By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -The largest union representing U.S. government employees filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to block President Donald Trump’s plan to reclassify up to 50,000 federal workers and make it easier to fire them.
The American Federation of Government Employees, in a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. federal court, said Trump lacks the power to strip federal employees of protections against being fired at will without adopting a formal rule.
Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order exempts positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from the protections enjoyed by career civil servants.
The order was one of several efforts to overhaul the federal government since Trump took office on Jan. 20.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Franklin Paul and Chizu Nomiyama)
