President-elect Donald Trump is bringing back a senior White House official who led his first-term push to make it easier to fire civil servants.
James Sherk, who served as a special assistant on domestic policy during Trump’s first term, will return to serve in the White House Domestic Policy Council, Trump announced Saturday. Sherk has worked at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute during the Biden administration.
Sherk was central to the Trump administration’s efforts to make it easier to fire some federal employees using a classification called Schedule F. That effort generated an outcry from civil servants, and the Biden administration moved quickly to reverse course.
But the effort “could — and should — be reissued by another president,” Sherk wrote in a 2022 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, “The President Needs the Power to Fire Bureaucrats.”
The incoming Trump administration has made it clear that it plans to pursue drastic reforms to the federal workforce, and Sherk is poised to be central to those efforts. Trump has vowed to “shatter the deep state” and make it easier to fire “rogue bureaucrats.”
During the Biden administration, Sherk has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with multiple agencies seeking career staffers’ emails that mention Trump or President Joe Biden around the time of the 2020 election and the 2021 inauguration, he told POLITICO’s E&E News in 2022.
“While it is of course perfectly fine for federal employees to have their own political views, the extent to which those views differ from the American electorate is of interest,” Sherk said at the time.
Reporter Kevin Bogardus contributed.
