There’s an old joke in Washington: How do you fire a federal employee?
You don’t.
You write them up. They file a grievance. You document their failures. They appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board. You build a case over eighteen months. They hire a union lawyer. You finally get approval to terminate. They sue. And somewhere around year three of this process, you give up, move them to a different department, and pray they become someone else’s problem.
That’s not a joke. That’s the system. That’s how it’s worked for decades. And that’s why the federal bureaucracy is stuffed with people who openly despise the elected president, ignore his directives, leak to the press, and face zero consequences for any of it.
Donald Trump just took a sledgehammer to that system.
The Rule That Changes Everything
On Thursday, the Office of Personnel Management — the agency that oversees the federal workforce — issued a final rule creating a new category of worker for high-ranking career employees whose jobs involve executing administration policy.
Here’s the key part: workers in this category are no longer protected by the decades-old rules that make firing a federal employee harder than getting a reservation at the French Laundry.
We’re talking about roughly 50,000 senior bureaucrats. The GS-14s and GS-15s. The Senior Executive Service types. The people who’ve spent careers building little fiefdoms inside agencies, who know the system better than any political appointee, and who’ve learned that the safest way to survive a presidency they don’t like is to slow-walk, obstruct, and wait it out.
Those people just got put on notice.
The Deep State Isn’t a Theory
Trump has been talking about the “deep state” since his first term, and for years the media treated it like a conspiracy theory. Silly Trump, thinking career bureaucrats would undermine him!
Then we watched it happen in real time.
We watched FBI officials text each other about “insurance policies” against Trump. We watched intelligence community leaders leak classified information to damage him. We watched career State Department officials testify against him in impeachment hearings while being celebrated as “public servants of conscience.”
We watched an entire government apparatus treat an elected president like a foreign invader to be resisted, not a commander-in-chief to be served.
The deep state isn’t a theory. It’s a job description. And until now, those jobs came with ironclad protection.
Why Federal Workers Are Panicking
The beauty of this rule is its simplicity. It doesn’t fire anyone outright. It just makes firing possible.
Under the old system, a senior career official could actively sabotage administration policy and still require years of documentation, hearings, and appeals before facing termination. The process was so onerous that most political appointees didn’t bother. They served their two or four years, the bureaucrats outlasted them, and the status quo continued.
Now? If a senior official is in a policy-execution role and refuses to execute policy, they can be disciplined or fired without the endless procedural gauntlet.
That’s it. That’s the change. And it’s got federal workers and their union allies absolutely melting down.
The Predictable Outrage
CNN is clutching pearls because the move would “weaken” the federal workforce. Weaken it how, exactly? By making it possible to fire people who don’t do their jobs? By giving the elected president some actual control over the executive branch he theoretically runs?
The horror. The absolute horror.
Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — which, not coincidentally, is home to massive numbers of federal workers — called it a “witch hunt.” Because apparently expecting government employees to implement the policies of the government they work for is now persecution.
The union representing federal workers is threatening legal action. Of course they are. Their entire business model depends on making federal employment a lifetime sinecure regardless of performance or loyalty.
And somewhere in the bowels of every federal agency, senior bureaucrats who’ve spent years building careers on obstruction are quietly wondering if their thirty years of “service” are about to end a lot sooner than planned.
What This Is Really About
Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. This isn’t about punishing people for their political views. It’s not about creating a loyalty test. It’s about a basic principle that somehow became controversial: if you work for the executive branch, you execute the executive’s policies.
Scott Kupor, the director of OPM, said it plainly: “This is not about people’s views or ideas. This is about whether they are refusing to actually affect their duties on behalf of the American people consistent with the objectives of this administration.”
That’s not unreasonable. That’s the job description. If you work at McDonald’s and refuse to make hamburgers because you’re personally opposed to beef, you get fired. Nobody calls it a witch hunt. Nobody demands eighteen months of hearings.
But if you work at the EPA and refuse to implement the president’s environmental policies because you disagree with them, suddenly you’re a heroic resistor entitled to lifetime employment and a pension.
That double standard is what’s dying here. And the people who benefited from it are furious.
The Bigger Picture
This rule is part of something larger. Trump has made shrinking the federal government a centerpiece of his second term. DOGE is auditing agencies and finding billions in waste. Entire programs are being shut down. Thousands of employees have already been offered voluntary separation packages.
The goal isn’t chaos. The goal is accountability. For the first time in decades, federal workers are being asked to justify their existence — and some of them are finding that harder than expected.
The bureaucracy has grown relentlessly for generations. Every administration adds programs, hires staff, creates offices. Almost none of it ever gets cut. The ratchet only turns one direction.
Trump is trying to turn it the other way. And this rule — making it possible to actually fire senior officials who obstruct rather than execute — is one of the most important tools in that effort.
Is This What We Voted For?
Conservative author Janie Johnson asked the right question on social media: “Is this what we voted for?”
Yes. Unambiguously, yes.
The 2024 election was fought in large part on the promise that Trump would drain the swamp, fire the bureaucrats who undermined his first term, and restore accountability to a government that had become a permanent, unelected fourth branch.
This rule is that promise kept. Not with speeches. Not with tweets. With an actual regulatory change that shifts power from career bureaucrats back to the elected president and the voters who put him there.
The Democrats are crying. The unions are threatening. The media is hyperventilating.
That’s how you know it’s working.