The man who wrote it was in the room

Introduction

On August 1, 2025, the July jobs report landed showing 73,000 new nonfarm jobs and downward revisions to the prior two months. Within hours, Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, and called the numbers "RIGGED" on Truth Social. McEntarfer played no role in producing the estimates, revisions are routine BLS methodology, and even Trump's own first-term BLS commissioner, William Beach, called the firing "totally groundless."

Ten months later, on June 3, 2026, Trump signed the executive order that hands him the legal machinery to do a version of that to 8,000 more people. The man who designed that machinery, James Sherk, was standing in the room.

How One Policy Survived Six Years and Two Presidents

The order is called "Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service." It moves roughly 8,000 senior federal positions, about 97% of them at the GS-15 level, into a new at-will employment category. These are agency directors, chiefs of staff, the people who draft federal regulations, the attorneys who write agency policy, the officials who decide who gets federal grants. They can now be removed for "poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives without lengthy procedural hurdles," per the White House fact sheet. They lose the right to appeal a firing to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a protection that traces back to the Pendleton Act of 1883.

Here's the part the coverage tends to skip. This policy has a single author, and he's followed it across six years and two administrations like it was the only thing he ever wanted to build. James Sherk was a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation working on civil service and labor policy. He joined Trump's first-term Domestic Policy Council in 2017 and became, in the Federalist Society's own bio, "the principal author of and/or policy lead for approximately two dozen executive orders." One of them was EO 13957, the original Schedule F, signed October 21, 2020. Biden revoked it on day one in January 2021.

Sherk didn't move on. He went to the America First Policy Institute to keep developing the idea, where he identified 50,000 federal workers for potential reclassification. He co-wrote the case for bringing it back in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership, the 920-page Heritage blueprint whose Chapter 3 states plainly on page 80 that EO 13957 "should be reinstated." On January 18, 2025, Trump announced him as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, the job he holds now. And on June 3, 2026, he addressed Trump at the signing: "if they're messing up, then they can be removed quickly, rather than taking a year longer to get rid of them." He wrote the first draft in 2020 and was standing at the desk when the president signed the final version six years later.

The Paper Trail From Think Tank to Federal Register

The administration's framing is accountability, and it isn't baseless — firing a genuinely bad federal performer is genuinely hard. But read the OPM final rule published February 6, 2026 (91 FR 5580, 78 pages), and that story gets harder to hold. The rule estimates "approximately 50,000 positions would be moved or transferred into Schedule Policy/Career," so the 8,000 named on June 3 are a first installment, not a ceiling. The administration has openly declined to rule out expanding further. The rule also rescinds the Biden-era guarantee that involuntarily reclassified employees could appeal to the MSPB, and it strips these employees of statutory protections for performance-based removals under Chapter 43. The mechanism the administration says is about removing underperformers also removes the venue where a fired employee could prove the removal had nothing to do with performance.

One line in that rule does a lot of legal work: "the President is not an agency for purposes of the Administrative Procedure Act." Translated, that's the administration trying to wall the order off from the standard legal challenge to federal rulemaking. The agencies most people imagine as faceless bureaucracy spent over 40,000 public comments on the proposed version of this rule, and roughly 94% of them opposed it. It went final anyway.

What McEntarfer's firing showed is what the chilling effect looks like before the legal protection is even gone. She was a Senate-confirmed commissioner in the second year of a four-year term, and she was removed over a number the president didn't like. She wasn't the only one. CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired August 27, 2025 after she refused to sign off on vaccine recommendations she considered unscientific and declined to fire career vaccine scientists. Acting FEMA Director Cameron Hamilton was fired the day after he told lawmakers he didn't support eliminating FEMA. Strip the appeal rights from the next 8,000 people who sit in those kinds of chairs, and you don't need to fire many of them for the rest to get the message.

Who Benefits

Two parties come out ahead here, and the quieter one is where this gets interesting.

The Trump administration gets power, the direct and obvious kind. The government has roughly 4,000 political appointees who already serve at the president's pleasure. This order more than doubles the pool of senior positions that can be vacated without cause, pulling the people who set Medicare reimbursement rates, approve drugs, certify food, and review environmental permits into a category where producing a politically inconvenient result is now a fireable offense with no appeal. OPM Director Scott Kupor described the goal to reporters as letting "people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will."

The Heritage Foundation and the donors behind Project 2025 get something subtler: a regulatory state staffed by people afraid to say no to them. DeSmog's investigation traced more than $120 million into Project 2025 advisory groups since 2020 from six billionaire family networks. The Bradley family alone accounts for $52.9 million of it, with the Scaife family at $21.5 million and Koch-affiliated groups at $9.6 million behind them. The industries those fortunes are built in are the exact industries the 8,000 reclassified civil servants regulate. The Intercept put the incentive bluntly, quoting the logic that a defense contractor "would prefer it if the procurement officers it dealt with were chastened and felt fear of asking the hard questions." That's the flow: donors fund the think tank, the think tank writes the policy and supplies the author, and the policy removes the appeal rights of the regulators standing between those donors and a friendlier ruling.

I keep coming back to one detail in the rule. Whistleblower complaints from Schedule Policy/Career employees would be investigated by their own agencies rather than the independent Office of Special Counsel. The protection against retaliation is now administered by the people doing the retaliating.

What 1883 Was Actually For

The civil service system everyone finds boring exists because of a specific failure. Before 1883, federal jobs were spoils, handed out to loyalists and pulled when loyalty wavered, and the system was corrupt enough and dysfunctional enough that Congress built the merit protections to end it. The argument for Schedule Policy/Career is that those protections went too far and now shield bad workers. Maybe some of them do. The honest version of that fix would narrow the appeal process or speed up removals for documented cause. This order does something different: it removes the appeal entirely for a category of employee the president defines, which is a different project.

Don Moynihan, the Michigan public policy scholar, calls the June 3 order a "swing-for-the-fences moment," because the administration believes "this is the most friendly court we are going to get on this topic." That timing is the whole reason it landed now. AFGE, AFSCME, and the AFL-CIO are suing in D.C. District Court, with separate suits in Maryland, and no court has granted a preliminary injunction yet. The administration sized the first batch at policy-heavy positions precisely because that's the version most defensible in court. What gets harder to defend is the result Moynihan describes downstream: "bubbles around policymakers," where officials stop delivering facts that might cost them their jobs. The numbers, the safety findings, the regulatory determinations you rely on without thinking about it now come from people with a clearer incentive to tell the president what he wants to hear.

The Bottom Line

What this order changes is not the headcount but the capacity. Before June 3, removing an inconvenient official took a Truth Social post and drew criticism even from Trump's own former appointee. Now, doing it to the people who write regulations, approve drugs, and certify the food supply takes a personnel-record update inside a seven-day window, with no board to appeal to. The same think tank that wrote the mechanism is funded by the industries those regulators check, and the man who carried the policy from a 2020 draft to the signing desk was in the room when the president made it law.

The 50,000 figure in the OPM rule is the part worth watching. If no court stops the first 8,000, what's the principle that keeps it from reaching the rest of the people whose job is to tell the government an answer it didn't want?