees that Musk is bringing with him, avoids some disclosure requirements, and presumably makes it easier to ignore the conflict of interest requirements that federal employees must follow. It will also likely have the wider-ranging mission that Musk wants to pursue, leaving the permanent USDS to maintain more of a technology focus, though this will reflect Musk’s preferences: some of the DOGE’s anti-regulatory focus departs with the exit of Vivek Ramaswamy.
DOGE agency teams will exist to facilitate agency control, and reduce the potential for agency stonewalling. Each agency will have four DOGE employees, selected by the agency. These “will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney.” Think of these as implementation teams. The engineer looks at what is technically feasible, the HR person identifies people to cut, while the lawyer looks at what is legally allowed. Agencies must provide DOGE with “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” The EO also tells agencies to “ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” The eyes of DOGE will be everywhere.
So, this is how DOGE becomes a government unit. It reports to the White House Chief of Staff, and has its representatives across the government. This is a marked difference from the US Digital Service which was not omnipresent, but worked with agencies in a collaborative way or when directed to by the President. The ethos of collaboration and trust that they relied on will be hard to maintain. How much the DOGE occupiers transform the working of the agency remains to be seen.
The positive interpretation here is that DOGE people should be talking to the Digital Service veterans who can identify challenges with modernizing government’s use of technology. With its political power and momentum, DOGE could give them the chance to take on bigger projects. Jen Pahlka, the founder of the Digital Service said: “It’s a very convenient vehicle for them. If you were trying to do something ambitious across the government, USDS is a good place to do it from.”
On the other hand, the new USDS is identified in the hiring freeze EO, asking it to “shall submit a plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.” This is not USDS’s traditional role, and is going to make it harder for the agency to retain trust with agencies. The new chief of staff at OPM, which is leading the purge of DEI employees, is a former Musk employee. The portion of the EO about providing access to agency data will heighten that distrust, and creates concern that DOGE could be used for other purposes, such as monitoring the public or targeting immigrants.
Many of the skilled technologists who joined USDS did so because they rejected the Silicon Valley focus on profits, and wanted to focus on meaningful public service. USDS employees lack strong civil service protections and so are more vulnerable to firing. USDS employees are being interviewed by DOGE, with pointed questions about their role that sound disturbingly similar to what Twitter employees faced when Musk took over. It does not help that Steve Davis, Musk’s downsizer-in-chief at Twitter, is playing a leading role with DOGE. If DOGE turns out to be a project of undermining state capacity, as I fear, a good number of skilled employees will head for the exit, extinguishing one of he true bright spots in American government over the last decade.
Weaponizing Government Against its Own Employees
Trump issued an executive order that promised to end the pretend weaponization of government by, uh, weaponizing it against federal employees. This EO, more than most, features unconstrained MAGA conspiracies, bemoaning, for example, the prosecution of the January 6 rioters.
The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process. It targeted individuals who voiced opposition to the prior administration’s policies with numerous Federal investigations and politically motivated funding revocations, which cost Americans access to needed services.
Weaponization has been a theme that Trump has pushed, fitting with the Deep State narrative. Russ Vought has also pushed this language. As I wrote back in 2023, the logic of weaponization is to justify extreme action:
A well-nourished sense of victimhood is a powerful justification for all sorts of actions. “Weaponization” serves to strengthen this victimhood narrative, reinforcing the idea that the deep state is seeking to steal not just your elections, but your entire way of life. We are merely defending ourselves, justifying our radical action.
The new order directs different parts of the legal system, including the Attorney General and intelligence services, to pursue investigations into past misdeeds against the conservative movement by the Biden administration. To be clear, employees who broke the law can already be investigated and punished. The goal here is to create a sense or fear of Stasi-like monitoring within the federal government.
While the weaponization EO bemoaned the poor treatment of the January 6 mob, another EO restored their freedom. This includes those who planned the violent insurrection, and those who violently assaulted Capitol police. It is but one more indicator of a growing trend in America of governing by fear. Federal employees know that a mob that attacked them, and democracy, were treated as victims to be saved by the new administration, while public servants are viewed as potential villains to be pursued.
It is important to note that EOs are not self-executing, and in their implementation, the nature of the orders might change, and their severity lessened. But they have the force of law, until proven otherwise. Schedule F, by itself, represents an extraordinary turning point in how American government will be run, and the other orders make clear the establishment of a new regime is taking place, even if we can only vaguely see its outlines.
If you are seeking more in-depth analysis, Nicholas Bednar provides an excellent review of the new EOs from an administrative law professor perspective. For career public servants who are too often unappreciated and whose importance is recognized only by those who oppose your mission, all I can say is that I am sorry and I wish things were better. Here is another blog with more guidance.
The rest of us should be worried too. The new regime is ambitious, and will wreak great havoc before they are done.
Just read William Shirer's Berlin Diary. Trump's team seems to be following the 1933 plan.