Before the Trump administration takes over next week, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Acting Director Rob Shriver took the time on Tuesday afternoon to emphasize that “Schedule F is bad policy.”
The policy stems from the Trump administration’s October 2020 executive order that created a new “Schedule F” classification for Federal employees deemed to be in policy-making positions. The order made it easier to hire and fire employees who were put into the proposed Schedule F class.
Ultimately, the executive order calling for the creation of Schedule F was not implemented. President Joe Biden canceled his predecessor’s order shortly after taking office in 2021, saying it “provides a pathway to burrow political appointees into the civil service.”
Nevertheless, President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to reissue an order implementing the Schedule F classification “on day one” of his next administration.
“My view is that Schedule F is bad policy, and my view is that the career civil servants are hired and evaluated based on their skills, their knowledge, and their abilities – their subject matter expertise is critical to delivery of services to the American people,” Shriver told reporters on Tuesday.
“They stand ready to implement the agenda of whoever the president is and follow lawful orders,” he added. “There are plenty of tools available to agency leadership to address individuals who may not be following lawful orders or who are performing poorly. Those tools exist, and Schedule F was not about that.”
OPM published a final rule in April 2024 that clarifies and reinforces long-standing protections and merit system principles for thousands of Federal employees, making it more difficult for a future administration to reapproach a Schedule F-type arrangement.
The final rule ensures that once a career civil servant earns protections they cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service.
The rule also prevents terms like “confidential, policy determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating” positions – terminology used to define Schedule F employees that would lack civil service protections – from being applied to career civil servants.
Shriver told reporters that OPM’s rule lays out what the next steps would be if an incoming administration wanted to reinstate Schedule F.
If the Trump administration wanted to make a change to OPM’s rule, Shriver said it would need to follow the same public, transparent process to change it. This includes proposing a regulation, accepting public comments, and then issuing a final regulation.
“It’s not just about following that process. They’d also have to justify why their position was the better position, why their position was more grounded in the current laws than our position, [and they] might have to have the kind of administrative record that backs that up, that we have in support of our regulation,” Shriver said.
“So, I can’t predict what the new administration will do when it comes in, whether it will reimplement Schedule F, and what that will look like,” he continued. “But what I can say is the regulation that we have on the books is the strongest action that this administration could have taken in support of the policy that we believe in, which is that the career civil servants are essential to our democracy, and that decisions about Federal hiring and firing should be based on merit and not partisan politics.”
Additionally, the acting OPM director took the time to say that telework should not be a “one-size-fits-all approach” – also contrary to President-elect Donald Trump’s plans. Trump has warned that Federal workers who don’t return to in-office work will be fired.
“I think that applying a one-size-fits-all approach will result in dramatically bad effects on those occupations where the occupation itself is largely performed from home,” Shriver said.
For example, he said that he has worked closely with National Cyber Director Harry Coker on increasing the Federal government’s cybersecurity talent, an occupation that largely works from home.
“The fact is that that occupation largely works from home, and so any kind of one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t recognize the dynamics of those different occupations is going to dramatically impact the Federal government’s ability to handle the most important challenges that we face,” Shriver said. “It should be driven by what is the best arrangement to accomplish the agency’s mission.”
