Schedule F
Executive order mechanism — first signed by Trump (October 2020), revoked by Biden (January 2021), re-signed by Trump (January 2025) — that reclassifies federal civil servants in “policy-related” positions as at-will “Schedule F” employees, removing their civil service job protections and enabling mass dismissal and replacement with political loyalists
Schedule F is the single most structurally significant provision in Project 2025’s governing blueprint. It translates the New Right’s theoretical critique of the administrative state into a concrete mechanism for personnel capture.
Under normal civil service rules, federal employees have strong protections against politically motivated dismissal. Schedule F strips those protections from any employee whose work “influences policy” — an extremely broad category that could encompass tens of thousands of positions across all executive agencies.
The practical effect: a second Trump administration could fire career civil servants who are perceived as disloyal and replace them with ideologically vetted political appointees, dramatically increasing presidential control over the federal bureaucracy.
This connects directly to the New Right’s theoretical commitments:
- Adrian Vermeule’s “Integration from Within” strategy explicitly calls for infiltrating and recapturing administrative institutions
- Longmarcherism frames this as the right’s counter-march through institutions
- The Claremont Institute’s constitutional theory (via John Eastman and others) holds that Article II gives the president near-unlimited control over executive branch personnel
Cross-References
- Project 2025 — Schedule F is its most structurally consequential provision
- Heritage Foundation — primary architect of Project 2025 and Schedule F
- Integration from Within — Vermeule’s theoretical precedent
- Longmarcherism — ideological framing for institutional capture
- Administrative State — what Schedule F is designed to dismantle