When the President Fires the People Who Write the Checks to California’s Disabled
The civil service has been many things in American political debate — bloated, untouchable, ideologically resistant, a bureaucratic firewall against executive authority. What it hasn’t been, until today, is fully at the president’s disposal.
Trump signed an executive order Wednesday converting approximately 8,000 senior federal workers into what the administration calls Schedule Policy/Career employees. These are at-will positions that agencies can terminate without cause, without lengthy procedures, and without the civil service protections that have governed federal employment since 1883. Nearly all of them are at the GS-15 level, the highest career rung in the federal workforce—program managers, regional office heads, senior grant overseers, and public affairs officers. These are the people who oversee how federal money gets allocated and spent. Similar executive orders attempting to reclassify civil servants have faced legal challenges in the past. For example, a previous version of this policy was quickly met with lawsuits and was ultimately revoked by the subsequent administration. The legal history here suggests that the durability of such orders is uncertain, and courts or future leadership may intervene again.
The administration frames this as accountability. The federal employee unions call it a spoils system dressed in new language. Both sides are telling the truth about what they want. The question that isn’t getting enough attention is what this does to the Americans on the other side of those federal desks — people who depend on federal programs to live and work independently.
In California, that question has a specific and consequential answer.
The California Department of Rehabilitation administers the largest vocational rehabilitation program in the country. It runs on federal money — Title I grants awarded through the Rehabilitation Services Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Education. Those RSA grants fund services for roughly 145,000 Californians with disabilities every year: job training, independent living support, assistive technology, and the blindness rehabilitation programs that serve some of the state’s most vulnerable adults.
The people who oversee those grants at the federal level — who review state plans, monitor compliance, approve modifications, and ensure the money reaches the people it’s designated for — are precisely the category of employees now subject to removal for any reason or no reason at all. Grant management specialists, program managers, regional oversight staff: all explicitly identified as vulnerable under Schedule Policy/Career.
That’s not an abstraction. If a program manager overseeing California’s RSA formula grants gets replaced mid-cycle by someone installed for political reasons rather than institutional knowledge, the consequences aren’t just bureaucratic. State agencies lose continuity. Approvals slow down. Nonprofits waiting on reimbursements wait longer. Services are delayed or not delivered. But agencies and nonprofits are not powerless in the face of this uncertainty. State leaders can strengthen internal project documentation, cross-train key staff, and establish contingency teams to help maintain continuity in federal relations. Nonprofits could consider forming joint working groups to share information on federal policy changes and coordinate advocacy to secure clarity from oversight offices. Proactively building relationships with multiple federal contacts, rather than relying on a single program officer, could help buffer against disruptive transitions. While these steps cannot eliminate the risks, starting to prepare now offers some degree of stability in a shifting landscape.
California is already absorbing a projected 20% DOR funding reduction coming in October. The state’s disability-serving nonprofits are already managing reimbursement backlogs. While the focus here is on California, the risk is not exclusive to one state or program. Every state that relies on federally administered grants for disability and vocational services faces similar exposure. Organizations receiving federal funds in Texas, New York, Illinois, and beyond could also face disruptions if their federal oversight counterparts are abruptly replaced. The last thing this ecosystem — in California and across the country — needs is the added uncertainty of a federal oversight structure that can be reshuffled every time a new political priority surfaces in Washington.
The merit-based civil service wasn’t built to protect comfortable bureaucrats. It was built to protect the programs that bureaucrats administer from becoming political instruments. The people who lose when that protection disappears aren’t the workers — it’s the blind adults in San Diego waiting on vocational services, the disabled veterans in Fresno awaiting independent living support, the deaf students in Los Angeles navigating a job market that already doesn’t make it easy.
Schedule Policy/Career is being sold as a workforce accountability measure. What it actually does is make the federal government’s most consequential program staff accountable to whoever holds political power — not to the Americans those programs were built to serve.
That’s a distinction worth making. Loudly.