The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued marching orders on Jan. 27 for Federal agencies to comb through their workforce rolls and submit to OPM by April 20 preliminary lists of employees who they want to designate under the new “Schedule Policy/Career” classification that will make them easier to replace.
The new “Schedule Policy/Career” classification is OPM’s new name for the “Schedule F” classification contained in a late-2020 executive order from President Donald Trump that aimed to reclassify as many as 50,000 Federal agency employees deemed to be in policy-making positions. The Trump order was cancelled by President Biden in 2021 before it took practical effect.
President Trump signed a fresh executive order on Jan. 20 that reinstates the Schedule F reclassification, and rebrands it as the “Schedule Policy/Career” classification.
OPM’s Jan. 27 guidance to heads and acting heads of agencies from OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell features three key dates for agencies to hit.
The first requires agencies by Jan. 29 to designate a Schedule Policy/Career point of contact and provide those contact names to OPM.
The second key date is April 20, by which agencies need to give OPM “interim recommendations on positions appropriate to be placed into Policy/Career.”
And the third key date will fall 120 days after April 20 – in mid-August – which is when agencies will need to finalize their reviews of employees to be reclassified and submit any remaining petitions.
After that, the guidance document indicates, “a new executive order will subsequently effectuate the transfers into Schedule Policy/Career.”
On the OPM side, the agency is staking itself to a Feb. 19 deadline to issue final guidance on the types of positions that agencies should consider in their Policy/Career reviews, but also said it plans to issue final guidance prior to that date.
Who’s Getting Classified
OPM said the executive order signed on Jan. 20 broadly “creates a new Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service for positions that are of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character (policy-influencing positions) and filled by individuals not normally subject to replacement or change as a result of a Presidential transition.”
In the document issued on Jan. 27, however, OPM provided more granular interim guidance for agencies to consider as they think about reclassifying employees for Schedule Policy/Career. That guidance points to positions whose duties include:
- Functions statutorily described as important policy-making or policy-determining functions, and principally 1) directing the work of an organizational unit; 2) being held accountable for the success of one or more specific programs or projects; or 3) monitoring progress toward organizational goals and periodically evaluating and making appropriate adjustments to such goals;
- Authority to bind the agency to a position, policy, or course of action either without higher-level review or with only limited higher-level review;
- Delegated or subdelegated authority to make decisions committed by law to the discretion of the agency head;
- Substantive participation and discretionary authority in agency grantmaking, such as the substantive exercise of discretion in the drafting of funding opportunity announcements, evaluation of grant applications, or recommending or selecting grant recipients; advocating for the policies (including future appropriations) of the agency or the administration before different governmental entities, such as by performing functions typically undertaken by an agency office of legislative affairs or intergovernmental affairs, or by presenting program resource requirements to examiners from the Office of Management and Budget in preparation of the annual President’s Budget Request;
- Publicly advocating for the policies of the agency or the administration, including before the news media or on social media; and
- Positions described by their position descriptions as entailing policy-making, policy-determining, or policy-advocating duties.
OPM said those descriptions were “guideposts” for agencies and “not determinative.”
“OPM retains discretion to determine which categories and types of positions it will recommend for Schedule Policy/Career, and the President will make the final determination about which positions to transfer,” the agency said.
The OPM guidance also notes that while the Biden administration’s OPM in 2024 issued a rule to make it more difficult for the Trump administration to pursue another Schedule F classification, President Trump’s new Jan. 20 order “broadly directs OPM to rescind these regulatory amendments,” and also “directly nullified some portions of that rule.”
