Close to 8,000 career federal employees will be moved into a new employment category with limited job protections, after the Trump administration took the final step to make Schedule Policy/Career a reality.
An executive order President Donald Trump signed Wednesday afternoon formalizes the long-expected federal employment classification and eliminates civil service protections for thousands of senior-level positions across government. The move is meant to boost workforce accountability, but has also drawn sharp criticism from federal unions, employee organizations and other stakeholders.
Trump administration officials said the creation of Schedule Policy/Career aims to improve employee accountability and ensure the federal workforce is carrying out the president’s policy agenda. Officials also said it’s currently too difficult to remove federal employees for poor performance.
“It’s also about a restoration, in our mind, of the democratic process,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told reporters during a press call Wednesday. “What Schedule Policy/Career does is really nothing new. This is exactly the way the system worked for a very long time … In order to affect the policy priorities of the administration, we need to have people willing to and capable of carrying out those directives.”
]]>
“You can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at-will,” Kupor continued.
Following Wednesday’s executive order, agencies now have seven days to make conforming changes to the affected employees’ personnel records, OPM said.
Approximately 97% of the governmentwide positions targeted for Schedule Policy/Career are at or above the GS-15 level. A smaller number of positions at the GS-13 and GS-14 levels — mostly within the Office of Management and Budget — will be converted as well, according to a senior administration official.
The targeted 8,000 career federal positions for the new classification is far lower than OPM’s initial estimate that Schedule Policy/Career would cover about 50,000 positions. Some earlier estimates had also suggested as many as 200,000 positions could be converted.
Schedule Policy/Career will generally cover senior-level and federal leadership positions in areas including:
- Leaders of agency subcomponents and divisions
- Leaders of certain agency field offices and regional offices
- Chief agency officers, such as CIOs and chief learning officers
- Senior HR officials
- Agency deputies and chiefs of staff
- Senior program managers
- Senior-level regulation writers
- High-level agency attorneys
- Senior officials involved in policy development; policy advising; budget and spending allocations; federal grantmaking; internal administrative and operations policies; strategic planning
- Senior officials in public affairs, legislative affairs and intergovernmental affairs
The White House published an appendix of all positions that will be converted to Schedule Policy/Career.
“Ensuring that such employees can be removed for misconduct or poor performance is essential to protecting democratic self government by an elected president,” the executive order states.
]]>
“It’s a relatively small slice of senior career positions,” a senior administration official told reporters. “There were serious issues with policy resistance in the first term, and this is designed to provide an accountability tool to ensure that that can be swiftly addressed.”
No positions beyond those included in the executive order are expected to be converted in the immediate future, an administration official said. But more positions may still be added later at the president’s discretion.
“We’ve got a small bite of what could be a much bigger apple,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland’s school of public policy, said in an interview. “The challenge is whether or not this is just the beginning of a much broader set of conversions that may be coming down the line.”
“[These positions] carry with them tremendous amounts of expertise that have been built up over time,” Kettl added. “If you risk turning those positions over, you gain more political responsiveness at the cost of expertise that has accumulated.”
Plans to revive the policy formerly known as Schedule F have been in the works since the president’s first day in office. Earlier this year, OPM issued final regulations detailing governmentwide implementation plans for Schedule Policy/Career. In the following months, agencies were expected to assemble plans for which employees and positions would be targeted for transfer into the new classification.
Following OPM’s final rule, Schedule Policy/Career still required the final step of the president issuing an executive order before agencies could officially begin the conversion process. The order on Wednesday comes months after the administration cleared a 30-day timeline that could have let Schedule Policy/Career take effect as early as March 9.
In April 2025, OPM’s proposed regulations on Schedule Policy/Career received over 40,000 public comments, with about 94% of commenters opposed to the regulation. Many federal unions, employee organizations, good government groups and individual federal employees raised concerns that Schedule Policy/Career will politicize the federal workforce, damage the non-partisan nature of the career civil service and undermine democracy.
“This is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “The practical implications of this action are clear. Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out.”
The Trump administration is facing a lawsuit against its efforts to remove civil service protections from a swath of career federal employees. Plaintiffs allege that the creation of Schedule Policy/Career violates due process rights, exceeds presidential authority and contradicts federal statute.
]]>
“For generations, our country has relied on a professional, nonpartisan civil service,” Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman said Wednesday. “The Trump-Vance administration’s attempts to dismantle civil service protections would make it easier to purge experienced public servants. When government experts can be fired without cause, it’s not just federal workers who are harmed — it’s the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day.”
Raymond Limon, a former Biden appointee at MSPB and long-time career civil servant, said there are already accountability measures for the career civil service under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. He called the new schedule’s stated focus on accountability a “ruse.”
“This is a way to add onto other illegitimate means to remove and fire employees and to remove due process from the civil service — it’s a solution looking for a problem,” Limon said in an interview. “Accountability is an important tool and people should always focus on how to get the most out of our employees. But these actions are being forced upon employees … Changing the contractual relationship and stripping way due process rights is unfair.”
Employees who are moved into the new category will be exempted from long-standing civil service protections. Schedule Policy/Career will make it easier for agencies to discipline or fire affected employees for any reason, with no opportunity for employees to appeal adverse actions to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Employees will also be unable to challenge their initial reclassifications.
In most cases, reclassified employees will also no longer be eligible for student loan repayment options, nor will they be able to receive recruitment, retention or relocation incentives.
In addition to adverse actions, agencies are expected to issue new categories of performance awards and bonuses for Schedule Policy/Career employees as well.
Trump attempted a similar effort during his first term, although it was short-lived. A 2020 executive order that came in the final few months of the president’s first term went largely unimplemented and was quickly rescinded under the Biden administration. The revival of Schedule F, which has since been renamed, comes with a longer runway for agencies to begin converting employees.
In 2024, the Biden administration issued regulations attempting to reinforce civil service protections for the career federal workforce and block Schedule F from resurfacing. The Trump administration later rescinded the 2024 rule and issued its own regulations on Schedule Policy/Career.
Ron Sanders, who served in Trump’s first term as chairman of the Federal Salary Council, resigned from his position in 2020 in response to Schedule F. But under the new Schedule Policy/Career, Sanders suggested he was open to the idea of adding workforce flexibility for agencies — as long as it remained fully clear that career civil servants are not required to support a president politically.
“That’s only in guidance and it could just as easily be repealed by the stroke of a pen, so I wish somebody would put that in law and make it harder to undo. But that took care of a lot of the concerns that I had when I resigned,” Sanders said in an interview. “Civil servants are still going to be able to speak truth to power. That’s more a hope than a fact, because it remains to be seen, but I’m hoping that OPM will protect them when they do so.”
Updated Wednesday evening with additional comments.
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email [email protected] or reach out on Signal at drewfriedman.11
Copyright
© 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
