The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will kick off a public proceeding later this week aimed at implementing the reclassification of an estimated 50,000 Federal government employees deemed to be in “policy making” positions into a new ‘Policy/Career’ personnel schedule.
Those positions being reclassified amount to about 2 percent of the Federal workforce, OPM said, and will stretch across 80 government agencies.
OPM’s move to seek comment aims to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order signed in January that reinstates a plan from his prior administration to create the new Policy/Career schedule, which will remove existing civil service protections for those employees and make it easier to fire and replace them.
President Trump signed a similar order in 2020 to create a new “Schedule F” classification to policy-making positions, which was not implemented prior to the end of his first term. The executive order issued in January changed the term Schedule F to the new Policy/Career designation.
“Despite its new name, the order aims to achieve the same goals,” OPM said in its proposed rule due to be published in the Federal Register this week, with public comments due 30 days after that.
In addition to creating the Policy/Career schedule “as an excepted service schedule for policy-influencing career positions,” OPM said its proposal also clarifies that “Schedule C appointments are exclusively for noncareer (i.e., political) appointments with policy responsibilities.”
“This rulemaking will promote Federal employee accountability and strengthen American democracy while addressing performance management challenges and issues with misconduct within the Federal workforce,” OPM said.
“This rule empowers federal agencies to swiftly remove employees in policy-influencing roles for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives, without lengthy procedural hurdles,” the White House said in a fact sheet released late Friday.
The reclassification of Federal employees has been decried by some members of Congress since President Trump’s first attempt to do so in 2020 – particularly by members representing areas that are heavy with Federal government employees.
In a joint statement issued over the weekend, Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said, “Anyone who cares about our national security, or receives Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other critical service administered by the federal government, has a vested interest in protecting our merit-based federal workforce.”
“President Trump has made it clear that he wants the power to hire and fire these workers based on their politics, not their qualifications – and that makes all of us less safe,” the members of Congress said.
Additionally, they pointed to their continuing but thus-far unsuccessful legislative efforts to prevent a reclassification via the Saving the Civil Service Act. The same legislation introduced in 2023 failed to win approval in either chamber of Congress, although a similar measure filed by Rep. Connolly in 2022 was approved by the full House.
The bill was reintroduced in the House and Senate in January 2025.
“We have long fought for legislation to protect the federal workforce from this kind of attack,” the lawmakers said on Saturday. “To our colleagues who will hear from their constituents if government services continue to decline because of this decision: you were warned.”