Three months before the end of his presidency, Donald Trump quietly issued Executive Order 13957, allowing the conversion of some federal civil service jobs to excepted service under a new classification, Schedule F. If a position was reclassified, the president could fire its occupant at will and install a successor without going through the civil service hiring and placement process. Trump issued the order after years of complaining that a practically conspiratorial federal bureaucracy was obstructing his agenda. His successor, President Joe Biden, rescinded the order two days after taking the oath of office in early 2021. Trump, now running against Biden (again) to return to the Oval Office, has made reinstating Schedule F and remaking the federal bureaucracy (and retaliating against some of its occupants) one of the top themes of his campaign. "Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state," he said at the first major rally of his current campaign, a vow he has repeated ever since.
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- United States of America
