Overview
- The executive order, signed in early June, reclassifies roughly 8,000 senior career employees into a new “Policy/Career Professional” exception that strips long-standing procedural protections against removal.
- Affected roles include program directors, agency lawyers, senior advisers and other high-level policy staff who often earn near $200,000 a year.
- The Office of Personnel Management removed Biden-era regulations that had blocked similar changes and the White House says the measure aims to ensure career staff implement lawful presidential priorities.
- Unions and advocacy groups condemned the move as a threat to due process and warned it could enable politically motivated firings, with legal challenges already indicated.
- The order consolidates a Trump-era removal framework from 2020 and 2025 and could be widened in the future from the current 8,000 toward previously cited estimates as high as 50,000, which would reshape the boundaries between career civil servants and political control.