Donald Trump’s campaign promise of reviving his efforts to erode federal workforce job protections is prompting an apolitical Justice Department employee group to raise the alarm.
A 2020 Trump executive order would’ve reclassified thousands as “Schedule F” federal employees who can be terminated at will, but was withdrawn by President Joe Biden before being implemented. Even though that order didn’t appear applicable to lower-level prosecutors who lack policy roles, Trump campaign rhetoric has the head of a trade organization for 6,000 assistant US attorneys preparing for the possibility they are targeted in a second term.
“We as career prosecutors are very protective of insulating ourselves from any type of political pressure in making investigative decisions, choosing who to target, what to charge, what actions to take during a prosecution,” said Steven Wasserman, president of the National Association of Assistant US Attorneys—which advocates for federal prosecutors at 93 US attorneys’ offices nationwide.
“So to the extent that a change to Schedule F could potentially impact that insulation from political pressure, we believe that undermines democracy,” Wasserman, who’s also a longtime assistant US attorney in Washington, said in an interview. “It is antithetical to really everything that we as prosecutors stand for in executing our responsibilities.”
Threats to the job security of civil servants, including those deemed disloyal to Trump were he to win a second term, take on added significance for prosecutors. Republicans have been ramping up criticism of career prosecutors for pursuing four criminal cases against Trump, including two from a DOJ special counsel’s office. For the former president to make good on his talk of indicting political foes, such as the Biden family, he’d likely need to find willing line attorneys.
NAAUSA, which calls itself the bar association for line prosecutors, tries to stay out of politics, while engaging with the department and lawmakers on ways to improve members’ working conditions.
For instance, the organization has separately been talking with Republican Capitol Hill staffers about how to implement a proposal from Trump backers to restructure AUSA compensation to ensure parity with lawyers at DOJ headquarters in Washington.
Aides to multiple GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate have contacted NAAUSA for its thoughts on the plan since reading it in a 2023 manifesto from a group called Project 2025 that’s designing policies for a second Trump administration, said Jason Briefel, the association’s Washington representative. NAAUSA is supportive of the concept, which aligns with its longstanding calls for pay parity between members and their Main Justice counterparts, Briefel added.
Wasserman confirmed this account, but said those Hill conversations have been entirely distinct from his advocacy on Schedule F.
Policy Positions
The Schedule F executive order would have applied to civil servants in “policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” roles, leaving it uncertain whether line prosecutors enforcing federal laws could be targeted.
Reed Rubinstein, a Trump-era DOJ official who’s now senior vice president of the Trump-aligned group America First Legal, said that “Schedule F or something like it” will return if there’s a new administration next year, but that it was never intended to apply to DOJ line attorneys. It could “perhaps” apply in certain circ*mstances to assistant US attorneys who simultaneously hold senior titles, like a deputy US attorney, Rubinstein added.
Wasserman’s organization prefers not to leave it up to chance. After signing on to a November 2020 letter urging Congress to block the prior Schedule F initiative, NAAUSA more recently wrote to the Office of Personnel Management to express “strong support” for its regulation designed to thwart a return of Schedule F, which was finalized in April.
The current civil service protections, which Schedule F would undermine, “ensure AUSAs are only fired for their incompetence, not their refusal to execute a political demand,” Wasserman wrote in his letter last November.
He’s yet to see the issue mobilize his members, who pay voluntary dues and are of all political stripes. Wasserman said he’s “curious whether we do start getting some inquiries about” Schedule F as the November election gets closer.
NAAUSA’s meeting scheduled next month with a panel of US attorneys who advise Attorney General Merrick Garland on policy and management issues will present a “good opportunity,” Wasserman said, to gauge the US attorneys’ thoughts on Schedule F.
Still, they are political appointees who can be and traditionally are replaced by a new president. It remains to be seen what if anything they could do to pre-empt the policy’s return if Trump wins.
A DOJ spokesman declined to comment on Schedule F, but pointed to Garland’s Washington Post opinion piece Tuesday in which he wrote “it is absurd and dangerous that public servants, many of whom risk their lives every day, are being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department’s work.”
‘Disturbing Signal’
Rubinstein, whose legal group is run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, said he’s “distressed” to learn that NAAUSA is speaking out on Schedule F. The directive was an effort to “inject some accountability into the highest-ranking career civil servants,” he said.
“It sends a very disturbing signal that the political partisans are preparing for a repeat of ‘hashtag resist’ and that this time it’s going to be line attorneys at the DOJ, apparently,” he added. “That can’t be tolerated.”
To Wasserman, however, “it’s a bit disingenuous for anyone to say they know exactly how a new administration would seek to implement this.”
There are additional DOJ positions beyond his membership who’d be impacted, and US attorneys’ supervisors, who hold more power to shape investigations, may also be deemed Schedule F-eligible, he said.
And then there’s the latest narrative from Trump and his base about exacting revenge on Democrats, which grew following the guilty verdict in his Manhattan hush-money trial.
“The current rhetoric about weaponizing DOJ to pursue political adversaries certainly does not give me any confidence that the Schedule F proposal would be implemented responsibly,” Wasserman added.
