WASHINGTON — The Trump administration finalized a new policy Thursday that would strip job protections from up to 50,000 federal workers, a move that would make it easier for President Donald Trump to remove or discipline them, in his latest effort to dismantle the federal workforce.

Until now, the roughly 4,000 people appointed by the president, known as political appointees, were the only federal workers who could be fired at will. The policy issued Thursday allows the administration to expand that number to include career employees whom the administration consider to also have policy-related roles. For these employees, any whistleblower complaints would now be handled inside their agencies rather than by the independent Office of Special Counsel, as they had previously.

The 255-page rule did not say precisely which positions would be affected. The White House will ultimately make that decision, Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said Thursday.

The announcement represents another push in the administration’s campaign to reshape the federal workforce, which has included mass firings, layoffs, pressured resignations and early retirements. In total, about 352,000 employees left the federal government in 2025, according to the most recent data from the personnel agency. The new policy is also the latest step the administration has taken to replace nonpartisan civil servants with employees who are ideologically aligned with the president.

The proposed version of the rule drew wide criticism, with more than 35,000 submissions over a 45-day public comment period last year. More than 90% of the commenters opposed the new policy, according to an analysis by The New York Times that used artificial intelligence tools to classify each comment’s viewpoint.

In a statement announcing the final rule, the Office of Personnel Management said that political patronage, loyalty tests and political discrimination in the federal workforce were “explicitly” prohibited.

The rule, which is expected to be published in the Federal Register on Friday, describes the new job category as “career jobs filled on a nonpartisan basis. Yet they will be at-will positions excepted from adverse action procedures or appeals.”

Kupor argued that the change helped restore accountability to the federal workforce by offering more control of the executive branch to a democratically elected official, the president.

But critics question whether the government can be taken at its word after a year of retributive firings, including the dismissal of several whistleblowers.

The rule amounts to “a huge increase of at-will employment with an administration that has demonstrated a contempt for nonpartisan expertise,” said Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes an effective federal workforce. “Their track record does not justify trust, and our history as a country demonstrates that these kind of changes lead to worse government results, not better.”

The new rule, said Don Kettl, an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland who studies the civil service, “sweeps away all of the pillars of accountability except responsiveness to the president.”

He added, “That, of course, is patronage under a different name.”