President Trump signed on January 20 an Executive Order (EO), Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce, and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued guidance on the order on January 27. The broad order reinstated and amended a 2020 EO that reclassified certain federal employees into an excepted service category known as Schedule Policy/Career (formally Schedule F). This action would significantly alter civil service protections for thousands of career employees.
Under the order, federal agencies must review and identify positions that involve policy-making, policy-advocacy, or confidential advisory duties and recommend them for transfer to the new Policy/Career schedule. This includes anyone with “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.” Employees in these positions would be exempt from traditional civil service protections under Title 5, making it easier to reassign or remove them. Agencies have 90 days to submit their preliminary recommendations, with final reviews due within 120 days.
OPM is tasked with guiding agencies through the reclassification process and rescinding Biden-era regulations that sought to limit similar workplace changes. While the order prohibits political patronage hiring, stating that “competitive service positions rescheduled into Schedule Policy/Career will generally continue to be filled using competitive hiring procedures,” critics argue that it could enable a shift toward a more politically aligned federal workforce by stripping certain career positions of their job protections.
Read the full OPM memorandum at: https://tinyurl.com/49hu4vkt