Donald Trump just tripled the size of his personal army inside government. It was illegal.

The White House quietly issued an order turning 8,000 top "civil service" jobs into roles that serve at the pleasure of the president.

The president did something yesterday that almost no one noticed. He signed an order that will allow him to fully hijack (and politicize) the federal government, like never before.

While the country was looking elsewhere, Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to convert roughly 8,000 of the federal government’s most senior career officials into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.

The order is called “Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service,” a name obviously engineered to be skimmed past. And surprisingly, almost everyone obliged. The coverage that followed dutifully reported that thousands of workers are now “easier to fire,” which is true and also misses the point entirely.

The point is that these are the top lieutenants across the federal government. In other words, these are the people serving right under Trump’s political appointees (the ones he assigns to run federal departments and agencies). Presidents get “their people” to reshape policy priorities. And Americans count on the rest of the government staff, the career officials, to carry out the workings of those agencies and follow the law faithfully and impartially. Trump has just upended that centuries-old system.

His executive order would, in effect, triple the number of people inside of government who he can personally toss out on a whim, as easily as his own top henchmen. It’s a breathtaking takeover of the machinery of state. And if it’s not challenged in the courts, it will make it easier for Trump to weaponize almost every agency under his purview.

The number of “political appointees” in the executive branch hovers around 4,000. Think of these as the top jobs. Each president comes in and spins up an HR operation to bring in ideologically-aligned folks to fill those roles, most of which are in charge of running key departments, agencies, boards, and commissions across the federal government. You can see them all here in what’s called the “Plum Book.” They serve at the pleasure of the president and can be hired and dismissed at will.

That was the kind of role I was in as DHS chief of staff in the first Trump administration. I wasn’t protected by anything other than the president’s favor. That’s why — when you make a decision to speak out about wrongdoing — you’ve got to be prepared to quit or be fired. You have no protections if you fall out of favor with the president. Unfortunately, that’s why you see so many Pam Bondis and Todd Blanches, eagerly doing whatever Trump wants. They know how easy it is to lose their job.

That four thousand number is important. It’s the practical measure of a president’s direct grip on the executive branch. Everyone underneath those positions, some two million civil servants, has historically been insulated from political whim by removal protections dating to the reforms that ended the spoils system back in the 1800s. Those protections are the entire reason a new president inherits a functioning government, rather than giant shell of a machine to reconfigure each time we have a national election.

Yet Trump just took 8,000 of those highest-ranking career officials and effectively turned them into potential shock troops. They are no longer protected workforce. The office directors, deputy directors, chiefs of staff, senior advisers, and people who draft regulations and decide who receives federal grants have been stripped of their protections, which means Trump can dispose of them whenever he wants and for whatever reason. Add that to the 4,000 appointees he already controls, and the universe of executive-branch officials who now serve entirely at his pleasure has, in functional terms, roughly tripled.

The White House disputes this with a smirk. These remain “career” positions, they insist. They are not technically political appointments. Strictly speaking, this is correct. But as the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service put it, that’s “a distinction without a difference.” It’s now just a meaningless category. The president can toss them out as easily as his own, hand-picked loyalists. And surely the White House is already thinking about how they’ll short-circuit the “merit” process to restock those vacant roles with campaign aides and January 6 rioters.

The chilling effect has begun either way, before any of these 8,000 people have been replaced. An official who can now be fired this very afternoon for “subversion of presidential directives” — the order’s own language — does not need to be hand-picked to understand what is now expected of him or her. The threat does all the work. And the result is that Donald Trump has expanded the ranks of his political army almost instantly.

What just happened is almost certainly illegal. A coalition of federal employees unions are, I hope, prepared to fight hard. There already have been against similar orders. Here’s why they need to take this one down.

The president’s authority to pull positions out of the protected civil service comes from a provision of Title 5 that lets him make only “necessary exceptions” from the competitive service. That word, “necessary,” was something government managers were keenly aware of when I was in the executive branch. Job categories could only be reclassified in extenuating circumstances — basically where it was urgently necessary to create a position that wasn’t selected through the normal competitive service system.

Reclassifying 8,000 senior careerists to make them fireable at will is not “necessary” for good administration. It’s the total opposite of the merit-based system the laws exist to protect in the first place. Indeed, the rights being stripped away are supposed to be written in stone, e.g. the right to notice before firing, the right to appeal to an independent board, etc.. A president cannot use a magic wand to erase the very protections Congress wrote into law. They were put in place for this exact reason, that is, to prevent presidents from either party from simply firing all the top people across government and stuffing agencies with inexperienced, political bootlickers.

Upon reading it, I found the most revealing detail to be how the order was seemingly written to escape scrutiny. A rule this consequential would normally have to go through what’s called the Administrative Procedure Act, requiring a period of public comment, a reasoned justification, and review by a court that can strike it down as arbitrary, if needed. But Trump didn’t want that. He wanted to wave his wand. So the White House performed a quiet bit of engineering. They wrote the rule to make the president himself (not the Office of Personnel Management) the official who formally moves positions into this new category because the president, unlike an agency, is not technically bound by that Act. They might as well have admitted their goal was to break the law.

The famously brutal English king Henry VIII didn’t need to appoint every man in his court to make every man in his court afraid. All he had to do is make them aware that he might swing the axe at any time. In America, we’ve spent more than a century building a civil service so that the people who enforce our laws answer to the law and not to the mood of one man. Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump tried to change that.

All I can tell you now is this: we’re going to help fight it. Stay tuned.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor
P.S. Help spread the defiance by sharing this post.

THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST

We are tracking these stories today.

1. TRUMP’S PERSONAL ATTACK DOG TO BE NOMINATED AS ATTORNEY GENERAL. Todd Blanche, best known for being Donald Trump’s corruption magnet and former personal attorney, is now expected to be nominated as attorney general in the coming days. After being handed the acting role after Pam Bondi’s firing (which, let’s not forget, followed the Epstein files disaster he helped bungle), Trump is ready to make it official. Nothing says “law and order” like handing the nation’s top law enforcement role to the guy who spent years fighting to keep his boss out of handcuffs. We’re interested to see if an increasingly “reluctant” GOP majority in the Senate will go along with this.

2. THE “SLUSH FUND” IS GOING UNDERGROUND. After a rare bipartisan revolt and two federal judges stepped in, Todd Blanche told Congress the administration is scrapping its $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the pot of taxpayer money conjured up to compensate Trump's “persecuted” allies, potentially including the very Jan. 6 rioters he pardoned. But the DOJ is now reportedly hunting for another way to cut the same checks, quietly, through one-off settlements paid out of the same bottomless judgment fund, no splashy commission required. The “fund” may be dead. But the grift is alive and well. So we’re going to make sure the spotlight stays on them.

3. ACT OF DEFIANCE — U.S. HOUSE VOTES TO END THE IRAN WAR. Yesterday, the House of Representatives delivered a stinging rebuke to Trump by voting down his war with Iran. Thanks to a handful of Republican votes, the chamber narrowly passed a resolution directing Trump to remove U.S. forces from the conflict with Iran, unless Congress votes to declare war or authorizes using military force against it. While the resolution was largely symbolic, the symbolism itself is powerful. It tells the White House that the GOP resistance “reluctance” is growing.

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