White House Secretly Pressured the Board Meant to Protect Civil Servants — Sherk Told MSPB Head to Follow "the Company Line," Board Then Broke with Decades of Precedent, and 50,000 Workers Lost Protections

The board that exists to protect federal employees from political firings was secretly told by the White House how to rule — and then ruled exactly as instructed.

The New York Times investigation

On June 28, 2026, New York Times investigative reporter Michael S. Schmidt published a report titled "White House Secretly Swayed Board Meant to Stop Civil Service Politicization." The article reveals that the Trump White House went to extensive lengths behind the scenes to advance its theory of executive power — "potentially giving the president remarkable leeway to install loyalists at nearly every echelon of government."

The target of the pressure was the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) — an independent, quasi-judicial agency created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, in the aftermath of Nixonian personnel abuses, specifically to hear cases when employees believe they were fired for political reasons.

What James Sherk did

The private pressure campaign was led by James Sherk, a White House aide and Heritage Foundation alumnus who authored the original Schedule F memo — the blueprint for stripping civil service protections from career federal employees. Sherk has stated publicly: "Every federal employee should serve at the pleasure of the president."

In November 2025, Sherk met with Henry Kerner, the acting Republican head of the MSPB, while Kerner was being considered for a permanent leadership position — creating implicit leverage. Sherk told Kerner that the administration expected him to follow the Office of Legal Counsel's opinions on unitary executive theory.

Kerner was not explicitly told how to rule. He was told to follow "the company line" on the constitutional theory that the president has absolute authority over every federal employee.

Experts described the meeting as "little different from calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule."

The MSPB complied

The MSPB then broke with decades of precedent. The board ruled that it was entitled to weigh in on constitutional questions regarding unitary executive theory — effectively endorsing the administration's position that Article II of the Constitution gives the president the power to dismiss federal officials without due process, overriding any statutory protections.

The implication is sweeping: if the president's constitutional authority supersedes civil service law, then the protections guaranteed by the Civil Service Reform Act — the very protections the MSPB was created to enforce — are meaningless. The board built to protect federal workers from political firings had just ruled that political firings are constitutional.

As one analyst put it: any MSPB decision from this point forward is "the rotten fruit of a poisoned tree."

How the board was captured

The MSPB is designed to be bipartisan: three members, no more than two from the same party, each removable only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Trump systematically dismantled this structure:

1. February 2025: Trump fired Democratic MSPB member Cathy Harris, whose term ran until March 2028. He made no attempt to claim the firing was for cause
2. Harris sued. A District Court sided with her and upheld the constitutionality of the MSPB's bipartisan structure
3. May 2025: The Supreme Court blocked Harris's reinstatement via shadow docket — a two-page, unsigned decision that sidestepped 90 years of precedent from Humphrey's Executor. The majority wrote the government was likely to show the MSPB "exercises considerable executive power"
4. Justice Kagan dissented, noting the interest at stake was "maintaining Congress's idea of independent agencies: bodies of specialists balanced along partisan lines"
5. December 2025: The D.C. Circuit ruled in Harris v. Bessent that "Congress cannot restrict the president's ability to remove NLRB or MSPB members"
6. The dissent warned: "Under my colleagues' reasoning, it appears that no independent agencies may lawfully exist in this country"
7. November 2025: With Harris gone and the board under his control, Sherk met with Kerner and told him to follow the company line
8. The MSPB complied

The board went from quorum-less (it lacked a quorum from March to October 2025, and previously from January 2017 to March 2022 — a five-year gap that produced a 3,800-case backlog) to captured.

Schedule Policy/Career: 50,000 workers stripped of protections

On March 9, 2026, the Schedule Policy/Career rule took effect — the renamed and revived version of Trump's first-term Schedule F. The rule reclassifies up to 50,000 federal positions as at-will employment. What reclassified employees lose:

• Due process rights: no notice of removal, no right to respond before being fired
• MSPB appeal rights: cannot challenge suspensions, demotions, or firings before the board
• Statutory whistleblower protections: agencies set their own investigation policies instead of cases going to the Office of Special Counsel
• Reclassification challenge: cannot appeal being moved into the at-will category
• Collective bargaining: union negotiating power and official time severely curtailed
• Pay incentives: no longer eligible for retention, recruitment, or relocation bonuses, or student loan repayment

An initial executive order in June reclassified about 8,000 positions. The administration has not ruled out expanding the pool.

Max Steir, president of the Partnership for Public Service: "No matter what the administration says, today's action has nothing to do with restoring merit in federal employment."

A senior Trump administration official said reclassified employees "have nothing to be afraid of" as long as they perform their duties "in a competent, professional manner." The entire history of civil service reform exists because political leaders have defined "competent" and "professional" to mean "loyal."

The Maureen Comey case

The collapse of the MSPB's independence was laid bare in the case of Maureen Comey — the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey and a career federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York for nearly a decade.

Comey worked on cases involving Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sean "Diddy" Combs, and Sen. Bob Menendez. In July 2025, she received a form letter citing "Article II of the United States Constitution" as the sole basis for her immediate termination. No performance issues. No cause. Just a constitutional theory.

The DOJ argued she could only challenge the firing through the MSPB — the board the White House had just pressured into adopting the same constitutional theory that justified her firing. Comey argued the board was too compromised to hear her case.

In April 2026, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled she could bypass the MSPB and sue directly in federal court. His reasoning was elegant: because the government fired Comey "pursuant to Article II" rather than the normal statutory removal process, her case fell "outside the universe of cases that Congress intended the MSPB to resolve."

The government's own legal theory — that the president's constitutional power supersedes civil service law — had created a jurisdictional escape hatch. By claiming authority above the law, they put themselves outside the system designed to enforce it.

The OLC takeover

The pressure on the MSPB was part of a broader campaign. Trump ordered that "the President and the Attorney General's opinions of questions of law are controlling on all employees" — including independent agencies. In September 2025, the Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion claiming to overturn a prior MSPB decision, and the DOJ argued in subsequent litigation that OLC opinions "provide binding legal advice within the Executive Branch" and must control the board.

This means the president's own lawyers are telling the board — whose purpose is to be independent of the president — what the law requires. And the board, after Sherk's meeting with Kerner, is following those instructions.

What this means

The sequence is complete:

1. Fire the Democratic board member to eliminate the bipartisan check
2. Get the Supreme Court to block her reinstatement via shadow docket
3. Send a White House aide to tell the remaining board head to follow the company line
4. The board breaks with precedent and adopts the president's constitutional theory
5. Strip 50,000 workers of civil service protections via rule
6. Fire employees using Article II letters
7. When employees try to appeal to the board, the board rules in the president's favor
8. When employees try to bypass the board, the government says they can't

The board created after Nixon to prevent political firings is now the instrument of political firings. The guard has become the gate.

The MSPB was designed with a simple premise: federal employees should not lose their jobs because the president doesn't like their politics, their father, or their work on cases that embarrass him. That premise required an independent board. The board is no longer independent. Its head was told to follow the company line by the man who wrote the plan to fire federal workers, while being evaluated for a promotion. He followed the line. The board ruled accordingly. And now the employees it was built to protect have nowhere to go — except, as Judge Furman found, to the federal courts that the administration is simultaneously trying to stack.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was written because Nixon abused the system. The system is now being dismantled by people who believe the abuse was the point.