Lawfare Archive: Nick Bednar on Trump's Civil Service Executive Orders
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2026
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From January 28, 2025: In today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Alan Z. Rozenshtein speaks with his University of Minnesota Law colleague, Nick Bednar, about the wave of Day 1 executive orders affecting the civil service. Bednar recently analyzed these orders in a piece for Lawfare. They discuss what the orders say, how they might be challenged in court, and what this means for the next four years and beyond.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Electronic Communications Privacy Act turns 40 this year, and it's showing its age. |
| 0:06.0 | On Friday, March 6th, Lawfare and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars, |
| 0:11.1 | practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day event |
| 0:16.6 | on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public, in person and online. |
| 0:23.2 | Visit lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event. |
| 0:26.4 | That's lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event for details and to register. |
| 0:48.3 | Music I'm Marissa Wong, I'm Marissa Wong, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare for February 22, 2006. |
| 0:53.3 | When President Trump first came into office for his second term, he signed an executive |
| 0:58.1 | order on, quote, restoring accountability, unquote, to the federal workforce, declaring that all |
| 1:04.7 | federal employees, quote, must be accountable to the president, unquote. As part of maintaining this policy position, the recently published Office of Personnel Management Rules |
| 1:15.6 | reclassifies at least 50,000 federal workers as at-will employees. |
| 1:21.6 | This reclassification is part of the Trump administration's expansive application of the unitary executive theory to many |
| 1:29.5 | domains, including the civil service. For today's archive, I chose an episode from January 28, 2025, |
| 1:38.2 | in which Nick Bednar joined Alan Rosenstein to discuss how President Trump's day one wave of executive orders |
| 1:45.7 | affect the civil service, the potential legal challenges, and the rippling effects on federal |
| 1:51.7 | workers for the remainder of President Trump's second term. |
| 1:54.8 | The It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 2:07.4 | I'm Alan Rosenstein, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, |
| 2:11.5 | and senior editor and research director at Lawfare. |
| 2:14.6 | The executive power, all of it, is vested in a president who must take care that the laws |
| 2:20.7 | be faithfully executed. |
| 2:23.3 | Because senior executive service officials wield significant governmental authority, they must |
... |
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