The Trump administration’s Day 1 executive actions governing federal workforce issues could collectively kickstart the new president’s efforts to politicize the nonpartisan civil service, beginning with a potential “mass layoff” of recent agency hires, good government experts said Tuesday.

As part of a tranche of executive actions either setting new policy or revoking Biden-era initiatives issued upon his inauguration Monday, President Trump revived Schedule F, albeit under a slightly different moniker—Schedule Policy/Career. Like the first iteration of the policy, unveiled in October 2020 but never implemented, it aims to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers in so-called “policy-related” positions out of the competitive service, stripping them of their civil service protections and making them effectively at-will employees.

There are some changes from the original Schedule F executive order: first, it strips much of the language regarding exempting Schedule F positions from the competitive hiring process. And in various places it moves the final decision-making authority for conversion of jobs into the new job classification to the president, rather than the Office of Personnel Management director, likely in an effort to make it easier to ward off legal challenges.

The National Treasury Employees Union has already filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from moving forward with implementing Schedule F, arguing that when Congress passed the...

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