Welcome to the NewsHour. President Trump today advanced his plans to make it easier to fire tens of thousands of federal workers.

On social media, he said he would move forward with a rule previously known as Schedule F, which the administration said, quote,

will allow agencies to quickly remove employees from critical positions

who engage in misconduct, perform poorly, or undermine the democratic process

by intentionally subverting presidential directives.

Our White House correspondent Laura Barone Lopez joins us now with the latest.

Laura, President Trump promised that he would do this.

So what does this do and how many workers would this affect?

So Schedule F changes the job classification of nonpartisan federal workers,

designating them as political appointees. And so bottom line, it makes it easier for the president

to fire anyone that he considers disloyal and replace them with complete loyalists

to his cause and to his agenda.

Now, Schedule F was a part of the Project 2025 blueprint from the Heritage Foundation, and OMB

director Russ Vote was key in drafting this during the first administration, but they were

not able to implement it during the first administration.

And Russ Vote said throughout the campaign that they wanted to traumatize federal workers.

And the White House estimates that this will impact some 50,000 federal workers that could be laid off.

But government experts say that that's probably a minimum.

So what happens next? And has there been,

I imagine, pushback to this? There has been pushback. But so first, what happens is a White House

official said that agencies have until April 20th to hand them the lists of who they think should

be reclassified in their agencies. But Everett Kelly, the president of the American Federation of

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