Trump did this by Executive Order in 2020, but that order was repealed by President Joseph Biden in 2021. On Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2025, Trump reissued his original order from 2020. Trump’s federal Office of Personnel Management, then in Feb. 2026, issued a final order titled “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service” which formerly reclassifies nearly 50,000 workers out of the civil service on March 8. Dr. Stephen Goldman, psychiatrist, author, and historian along with being a person who spent years as a product safety and risk management expert and regulator for the Food and Drug Administration, joins Next Witness…Please to critique this new development.

Dr. Goldman argues that the federal government has relied on a robust civil service since the 19th century. He fears that true federal experts, who are not politically aligned, will now be stripped of civil service protections and replaced by less qualified political appointees. Dr. Goldman also joins retired judges Gayle Williams Byers and Thomas Hodson to discuss the numerous federal lawsuits that have been filed to stop this transition.

They also examine the parallel case of Trump v. Cook that awaits a Supreme Court decision this spring. That case, although not directly on point, will give politicians and legal experts a precedent for how much authority the President has to fire “inferior officers without traditional civil service protections.”