Here’s how Trump’s planned regulations could impact federal employees 

Updated at 10:45 a.m. ET Sept. 8

A preview of rules that the Trump administration intends to implement published Thursday shows how officials are seeking to change federal employee removal and disciplinary procedures as well as modify other systems for civil servants. 

The Office of Personnel Management disclosed that in September it will issue a notice of proposed rulemaking to amend reduction in force regulations “to prioritize performance over length of service when determining which employees will be retained in a RIF” as well as “streamline the RIF process.”

Agencies publish an NPRM to kickstart a process for members of the public to comment on the proposal. Officials are then required to consider such feedback before issuing a final rule. The Trump administration has relied on RIFs as part of its goal to reduce the size of the federal workforce. 

Trump proposed a similar rule at the end of his first term, but President Joe Biden reversed it shortly after taking office. 

OPM also shared that in October officials will release an NPRM regarding employee accountability. 

“The proposed rule would reduce the requirements placed on agencies when providing employees with an opportunity to demonstrate acceptable performance; eliminate the requirement that agencies must use progressive discipline for adverse actions and otherwise limit interference with the appropriate penalty determination; and restrict agencies from agreeing to remove performance-based and adverse actions from an employee’s official personnel folder and other records as a condition of settlement,” according to the entry. 

American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley described the proposed rules as "very significant." 

"They would end the required use of progressive discipline and severely reduce the ability of federal workers facing termination to improve their performance," he said in a statement to Government Executive. "In short, these revised rules would complete the process of corruption and politicization of the civil service under the banner of so-called ‘accountability.’ The only accountability will be to the whims and prejudices of Donald Trump.”

The National Treasury Employees Union didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

This information comes from the unified regulatory agenda, which is a semiannual compilation of information about agency regulations that are under development. The Trump administration was late for the first agenda of his second term, as it was supposed to be published in the spring. 

Additionally, according to the unified agenda: 

• The Federal Labor Relations Authority is planning to “simplify processes for resolving representation cases and unfair labor practice cases, and close an office that is not statutorily mandated.” In response to a request for clarification, a spokesperson pointed to the agency’s fiscal 2026 congressional budget justification that states FLRA eliminated its Collaboration and Alternative Dispute Resolution Office, among other changes. The two-person CADRO office, which Trump also eliminated during his first term but that Biden brought back in 2021, helped unions and federal agencies resolve labor disputes outside of litigation.
• The General Services Administration this fall will issue final rules to “streamline and update” regulations concerning property management and federal travel in line with administration priorities. 
• OPM also said that in September it will publish an NPRM to “streamline the RIF appeals process.” 

Experts said that Trump’s first unified agenda of his second term exhibits a relatively high amount of rulemaking activity, but that’s largely because agencies generally have to issue a new regulation to repeal an existing one. 

“At least in terms of what we think of as conventional regulations, the unified agenda reflects added rules, but paradoxically, a lot of them are ‘unrules’ that the administration is working through across the various agencies to roll things back,” said Wayne Crews, the Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

Sarah Hay, a policy analyst at George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, agreed that the agenda reflected the administration’s push to reduce federal rules. 

“There were a lot of first-time published active actions, which I thought was really interesting. And as I've been looking through a lot of those first-time published actions, a lot of them are these deregulatory actions and seem to be for the administration's priorities,” she said. 

Trump is pursuing a deregulatory agenda and has sought to expedite the process. 

Public Citizen, a progressive consumer advocacy nonprofit, condemned the unified agenda. 

“This agenda is packed to the brim with hundreds of regulatory rollbacks, including further limits on who is eligible for student loan forgiveness, rollbacks of energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances, rollbacks of greenhouse gas regulations and emissions standards for vehicles and repeals of workers’ rights to safe and fair workplaces,” said Elizabeth Skerry, a regulatory policy associate for Public Citizen, in a statement. “It’s yet another manifestation of the worst corporate favoritism since the Gilded Age.” 

This story has been updated with a statement from AFGE and a clarification from FLRA officials on which office is being eliminated pursuant to a rulemaking.