The Federal Purge: Trump Is Reshaping the Government in His Image

What Is Happening

In the first year of Trump's second term, the federal government has experienced the most sweeping personnel purge since the creation of the modern civil service. Thousands of employees at the Department of Justice, the FBI, the State Department, USAID, the EPA, the Department of Education, and across dozens of agencies have been fired, placed on administrative leave, forced to resign, or transferred to assignments designed to prompt their departure.

The mechanisms are multiple: DOGE-directed "efficiency" reviews, reinstatement of Schedule F (an executive order reclassifying large categories of federal workers as at-will political appointees), false accusations of disloyalty or poor performance, and the simple intimidation of placing senior officials under investigation.

Schedule F: The Key to Understanding It

Schedule F is the legal architecture underneath the purge. Normally, federal career employees — the people who actually run agencies, enforce laws, process applications, conduct research — have civil service protections that prevent them from being fired for political reasons. This is what prevents each new administration from starting from scratch and enables institutional continuity.

By executive order, Trump reclassified tens of thousands of these positions into a new "Schedule F" category, stripping their civil service protections. Any of them can now be fired at will, for any reason, including the reason that they worked professionally for the previous administration.

Who Is Actually Being Fired

The purge is not primarily of the senior political appointees that normally turn over with administrations. Those positions always change. The purge is targeting career professionals:

• FBI agents who worked on January 6 cases
• State Department diplomats with expertise in China, Russia, or Ukraine
• EPA scientists who produced inconvenient research
• USAID program managers with decades of field experience
• IRS enforcement staff

These are not partisan operatives. They are institutional knowledge. When they leave, they take decades of expertise and institutional memory with them. Their replacements will be ideologically vetted, less experienced, and less willing to push back on decisions they believe are wrong.

Why This Is Not Normal

Every administration makes political appointments. Every administration tries to implement its agenda through the executive branch. That is normal and appropriate.

What is not normal is the wholesale gutting of career professionalism, the replacement of merit criteria with loyalty tests, the firing of people for how they voted or what they investigated, and the explicit goal — articulated in Project 2025 — of "dismantling the administrative state" by removing the professionals who make it function.

This is not a reform. It is a degradation of the government's operational capacity in service of political control.

FAQ

What is Schedule F? Schedule F is an executive order classification that removes civil service protections from federal workers whose jobs are deemed "policy-related." It was originally created by Trump in October 2020, revoked by Biden in January 2021, and reinstated by Trump in January 2025.

How many federal workers have been affected? Estimates vary, but analyses suggest tens of thousands of positions were reclassified under Schedule F, with thousands of workers fired or forced out through the combination of that reclassification and DOGE-directed reviews.

Is it legal to fire federal workers for political reasons? Under normal civil service protections, no. That is the entire point of civil service — to insulate professionals from political firing. Schedule F creates a legal pathway around these protections for reclassified positions.