Schedule F, the executive order that reclassifies roughly 50,000 civil-service positions as political appointments, completed its seventh day on the books with no live legal injunction restricting implementation. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the administration's most visible messenger on workforce reform this week, delivered remarks at a community college in Salem, Oregon — her second of three Pacific Northwest stops designed to frame the order as a merit-and-accountability correction rather than a purge. [1]

Yesterday's paper noted the Day Six corrected baseline: the 50,000 figure, initially reported as 80,000 by Reuters, now held across administration and union tallies. The Day Seven variable is not the number. It is the absence of legal resistance at the federal level.

The National Treasury Employees Union filed suit in the DC district court April 18 seeking a preliminary injunction on procedural grounds — notice-and-comment violations under the Administrative Procedure Act. [2] No hearing has been scheduled. The American Federation of Government Employees, the larger of the two federal unions, has not filed. AFGE spokespeople told the paper Thursday the union is "coordinating with coalition partners on a comprehensive challenge," a formulation that in litigation terms usually means six to eight weeks from now. [3]

Personnel actions under the order have begun. Office of Personnel Management data published Wednesday identified 2,400 positions at the Departments of Education, Labor, and Housing as formally reclassified, with performance reviews ordered by June 30. [4] The reviews' structure is the mechanism: positions graded below a threshold can be terminated without the removal-procedure protections that attach to competitive-service jobs. McMahon's tour is rhetorical cover for a process that will produce discrete individual firings over the summer, each of which will be too small for national coverage.

This is the governance shape the paper has been tracking since the original 2020 Schedule F memo: not a single mass dismissal but a continuous attrition protocol. The political economy favors the administration. A union suit requires one named plaintiff willing to be publicly identified as a below-standard performer; most federal workers prefer to transfer, retire, or resign quietly rather than become test cases. The 50,000-position universe is large enough that aggregate attrition can be substantial without ever producing a litigatable mass event.

McMahon's third stop is Friday in Portland. The paper will watch for two things: any change in the number of reclassified positions OPM publishes, and any AFGE filing. Thursday produced neither. Day Eight will begin with the same fact pattern.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington