The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published a final rule on Thursday establishing Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service, a move that makes it easier for the Trump administration to fire federal employees in policy-making positions.
The final rule affects an estimated 50,000 federal employees and implements an executive order President Donald Trump issued on his first day in office last year. OPM said the change is aimed at increasing accountability for career officials who help shape and execute administration policy.
“Schedule Policy/Career restores a basic principle of democratic governance: those entrusted with shaping and executing policy must be accountable for results,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a Feb. 5 press release.
“This rule preserves merit-based hiring, veterans’ preference, and whistleblower protections while ensuring senior career officials responsible for advancing President Trump’s agenda can be held to the same performance expectations that exist throughout much of the American workforce,” Kupor said.
The new classification revives a concept first introduced by Trump in an October 2020 executive order that created “Schedule F,” which would have stripped civil service protections for much of the federal workforce.
That order was never implemented and was canceled by former President Joe Biden shortly after he took office in 2021, with Biden arguing it would provide “a pathway to burrow political appointees into the civil service.”
Under the Biden administration, OPM issued a final rule in April 2024 that reinforced long-standing civil service protections and merit system principles. That rule made it more difficult, though not impossible, to reestablish a Schedule F-type framework.
The Trump administration’s final rule, published in the Federal Register on Thursday, will take effect 30 days after publication.
OPM said the final rule “prohibits political patronage, loyalty tests, or political discrimination. The rule also makes clear that Schedule Policy/Career may not be used for workforce reshaping or mass layoffs or to circumvent existing reduction-in-force (RIF) laws and procedures.”
In a Feb. 5 blog post, Kupor explained that “all of the same protections in favor of merit-based hiring” are present in Schedule Policy/Career.
“Pretty much all that has changed is that policy-making civil servants can be removed at-will —just like under the Pendleton Act, and just like private sector workers and many state government employees,” Kupor wrote.
However, federal employee unions, nonprofit organizations, and Democratic lawmakers sharply criticized the move, arguing that it undermines a nonpartisan civil service and allows the Trump administration to further dismantle the federal workforce.
“This rule is a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley in a statement.
“Turning tens or maybe hundreds [of] thousands of these professionals into at-will employees doesn’t make government more accountable. It makes it more vulnerable to pressure, retaliation, and political interference, which is exactly the opposite of what the public is asking for right now,” Kelley added.
The nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service criticized the move as a first step toward stripping job protections for certain career federal employees and making them vulnerable to political firings.
“No matter what the administration says, today’s action has nothing to do with restoring merit in federal employment,” said Partnership for Public Service President and CEO Max Stier. “This new designation can be used to remove expert career federal employees who place the law and service to the public ahead of blind loyalty and replace them with political supporters who will unquestioningly do the president’s bidding.”
“Our government needs serious improvements to make it more effective and accountable, but one thing that doesn’t need changing is the notion that it exists to serve the American people and not any individual president,” Stier said.
Notably, recent polling from the Partnership for Public Service found that 66% of Americans oppose the politicization of the civil service, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independent voters.
Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., who previously introduced the Saving the Civil Service Act, issued a joint statement slamming the final rule.
“The Trump Administration’s move to reclassify federal employees to make it easier to fire them for political reasons will hurt these workers and their families, threaten our national security, and make it harder for Americans to access the services they need,” they said. “If we want to continue to lead the world, then we must have a federal workforce based on merit, not politics. We will continue to do everything we can to protect these dedicated public servants, many of whom live in Virginia.”
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said the legal group “will return to court to stop this unlawful rule.”