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Trump orders the federal government to hire on skills, not just diplomas.
President Trump capped a meeting of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board at the White House on June 26 by signing an executive order that tells federal agencies to stop treating a college degree as a hiring gatekeeper. The order, “Modernizing and Reforming the Assessment and Hiring of Federal Job Candidates,” targets a civil service of roughly 2.1 million employees — the largest employer in the country. Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who co-chair the advisory board, pushed the plan alongside corporate leaders who’ve already tested similar hiring models in the private sector.
- The order bars agencies from requiring a minimum degree unless one is legally mandated for the job, such as in medicine or law.
- OPM Acting Director Michael Rigas said his agency will rewrite federal job qualification standards within 180 days.
- IBM Executive Chairman Ginni Rometty cited her company’s own experience dropping degree requirements to hire more people from underserved communities.
The Mechanics of the Order
Instead of resume screens and self-certified questionnaires, the order pushes agencies toward competency-based evaluation — online skills testing and structured interviews conducted by subject-matter experts. The goal, according to the White House, is to measure whether someone can actually do the job rather than whether they checked a box on a diploma. Positions where a specific degree is legally tied to performing the duties, licensed medical or legal roles, for instance, are the narrow exception.
That’s a direct break from decades of federal hiring practice, where a bachelor’s degree often served as a blunt proxy for competence regardless of the role. Rigas and OPM now have a 180-day clock to rebuild qualification standards agency by agency, a process that will determine how quickly the order actually changes who gets hired.
Selling It as a Model for Business
Trump framed the signing as a long-overdue shift toward merit-based hiring, calling it a bold move away from outdated restrictions that keep capable workers out of government jobs. Ivanka Trump argued the change could ripple beyond Washington, encouraging private employers to widen their own talent pipelines rather than defaulting to degree requirements as a screening shortcut.
Rometty pointed to IBM’s own hiring data as proof that dropping degree mandates opened doors for workers from communities the traditional pipeline had been skipping over.
That corporate angle mattered to the administration’s pitch — the advisory board isn’t just a policy shop, it’s stacked with executives who’ve already run this experiment inside their own companies. The White House is betting that if the federal government moves first, more of the private sector follows.
Target Audience of the Order
OPM and the White House framed degree requirements as a filter that quietly excluded people who built real expertise through apprenticeships, technical certifications, or years of on-the-job experience rather than a four-year program. That’s consistent with the administration’s broader workforce push — Trump signed an earlier order in 2017 aimed at expanding apprenticeships, and this order extends that logic directly into the federal payroll itself. For a White House that has leaned on executive action across a range of fronts, from labor policy to trade and foreign policy orders, this is another instance of Trump using the pen to reshape federal practice without waiting on Congress.
The Political Backdrop
The signing comes as the administration leans hard into an economic-recovery message heading toward November, with unemployment still elevated after the spring’s pandemic shutdowns. Framing hiring reform around merit and opportunity gives the White House a talking point aimed squarely at workers without four-year degrees — a bloc Trump has courted since 2016. It’s a different kind of economic message than the daily Biden campaign rollouts, betting that federal hiring reform resonates with voters who’ve felt locked out of white-collar tracks by paperwork rather than ability.
The real test starts now, with OPM’s 180-day window to rewrite job qualification standards across dozens of agencies. Whether the roughly 2.1 million-person federal workforce actually starts hiring differently by the end of the year depends on how fast Rigas’s office turns Trump’s signature into new job postings.
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