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Trump Administration Politicizing Social Security Administration Will Further Undermine Benefits
The Trump Administration is advancing a new rule that would make it easier to fire nonpartisan career civil servants across the federal government without justification, notice, or right to appeal. This would cause particular harm at an agency like the Social Security Administration (SSA), where the Trump Administration and its so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have already pushed through radical staffing cuts that have jeopardized SSA’s ability to reliably deliver benefits to seniors and workers with severe disabilities. The rule would create a new “Schedule Policy/Career” (Schedule P/C) classification that could be used to get rid of thousands of additional civil servants at SSA, giving the Administration even more power to undermine Social Security.
The Schedule P/C rule would lead to unprecedented politicization of the civil service. On April 23, the Trump Administration published a proposed rule that would let the President unilaterally change the employment status of any civil servant in a position that he deems to be “policy-influencing.” Under the rule — which revives a similar proposal from the first Trump term known then as “Schedule F” — the administration could fire, suspend, demote, or reduce the pay of employees they classify as Schedule P/C without regard for performance or due process. This would strip many current employees of existing protections, effectively converting civil service positions to an “at will” status and treating civil servants like de facto political appointees wholly subject to the whims of politically appointed bosses.
The rule violates the long-standing interpretation of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 — a post-Watergate reform to protect against abuse of power — among other laws providing civil servants with due process. The law ensures they are “protected against arbitrary action, personal favoritism, or coercion for partisan political purposes.”
While the legality of the proposed rule is likely to be challenged in court, experts have forecast that if the rule were implemented it would lead to “a massive degree of additional politicization, and the most fundamental change to the civil service system since its inception in 1883.” Across government, the proposed rule is likely to:
- undermine the quality of services;
- politicize day-to-day government decision-making;
- negatively impact the performance of core government functions;
- lead to more political favoritism in contracting and grant decisions which also can generate greater cost overruns; and
- cause an exodus of expertise from the federal workforce.
Schedule P/C would damage Social Security. While the Administration has failed to reveal how the rule would be implemented at each agency and how services to the public would be affected, we do have one indication, due to a leak from SSA.
In an email to staff, Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek outlined plans to reclassify thousands of SSA civil servants to Schedule P/C status. The acting commissioner would apply the proposed rule to roughly 10,000 positions, reclassifying all high-level career leaders across the agency, as well as every employee within over 20 offices, ranging from support functions like human resources and information technology to hearings and research. This sweeping application of the proposed new rule suggests that there would be no meaningful limits on deeming positions as “policy-influencing.”
The politicization of SSA is particularly egregious given the agency’s long-standing focus on customer service and benefits delivery across administrations and under the leadership of both political parties. SSA has one of the highest ratios of civil servants to political appointees in government, reflecting the nonpartisan nature of nearly all of its work. In 2024, the Office of Personnel Management listed only 19 politically appointed roles across the agency’s 57,000 employees — roughly 1 political appointee for every 3,000 civil servants.
Already, DOGE has taken steps to eliminate 7,000 jobs at SSA and reportedly has plans for additional layoffs and cuts. The proposed Schedule P/C rule would seemingly increase by over 500 times the number of civil servants who could be immediately fired or subject to other adverse actions without justification. Up to roughly a fifth of all remaining SSA employees would be at risk of termination without cause.
Schedule P/C would make a bad situation worse. The Trump Administration’s actions at SSA are already harming seniors and leading to service disruptions and longer wait times. These actions include unnecessary cuts in staffing, loss of expertise, strain on systems, and questionable policy decisions — such as effectively eliminating some existing phone services and forcing nearly 2 million additional in-person visits by seniors and people with severe disabilities to understaffed field offices.
Even the limited influx of Trump loyalists to date has already resulted in grieving families and parents of newborn children in Maine being targeted in an act of political retribution, senior executives being removed for objecting to the inappropriate and likely illegal weaponization of Social Security databases, and DOGE being granted access to sensitive information and systems — which former SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue, a Republican appointee, described as “literally illegal and inappropriate conduct.”
Implementation of Schedule P/C at SSA would further deteriorate services and threaten the mission of the agency. Civil servants will face pressure from political operatives to act against the best interests of the public — even when they worry it might be in violation of the law — if they want to keep their jobs. This will further reduce capacity in the already deeply understaffed agency, as civil servants are fired or forced out and potentially replaced by inexperienced workers whose primary qualification is personal loyalty to the President, the Commissioner, or DOGE. SSA’s challenges will only get worse if the remaining civil servants avoid providing honest analysis, undertaking needed research, or communicating clearly about agency actions to simply to stay in the good graces of an Administration that has repeatedly failed to prioritize the needs of Social Security beneficiaries.
Public comments are being accepted here until May 23 on the proposed rule to strip Social Security staff and other civil servants of protections from political influence.
