U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday creating a new classification of non-career federal workers who can more easily be fired if they fail to carry out the president's priorities, the White House said.

The new classification, called Schedule G, will be for employees involved in policy making who will now be expected to leave their positions when the president who appointed them leaves office, according to a White House fact sheet.

The White House did not provide details on how many workers would be put into this new classification.

Earlier this year, Trump signalled the change, saying the federal government will finally be "run like a business."

The executive order will likely strip vast numbers of the roughly 2.3 million federal workforce of their job protections by effectively making them employees at will.

Trump ordered the reclassification of many government workers at the end of his first term, known as Schedule F, which former Democratic President Joe Biden rescinded on his first day in office in 2021.

Estimates then were that Schedule F could have made at least 50,000 federal workers vulnerable to being fired.