Trump administration advances plan to strip job protections from career federal employees

An estimated 50,000 career federal employees will soon be easier to fire and will lose their ability to appeal disciplinary actions, in the Trump administration’s latest step to overhaul the federal workforce.

The Office of Personnel Management on Thursday issued a final rule on “Schedule Policy/Career” — a new classification of government employment that, once fully implemented, will exempt tens of thousands of federal employees in “policy-influencing” positions from long-standing civil service protections. The final rule will be published to the Federal Register on Friday.

Trump administration officials said the creation of Schedule Policy/Career aims to improve employee accountability and address “performance management challenges” across the federal workforce.

“It will give agencies the practical ability to separate employees who insert partisanship into their official duties, engage in corruption or otherwise fail to uphold merit principles,” OPM wrote in the final rule.

Schedule Policy/Career won’t take effect for at least 30 days, and it’s not yet clear which positions will be reclassified. Over the next month, agencies will compile lists of positions they intend to move into Schedule Policy/Career for the White House’s review. President Donald Trump, rather than OPM, will make the final call on which positions get reclassified.

“If people aren’t doing their jobs, if they aren’t showing up for work, if they’re not working hard on behalf of this president, they’re not welcome to work for him at all,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a press briefing Thursday.

In further guidance on the final rule, OPM told agencies to begin amending their workforce policies to reflect the administration’s changes.

Reclassified employees will lose long-standing job protections and be unable to appeal adverse actions taken against them to the Merit Systems Protection Board, such as a suspension, demotion or firing. They will also be unable to challenge their reclassification, OPM said.

OPM officials said impacted employees can still file in district court if they believe they faced discrimination or retaliation in a disciplinary action, but the final rule eliminates the government’s standard appeal process for those in Schedule Policy/Career.

“People are free to agree or disagree with any of the priorities that the president has. The only impact is if their disagreement leads them to then try to actively thwart or undermine the execution of those priorities. That behavior is not acceptable,” OPM Director Scott Kupor told reporters during a press conference Thursday. “You can’t run an organization if people are refusing to actually carry out the lawful objectives and orders of the administration.”

The administration is also altering the process for investigating allegations of whistleblower retaliation, in instances where federal employees come forward about wrongdoing in their agencies. Under OPM’s new final rule, individual agencies will now be responsible for setting up their own policies to investigate whistleblower retaliation — a task that has been historically reserved for the independent Office of Special Counsel.

OPM proposed regulations in April 2025 to begin the process of implementing Schedule Policy/Career. The proposal received over 40,000 public comments in 45 days, with about 94% of comments opposed to the regulation. About 5% of commenters supported the change, and 1% were neutral or mixed, OPM said.

The final rule, more than 250 pages long, addressed thousands of public comments from federal unions, employee organizations, good government groups and individual federal employees. Many argued that Schedule Policy/Career would politicize the federal workforce, damage the non-partisan nature of the career civil service, and undermine democracy.

“The proposed rule was unlawful, lacked evidence and was designed to sidestep the due process protections Congress guaranteed to career federal employees,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward. “The final rule fails to address those concerns. Instead, it allows the government to bypass existing civil service laws, strips employees of earned protections and opens the door to politically motivated firings and hirings, which have already occurred since President Trump took office.”

A coalition led by Democracy Forward is expected to sue the administration over the final rule. It follows an initial lawsuit against Trump’s day-one executive order calling for the creation of Schedule Policy/Career.

Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) vowed to push back against the administration’s efforts. The senator is also a co-sponsor on the Saving the Civil Service Act, a bill attempting to permanently secure federal job protections.

“They want to convert these positions that right now are based on your qualifications for the job, what you know, your experience — into positions where they can appoint political hacks to do the job, which directly undermines the whole idea behind the merit-based civil service,” Van Hollen said this week. “We will fight that. We’ll fight that in Congress. We’ll fight it in the courts, and we will fight it until we block it. And if they somehow get part of it through, we will work to repeal it.”

In the final rule, OPM pushed back against criticisms of Schedule Policy/Career. In response to those who argued the new classification violates the law, OPM argued that commenters “misunderstand the law.” And in response to those who said poor performance is not widespread and instead advocated for other reforms, OPM wrote that the commenters “miss a critical point.”

OPM argued that agencies report “great difficulty” in firing employees for misconduct or poor performance. The final rule also pointed to “widespread reports of career staff resistance to Trump administration policies.”

Noah Peters, a senior advisor at OPM, called the current process for disciplining federal employees “enormously lengthy.”

“We are inundated every day in the federal government, unfortunately, with misconduct and poor performance by civil servants — it’s a crisis,” Peters told reporters during a press conference Thursday. “[Agencies] shouldn’t have to go through layers of appeals and proceedings in order to fire someone or even discipline them.”

But critics of Schedule Policy/Career have argued in favor of alternative reforms to address poor performance and misconduct, such as better training for managers, flexibility in personnel systems and more support for leadership.

“No matter what the administration says, today’s action has nothing to do with restoring merit in federal employment,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. “This new designation can be used to remove expert career federal employees who place the law and service to the public ahead of blind loyalty and replace them with political supporters who will unquestioningly do the president’s bidding.”

Finalizing Schedule Policy/Career is the Trump administration’s latest move to alter federal workforce policies. The rule comes after President Donald Trump on his first day in office called for the revival of the policy previously known as Schedule F.

Trump had attempted a similar effort during his first term, although it was short-lived. A 2020 executive order went largely unimplemented, as it came in the last few months of Trump’s first term — and was quickly rescinded under the Biden administration.

OPM’s final rule this week also rescinds the Biden administration’s April 2024 regulations, which sought to prevent the resurgence of Schedule F by clarifying that “policy-influencing” roles are exclusively political roles and do not apply to career federal employees. The removal of the 2024 rule clears the way for agencies to begin reclassifying employees.

Like many federal unions and organizations, the American Federation of Government Employees warned that Schedule Policy/Career will increase politicization in the federal workforce, weaken protections for employees against leadership retaliation, and leave “essentially no procedural or appeal safeguards that have long protected the integrity of government operations.”

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email drew.friedman@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at drewfriedman.11

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