Schedule F and the Plan to Make Career Civil Servants Easier to Fire

Thirteen days before the 2020 election, on October 21, President Trump signed an executive order with a deceptively bland title: Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service. Most Americans had never heard of the excepted service, let alone its schedules, which run in alphabetical order through the federal personnel rules like the shelves of a filing cabinet. Schedule C, for instance, covers political appointees in confidential roles. The new order created a sixth drawer. Into it, agencies were told to move career employees whose jobs involved policy: people who drafted regulations, analyzed data that shaped decisions, advised officials or wrote the guidance that told the public how a program worked. Once in that drawer, those employees would lose the protections against arbitrary firing that most of the civil service had enjoyed for well over a century. The order was barely implemented before the administration changed hands. Four years later, on the first day of Trump's second term, it came back under a new name.

In short: Schedule F would reclassify career federal employees in policy-related roles so they can be fired more easily, without the notice and appeal rights most civil servants have. It was created in October 2020, revoked in January 2021 and revived in January 2025 as Schedule Policy/Career. Supporters say it makes the bureaucracy accountable to elected leaders; critics say it would let any president replace expert staff with loyalists. The answer matters for how every federal program works.

The protections Schedule F would strip

Start with what a career federal employee has now. Most of the more than two million civilians who work for the federal government are in the competitive service, hired through a merit process. After a probationary period, they cannot be fired or demoted for poor performance or misconduct without a process laid out in federal law.

That process is often described as impossible to get through. It is not, but it does have steps. An employee facing removal gets advance written notice of the reasons, a chance to respond, a written decision and the right to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that hears federal employment cases. Agencies have to show that the action was justified and that it promotes the efficiency of the service. Employees are also protected against being fired for political reasons, for whistleblowing or for discrimination.

These protections do not mean career employees can ignore their bosses. Political appointees, roughly four thousand of them across the government, set policy and direct the work. Career staff are required to carry out lawful orders. What the protections prevent is a manager firing someone for reasons unrelated to the job, such as party, personal loyalty or refusing to do something unlawful.

Schedule F would remove most of that structure for employees moved into it. They would become, in effect, at-will employees: removable without the usual notice, reply and appeal rights.

October 2020: the first version

The 2020 order defined the new schedule as covering positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character that were not normally subject to change when a new president took office. That last phrase matters. Political appointees already leave with each new administration. Schedule F was aimed at career employees who stayed.

Agencies were told to review their workforces and identify positions to move. A few began that work in the final months of 2020. But the process was slow, and when President Joe Biden took office he revoked the order on January 22, 2021, before significant reclassifications had taken effect.

Biden's administration then tried to make a revival harder. In April 2024 the Office of Personnel Management issued a rule saying that employees moved involuntarily into a new schedule would keep the protections they had already earned, and clarifying that policy-making positions excepted from civil service rules were meant for political appointees, not career staff. A rule can be changed by a later rule, so this was a speed bump rather than a wall.

January 2025: the second version

On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an order restoring the 2020 order, with a new name for the schedule: Schedule Policy/Career. The administration said the positions involved would still be filled through merit-based hiring and that employees would not be required to support the president politically, but that they would be accountable for carrying out the president's policies and could be removed if they did not.

In April 2025 OPM proposed a rule to put the change into effect and estimated that about 50,000 positions, roughly two percent of the federal workforce, would be moved. The proposal also sought to undo the 2024 rule.

The revival came alongside a broader effort to shrink and reshape the federal workforce. Within days of the inauguration, federal employees received an email titled "Fork in the Road," offering them a deferred resignation. Probationary employees, those in their first year or two in a position, were fired in large numbers at many agencies. Agencies announced reductions in force. Schedule Policy/Career was one piece of a larger plan.

The case for Schedule F, stated fairly

Supporters of Schedule F make arguments that many people who are not partisan find persuasive, and they deserve to be heard.

The first is democratic accountability. Voters elect a president to carry out a program. If career employees who disagree with that program can slow it down, leak against it or quietly resist it, the result is a government that does not respond to elections. Supporters point to instances during Trump's first term when officials resisted or delayed policies, and argue that the president needs more control over the people who shape policy.

The second is about performance. Federal managers have long reported that removing poor performers is difficult and time-consuming. Surveys by the Merit Systems Protection Board and others over the years have found that many supervisors believe they cannot easily remove a poor performer. Supporters argue that at-will employment is the norm in the private sector and that public servants should face similar standards.

The third is about scale. Defenders note that Schedule F would cover a small share of the workforce, the people closest to policy, rather than every federal employee.

Why critics see it differently

Critics, including many former officials who served in Republican administrations, answer each point.

On accountability, they argue that the system already gives the president enormous control. Political appointees run every agency and set its direction. Career employees who refuse lawful orders can already be disciplined or fired. What Schedule F adds is the ability to fire people for reasons unrelated to their work, such as their party, their views or their willingness to say that a proposed policy is unlawful or based on bad data. That is precisely the power the civil service system was designed to take away.

On performance, they agree that the process for removing poor performers can be cumbersome and should be improved. But they argue that the fix is to improve management, training and the removal process itself, not to strip protections from tens of thousands of people in jobs that require expertise and candour.

On scale, they point out that the people most likely to be reclassified are exactly the ones whose independence matters most: the scientists whose data shapes environmental rules, the economists who forecast costs, the lawyers who tell an agency what the law allows. A government where those people know that an inconvenient finding could cost them their jobs will produce fewer inconvenient findings.

And they make an argument about what happens next. Any power one president uses will be available to the next. A Democratic president could use Schedule F to remove career staff seen as hostile to a progressive agenda. Critics argue that both parties are better off with a professional civil service that serves each administration in turn.

What at-will status would mean in practice

Abstract arguments can hide what is at stake, so consider some ordinary situations.

A weather forecaster at a federal agency is asked to change a public forecast to match something an official said. Under current rules, she can refuse on professional grounds and appeal any punishment. In an at-will job, the cost of refusing could be her career.

A benefits analyst warns that a proposed change to a program will leave many eligible people without help. Under current rules, he can put that analysis in writing and expect to keep his job. At will, the safer course might be to stay quiet.

A lawyer in a regulatory agency concludes that a proposed rule would not survive a court challenge. She can say so now. At will, the incentive to tell officials what they want to hear grows stronger.

None of these people would necessarily be fired. The point is that they would know they could be, and that knowledge changes behavior. The public would rarely see it happen. It would see only the results: forecasts that bend, analyses that are missing and rules that fall apart in court.

Where the idea came from

Schedule F did not come from nowhere. The merit system was created by the Pendleton Act of 1883, passed after a disappointed office-seeker assassinated President James Garfield. Before that law, federal jobs were routinely handed out as rewards for party work, and employees were expected to campaign and donate to keep them. Reformers spent decades arguing that public work should go to people chosen for competence, and that they should be protected from being fired for their politics.

Over the twentieth century, Congress and presidents of both parties expanded that system until it covered most of the federal workforce. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, signed by President Jimmy Carter, reorganized it, creating the Office of Personnel Management to run it and the Merit Systems Protection Board to hear appeals. That law also tried to make it easier to manage performance, an aim reformers still argue has not been fully met.

The argument for Schedule F grew out of conservative frustration with what some called the administrative state: the large body of career officials who write and enforce regulations. It was developed further in policy proposals published by conservative groups in 2023 and 2024, which described a reclassified workforce as essential to a president's ability to govern. Critics noted that the same proposals described plans to replace career staff with people chosen for their loyalty to the president's agenda.

What Congress can do

An executive order can be revoked by the next president, and a regulation can be replaced by the next regulation. A statute is harder to undo. That is why much of the fight over Schedule F has focused on Congress.

Since 2021, members of Congress have introduced bills in both chambers to block the reclassification of career positions without congressional approval, or to guarantee that employees moved into a new schedule keep their protections. None had become law as of this writing. With Democrats taking control of both chambers in January 2027, such a bill could pass Congress more easily, though it would still face a possible presidential veto.

Congress also has the power of the purse. Appropriations bills can include limits on how agencies spend money, including on carrying out personnel changes. Those limits are subject to the same veto, and to negotiations over larger spending deals. Oversight hearings can at least establish, on the record, how many positions have been reclassified and what has happened to the people in them.

Where progressives can do better

It would be dishonest to pretend the civil service is working perfectly. Federal hiring is notoriously slow; filling a position can take months. Performance management is often weak, and good employees are frustrated by colleagues who coast. Progressives who defend the civil service sometimes sound as if any criticism of the bureaucracy is an attack on government itself.

That stance helps Schedule F's supporters. The stronger position is to defend protections against political firing while pressing hard for faster hiring, better training for managers, a removal process that is fair and quicker, and clearer accountability for results. People who believe government can do great things should be the most impatient with a government that does things slowly.

What you can do

• Follow what is happening to the workforce. Our coverage of the government being gutted tracks Schedule Policy/Career, reductions in force and the court cases over them.
• Comment on personnel rules. Changes like this one usually go through a public comment period. Our open comments page lists federal rules open for comment now, closing soonest first, with guidance on how to write a comment that agencies have to consider.
• Ask Congress to act. Use our representative lookup to call or write your representative and senators and see their latest votes. Congress can write civil service protections into law, which no executive order can undo.
• See where the parties stand. The Congress votes and bills page shows how bills on federal workers and the civil service fare on the floor.

The civil service was built on a simple idea: the people who do the government's work should be hired for what they know and kept for how well they do it. Schedule F tests that idea in a way it has not been tested in generations. How it comes out will shape whether the next forecast, audit or benefits check is the product of expertise or of fear.