By Courtney Rozen
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) – The Trump administration on Thursday finalized its overhaul of the U.S. government’s civil service system, according to a government statement, giving the president the power to hire and fire an estimated 50,000 career federal employees.
The overhaul, released by the Office of Personnel Management, fulfills a campaign promise for President Donald Trump to strip job protections from federal workers that his team deems to be “influencing” government policy.
It is the biggest change to the rules governing the civil service in more than a century. Trump called the overhaul “Schedule F” during his first administration.
The rule will be scrutinized by a federal judge. Federal worker unions and their allies sued in January to stop the policy before it was fully developed. Federal judges paused the litigation while the Trump administration finalized the changes. A court challenge will resume in the coming days, said Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the groups behind the lawsuit.
“We will return to court to stop this unlawful rule and will use every legal tool available to hold this administration accountable,” she said in a statement.
Trump will have the power to select which government positions will lose their job protections, according to the statement.
The Trump administration is also changing how long-standing legal protections that prohibit U.S. government agencies from retaliating against whistleblowers will be enforced, according to the statement.
Federal agencies will be in charge of setting up job protections for their own employees who accuse them of wrongdoing, such as violating the law or wasting money. That would be a change from the past, when an independent office known as the Office of the Special Counsel handled whistleblower disclosures from most civilian federal workers.
Reuters previously reported that the Trump administration was close to making this change.
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Deepa Babington)
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