New Orleans In the onslaught of executive orders coming out of the White House since Trump returned as President of the United States, it’s easy to miss some of the slings and arrows being thrown at the American people, its workers, and public servants. Somehow, I had taken my eyes of the ball and not paid enough attention to what was called Schedule F and is now being renamed Schedule Policy/Career.
What is it? Wikipedia takes a somewhat objective crack at it:
Schedule Policy/Career, commonly known by its former name Schedule F, is a job classification for appointments in the excepted service of the United States federal civil service for permanent policy-related positions. The purpose of the provision is to increase the president’s control over the federal career civil service by removing their civil service protections and making them easier to dismiss, which proponents stated would increase flexibility and accountability to elected officials. It was widely criticized as providing a means to retaliate against federal officials for political reasons, impede the effective functioning of government, and creating risk to democracy. It has been estimated that tens or hundreds of thousands of career employees could be reclassified, increasing the number of political appointments by a factor of ten.
Science magazine is less charitable about the executive order and its impact, partially because its broad reach includes science, public health and similar professional employees, never thought to be confidential, but now being politicized. An editorial made their position clear:
“Schedule F” (now renamed Schedule Policy/Career) is shorthand for an executive order that is a sharp break with civil service merit principles, which assume that career employees should be retained on the basis of performance and protected against political coercion. The US is already unusual in the degree to which it reserves the top layers of organizational leadership for short-term political appointees. Schedule F will vastly expand the number of appointees, adding a proposed 50,000 from the current 4000. It does so by involuntarily reclassifying career civil servants as appointees, removing job protections, the basic constraint against political interference.
Fifty thousand newly minted political appointees without any protections from civil service or collective bargaining, sounds like a huge partisan strike force.
The Civil Service Act “exempts from civil service protections federal employees ‘whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character’.” The kind of employees that the administration plans to make Schedule F include any current civil service workers who supervise lawyers, people who implement or assist in developing policy, and more. “The provisions were broad enough to include many scientists, attorneys, regulators, public health experts, and others in senior roles.” Grantmaking jobs under this order are also seen as policy making, which enables many of the administration’s assaults. Supposedly the unilateral reclassification of these classifications would require a written request and justification sent by an agency to the Office of Personnel Management, which right now is like asking the devil himself to be the judge and jury, run by the architect of Project 2025, who has been directing the purge of federal workers with Elon Musk and DOGE. Of an early 140 requested, 136 were approved. QED, it is proven.
This is a unapparelled patronage play. I’d bet money before Trump leaves in 2028, there will be an executive order that returns huge numbers of Section F workers back into civil service protections, so that they are embedded in the federal service under a new administration.
Are there any protections? Wikipedia again reports “…appointees cannot be dismissed based on certain protected statuses, such as whistleblower status, partisan affiliation, or for claiming discrimination or harassment.[4][6] The 2025 version added language making failure to faithfully implement administration policies to be grounds for dismissal, while stating that appointees “are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration.”[2]
Tell the truth, that’s no protection at all. We already know from the daily resignations and firings that even when lawyers have told the truth in court, as they are required, they have been fired for not representing the “administration policies.”
There’s no good news in Schedule F.