The New York Times – “President Trump signed an executive order this week that could substantially expand his ability to hire and fire tens of thousands of federal workers during a second term, potentially allowing him to weed out what he sees as a “deep state” bureaucracy working to undermine him. The executive order, issued late Wednesday and described by one prominent federal union leader as “the most profound undermining of the Civil Service in our lifetimes,” would allow federal agencies to go through their employee rosters and reclassify certain workers in a way that would strip them of job protections that now cover most federal employees. The White House, in a statement that accompanied the executive order, said the new employee classification was justified because under current rules “removing poor performers, even from these critical positions, is time-consuming and difficult.” Currently, only about 4,000 of the more than 2 million federal employees are so-called political appointees, who are typically replaced with each presidential administration. They include senior agency officials who oversee the development of federal policies. The bulk of federal workers are considered career civil servants, who have certain protections both in the way they are hired — typically based on a point system that is supposed to make the hiring competitive — and a time-consuming, appeals-based process that must be used if an agency manager wants to dismiss someone…

Trump administration officials had been discussing for months how to purge “bad people” who are part of the “deep state,” Axios reported in February. The effort accelerated early this year after Mr. Trump hired a new head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, John McEntee, who served as a campaign aide to Mr. Trump in 2016. Federal agencies would have seven months to conduct a review of their work force to decide which existing employees could be reclassified into this new status, under the executive order. The reviews would then be redone annually. Because this would take place on an agency-by-agency basis, it is hard to predict how many employees could end up being reclassified, and any future president could revoke the order…”

See also CRS report, Federal Workforce Statistics Sources: OPMand OMB Updated October 23, 2020