New Rule Moves US Government Closer To Creating A Trump State

On February 6, President Donald Trump's administration took a major step toward transforming the merit system for civil service employees so that it functions more like a “patronage spoils system.”

If successful, the administration would effectively establish a Trump state that could influence or undermine government well beyond Trump's current term. It would also effectively complete a project that President Richard Nixon failed to accomplish because of Watergate.

Trump’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) finalized its “Schedule Policy/Career” (Schedule P/C) rule so that the administration may reclassify tens of thousands of jobs as "policy-influencing positions" and fire those employees at will if they are not politically or personally loyal to the administration. 

At least 50,000 employees of the federal government are expected to lose whistleblower retaliation protections.

The reclassification was first pursued by Trump during his first term, but Biden reversed many of the rule’s changes. The rule was then included in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a blueprint for Trump’s second term, and in January 2025, Trump issued an executive order to revive the rule.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP), which filed a lawsuit against the proposed rule a little over a year ago, contends that the rule violates the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) and Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. 

According to GAP legal director Tom Devine, Trump’s effort to establish a “patronage spoils system” is remarkable because unlike Nixon he is not trying to do it in secret. 

Nixon secretly operated an “illegal ‘special referral unit’ whose task was to hire politically referred individuals in career jobs.” It was one of the worst patronage scandals in the history of the United States government, according to a 1976 report [PDF] from the Fund for Constitutional Government that Devine co-authored. 

The report recalled, “In 1973, Frederic V. Malek, former chief of the White House Personnel Office responsible for placing top political appointees in the federal government, told the Senate Watergate Committee that from 1971 to 1973 the White House directed federal agencies to employ persons referred by the White House in both career and political jobs. Malek's mandatory political referrals for competitive career jobs violated the Civil Service Commission's regulations.” 

From 1971 to 1973, according to the report, the Nixon White House attempted to take control of the federal government. “Cabinet departments, other agencies and even the statutorily independent regulatory commissions were included. During this period, the White House required each agency to file standard monthly reports noting and anticipating vacancies and reporting progress made on hiring of so-called ‘must’ referrals." 

“Agencies had to establish political patronage units to cooperate with the White House program to establish political control over the agency. Some of these units also took care of more traditional patronage, i.e., rewarding political allies of the politically-appointed agency head,” the report stated.

Out of this patronage scandal came the CSRA. The Senate committee that passed the law sought to protect the rights of federal employees “to be selected and removed only on the basis of their competence.” Senators also recognized that no manager had the “right to hire political bed fellows.”

But GAP insists that the CSRA did not grant the executive branch the power to strip federal employees of “protections from arbitrary or politically motivated employment actions.”

The CSRA has provided employees a path to defend themselves against whistleblower retaliation by taking their case to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Knowing that this avenue exists for protection typically gives employees the confidence to reveal government misconduct. Yet with this new rule, tens of thousands of employees lose the ability to go to the OSC. 

“The rule eliminates independent oversight of personnel complaints, including whistleblowing, potentially placing politically appointed agency leaders in the position of investigating complaints against themselves,” according to the Partnership for Public Service.

Much like the Nixon administration, there is a culture in the Trump administration that despises laws or regulations that aim to protect inspectors general, congressional oversight authorities, and any watchdog office that may investigate or document complaints of corruption. 

Plus, Project 2025 shows that the motivation for the change is also driven by a desire to serve the fossil fuel industry by rolling back government efforts to align the management of “public lands and waters…to support robust climate action.” It is a component of Trump’s “Energy Dominance Agenda.”

To maintain U.S. coal consumption as “20 percent of the nation’s electricity” and as a “mainstay of regional economies,” Project 2025 recommended that Trump reclassify government employees so that they could be “discharged.” 

While Trump once pretended that he was trying to “drain the swamp,” the administration no longer even bothers to sell their project as a fight against corruption in Washington, D.C. 

“If people aren’t doing their jobs, if they aren’t showing up for work, if they’re not working hard on behalf of this president, they’re not welcome to work for him at all,” declared White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt when the rule was finalized. 

Vice President J.D. Vance made it pretty clear during Trump’s 2024 campaign that the goal was to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.”

The Project on Government Oversight points out that in the first year of Trump's return to office his administration presided over a "breakdown in government services" and forced out 317,000 employees.

From Elon Musk’s DOGE to Schedule P/C, this is all part of making a federal Trump state that serves his every whim, and anyone who takes issue with this agenda will be publicly humiliated, harassed, and terminated from their job as a civil servant.