The Trump administration is instructing Federal government agencies to remove the designation of “career reserved” roles for agency chief information officers (CIOs) – a move that the administration says recognizes that agency tech chiefs have “policy-determining capabilities across a range of controversial political topics.”
In a memo dated Feb. 4 to agency and department heads and acting heads, Acting Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Charles Ezell instructed that agencies with a CIO role currently classified as Senior Executive Service (SES) and designated as career reserved send a request to OPM not later than Feb. 14 to redesignate the CIO position as “general.”
According to OPM’s website, career reserved positions are those defined in law to “ensure impartiality, or public’s confidence of impartiality of government,” and can only be filled by career appointees.
General positions, however, “may be filled by any type of SES appointee – career, noncareer, limited term or limited emergency,” the website says. By removing the career role designation, some protections against retaliatory or politically motivated moves would be removed, allowing noncareer appointees to be removed without appeal rights.
“The role of agency CIOs has changed dramatically in recent years,” the Feb. 4 OPM memo to agencies says. “No longer the station of impartial and apolitical technocrats, the modern agency CIO role demands policy-making and policy-determining capabilities across a range of controversial political topics.”
OPM said it wants to change the designation of agency CIOs “in light of this new reality.”
Federal CIOs are responsible for driving IT strategy across their agencies including in broad areas of cybersecurity, data management, and technology modernization. They also oversee the integration of new technology, such as artificial intelligence and cloud adoption. As key technology leaders, they align IT investments with mission goals while addressing risks such as cyber threats and outdated systems.
Most agency CIOs are career Federal employees appointed by agency directors. Congress created exceptions to that process – including with the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs – whose CIOs are nominated by the president and are subject to Senate confirmation.
In 2024, around 8,200 Federal workers held the SES classification, the majority of which – around 90 percent – came from the upper ranks of the career Federal workforce. Only about 10 percent of SES employees – around 850 employees – are non-career Federal employees.
The Feb. 4 OPM memo says that during the Biden administration, agency CIOs were given wide authority and say over cybersecurity, AI, government accountability and efficiency, digital access and communications, and other areas that can relate directly to policy – including diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) which the new administration has been working to dismantle.
“Each of these items standing alone and all of them taken together amount to significant political issues over which CIOs exercise authority,” reads the memo. “When an agency CIO makes policy choices about which of these topics to prioritize and fund – and which should be deemphasized or defunded – the CIO determines government policy in important ways.”
“The public rightly expects government officials who make such choices to be democratically accountable,” continued the memo, which also notes the harms of “poor” policy decisions that could be made by CIOs.
The Trump administration added that CIO talent is “hard to find,” and said that widening the pool of SES applicants could help to expand the talent pool.
While technical skills are important to the CIO role, the role isn’t “highly technical” and could still be performed by someone without extensive knowledge beyond a “baseline” of technical knowledge, OPM said.
“A modern agency CIO is not a mere engineer, scientist or technocrat. He does not spend his days writing complex lines of code, setting up secure networks,” or performing other “highly technical” tasks,” reads the memo. “Instead, he crafts and effectuates policy, and sets and deploys his budget, based on his Administration’s priorities.”
Changing the CIO designation follows closely on other changes the Trump administration has made to the Federal workforce. At the end of President Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order to create the new Schedule F classification for Federal agency employees in policy-making positions that would make it easier to replace them by the administration.
Former President Joe Biden revoked the Trump-era executive order once he took office, instating a new rule to protect career employees from being moved involuntarily to a new classification. Trump reinstated his executive order from 2020 on the first day of his second term.
