Federal employees face reality of Schedule Policy/Career

As the dust starts to settle after the finalization of Schedule Policy/Career, an air of anxiety is rising among reclassified federal employees.

Two federal employees, speaking to Federal News Network on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution, said they were shocked, angry and fearful to learn they were being stripped of their civil service protections. Their jobs, they said, have nothing to do with influencing policy.

“It caught me off guard. It really hit home,” one reclassified employee at the National Institutes of Health said in an interview. “I came in the next day and through conversations with my colleagues, I found out who was affected. We were all stunned. It has changed pretty much everything for me.”

Another reclassified employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoed these feelings.

“Suddenly, we were vulnerable. I haven’t planned for this financially, emotionally or professionally,” the employee said. “It hit me that I could lose the job I have worked so long for and that I loved.”

In the days following the Trump administration’s June 3 finalization of Schedule Policy/Career, close to 8,000 career federal employees received notice they had officially lost their civil service protections. President Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order to formalize the reclassifications set a seven-day deadline for agencies to inform all affected employees of the changes to their employment.

Across government, the reclassified federal employees can now be fired at-will, with no recourse for appealing adverse actions to the Merit Systems Protection Board. The employees also don’t have the ability to challenge their reclassifications into the new schedule, which is intended for career workers in “policy-influencing” roles.

Trump administration officials have 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.

A senior administration official last month told reporters, “As long as employees are performing their job duties in a competent, professional manner,” then reclassified federal employees “have nothing to be afraid of.”

“The core message here is that positions are being put in Schedule Policy/Career because the work matters — the work matters a lot for America,” the administration official said on a June 3 press call.

After learning of their loss of protections, however, some reclassified employees expressed growing fears about their job security and potential retribution from their agencies. Although many federal employees declined to speak with Federal News Network for this story because of fears of reprisal, three of them agreed to speak about their experiences and concerns on the condition that their names not be used.

The CDC employee said the thought now in the back of their mind of no longer having civil service protections has “seeped into everything.”

“Instead of being focused on my work, instead of being the best steward of taxpayer money, I’m now worried about if I will have a job,” the employee said. “Up until a few weeks ago, I could push back on methods, scientific rigor or interpretation of results without fear of losing my job. But this has been a distraction. Now I can’t say anything. What if I get fired?”

Employees who weren’t reclassified are also noticing an effect on workplace morale. A Department of Health and Human Services employee who was not personally reclassified, but whose supervisors were moved to Schedule Policy/Career, said they are watching closely for how things will change going forward.

“I don’t think that the people who are in those Schedule Policy/Career roles now are going to change any decisions that they would make, but it seems like they’re nervous about getting fired for standing up — or even for no reason at all,” the employee told Federal News Network.

In a statement to Federal News Network, an HHS spokesperson said, “under the Trump administration, HHS is committed to building a workforce that is accountable, mission-focused and responsive to the American people. These personnel actions support our efforts to deliver results for the American people and advance policies that address the nation’s chronic disease epidemic.”

But some reclassified employees also expressed concerns about what the loss of their job protections will mean for their agencies’ missions writ large.

“This threatens consistency, expertise and that mission-driven passion that makes us hop out of bed every morning,” the CDC employee said. “A lot of expertise that could be let go without due process, without another review – what if somebody just didn’t like me?”

The HHS employee said, “It changes the ecosystem in which we work.”

“Our managers and supervisors have been working so hard to protect us for the last year and a half so that we can continue to do the work. This is just one more hard thing put on their shoulders,” the HHS employee said. “For those of us who haven’t been reclassified, there’s a little bit of survivor’s guilt. But then also just the numbness of continuing to exist, continuing to try and do work and move forward.”

Since receiving notice of their Schedule Policy/Career reclassification, the NIH employee said they are now looking for other job opportunities. Some of their colleagues are beginning to do the same.

“When I came to NIH, I truly wanted this to be my last job, as I have really loved this job so much,” the employee said. “I’d still like to see if things can begin to change. But it seems like now, it doesn’t look like anything will change for the better.”

Reclassification pattern ‘hard to understand’

Following the executive order last month, the Schedule Policy/Career classification now includes federal positions like agency division leaders, chief agency officers and senior program managers. Many program managers, attorney advisors, program analysts and human resources specialists have also been converted.

According to the White House, about 97% of reclassified employees are either GS-15 or Senior-Level (SL) positions.

“In order to affect the policy priorities of the administration, we need to have people who are willing to and capable of carrying out directives,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said on the June 3 press call.

But Rob Shriver, managing director of Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong program, said he has heard from many reclassified federal employees who are frustrated and confused, with many saying their jobs are entirely unrelated to policy. There also have been “a lot of inconsistencies” in the types of positions reclassified across agencies, Shriver said.

“You won’t be able to find a similarly situated group of people that is, across all agencies, deemed to now be in Schedule Policy/Career,” Shriver, also former acting director of OPM during the Biden administration, said during a June 17 webinar hosted by the Partnership for Public Service. “It’s very hard to understand why your particular position has been classified this way, when you may very well know people that have jobs in other agencies — or even in your own agency — that are far closer to policy but that have not been reclassified.”

In an analysis of the reclassified positions, the Partnership for Public Service said the affected roles extend beyond only those that influence policy. For instance, many positions involved in legal, budget and HR work have been reclassified across government. Many independent boards and commissions are also being impacted by Schedule Policy/Career reclassifications.

“You have what you would expect — like supervisory or management-level GS employees that are not in the Senior Executive Service. But you also have some that raise questions — like some scientific positions that don’t have a clear nexus to policy, and a lot of HR professionals,” Mike Martinez, managing counsel at Civil Service Strong, said during the June 17 webinar.

One HHS employee told Federal News Network, “It feels like there isn’t a thought behind it. It’s just vindictiveness.”

By number, the agencies with the most reclassified positions are the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Treasury and Commerce. DoD alone accounts for 1,608 positions, or roughly one-third of the White House’s list.

“That’s in part because they are some of our larger agencies, but they also took a broader scope of what could be a Schedule P/C position,” Martinez said.

Some agencies with larger portions of reclassified employees have also seen high separations of career Senior Executive Service staffing since January 2025.

CDC, for instance, has lost nearly half of its career SES workforce — about 46%. The agency had 94 positions converted to Schedule P/C, making it the fourth-highest, by number, of all non-DoD agency subcomponents. CDC’s reclassifications come just behind U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Coast Guard and the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

CDC is also reclassifying many science-related positions, such as research biologists, epidemiologists and health scientists.

An HHS spokesperson told Federal News Network that agency positions are designated as Schedule Policy/Career “where appropriate based on the duties of the position.”

But one reclassified CDC employee said, “This isn’t surgical. This is just throwing a grenade at things.”

A big decision

At HHS, emails sent from the agency’s HR office to reclassified employees and obtained by Federal News Network notified workers in June that they were losing many of their job protections.

HHS also asked hundreds of employees to sign a form acknowledging their reclassification. The document, obtained by Federal News Network, showed that employees who signed the form would be confirming they understood their position was moved to the excepted service, and that they were now an at-will employee.

It also acknowledged their ineligibility for MSPB appeal rights, a loss of access to the Office of Special Counsel for filing allegations of prohibited personnel practices — and finally, confirming that all of the above are “conditions of my continued employment.”

As expected, the described changes align with OPM’s implementation guidance, which offers a closer look at what Schedule Policy/Career means for federal recruitment, adverse actions and other personnel policies. OPM has emphasized that the employment classification complies with due process requirements and preserves whistleblower protections.

“This change is not meant to cause anxiety, it’s about accountability,” OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover said in a statement to Federal News Network. “That’s what the American people deserve from the civil service.”

At HHS, reclassified employees were given a matter of days to return their signed document. The form includes a checkbox for the department’s HR office to fill in if the employee refuses.

The NIH employee said although they disagreed with the terms of the acknowledgment document, they felt pressured to sign the form anyway.

“We didn’t agree to what was in the letter, but we all felt if we didn’t sign it, we would all be subject to retribution,” the NIH employee said. “The letter was anxiety-provoking on its own.”

“People were swirling trying to figure out if they should sign it,” the CDC employee said. “There was a lot of confusion — are we safer if we do or don’t sign?”

Ultimately, the CDC employee made the difficult decision to sign the form.

“When I signed it, I cried,” they said. “I thought, haven’t we been through enough? We lost a third of our staff. We had a shooting, a shutdown. But I thought I might be putting myself at greater risk if I failed to respond; it would give them more reason to fire me.”

Across government, many federal employees were similarly grappling with the decision of whether or not to sign an acknowledgment form of their reclassifications, according to attorneys speaking during the June 17 webinar.

“The question on everybody’s minds is, if I sign this, am I giving up some rights that I have, or am I somehow accepting that this is legal?” said Suzanne Summerlin, a federal employment attorney and general counsel at Rise Up, a legal defense network for federal employees. “But signing it means you received it — it does not mean you agree to the information that you know is within it.”

It’s not entirely clear how agencies have responded to any reclassified employees who did not fill out the form.

“OPM’s own implementing guidelines do say that folks should not be punished for failing to sign that form. It directs agencies not to punish people for failing to sign that form,” Summerlin said. “However, agencies sometimes do what they do, regardless of what OPM is telling them to do — these days especially.”

In response to Federal News Network’s questions about HHS’s policies related to Schedule Policy/Career, a spokesperson said, “staffing decisions comply with applicable federal personnel laws and department policies.”

‘Zero loyalty tests’

On the June press call, Kupor told reporters there are “zero loyalty tests” in Schedule Policy/Career.

“It doesn’t matter what your political views are, but if you allow those views to interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism, obviously, for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at-will,” Kupor said. “This is exactly the way the system worked for a very long time under the Pendleton Act.”

But many others in the federal community — including nonprofit organizations, employee groups and federal unions — have warned that Schedule Policy/Career will have a chilling effect across the career federal workforce. Critics have raised concerns about the ability of agencies now to fire employees and replace them with political loyalists.

“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.”

Ron Sanders, who served in Trump’s first term as chairman of the Federal Salary Council, resigned from his position in 2020 in response the original Schedule F policy. But under the new Schedule Policy/Career, Sanders has suggested he is open to the idea, as long as career civil servants are not being required to support a president politically.

“While I am empathetic to employees who are anxious — and they should be anxious — they shouldn’t be wringing their hands over the worst case. They should just take a deep breath, wait and see what their agency does, and respond accordingly,” Sanders said in an interview. “Civil servants deserve due process. They deserve to be able to speak truth to power, privately, without any fear. I don’t think Schedule Policy/Career necessarily changes that. But at the end of the day, employees are required to follow the lawful orders of their boss.”

John Gibbs is director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank that published and organized Project 2025, a blueprint for a federal government overhaul written by more than 100 former Trump administration officials.

In an interview, Gibbs — who also served in the first Trump administration as a former principal deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development — said effectuating Schedule Policy/Career comes down to good management of the career federal workforce.

“If a manager is managing well, you won’t have employees who are afraid to speak up or push back. They will know that there is an environment where they can respectfully raise any concerns they have,” Gibbs said. “But if you have a member of the career workforce who refuses to do what they’re told, that is a problem. In those cases, management does have a right to take action.”

What comes next

Although there do not appear to be immediate plans underway, the list of reclassified Schedule Policy/Career positions could still expand. OPM originally estimated 50,000 federal employees would be put in the new schedule. But the White House’s June 3 orders converted fewer than 8,000 workers.

“We should be looking out for further movement,” Martinez said. “The initial groupings in the appendix, I think, were trying to highlight certain positions at a higher level. But it’s entirely possible we’ll see more reclassifications that go deeper into the GS scale to lower-level positions.”

Three lawsuits against the Trump administration are also challenging the legality of Schedule Policy/Career. The Government Accountability Project and the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE) amended their lawsuit last month to include arguments specifically against Trump’s June 3 executive order.

The two organizations, represented by Protect Democracy and Selendy Gay PLLC, allege that Schedule Policy/Career violates the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) and due process for federal employees, and intrudes on congressional powers.

Another legal challenge against Schedule Policy/Career comes from the National Treasury Employees Union. And a third lawsuit from several plaintiffs, including AFGE, argues that the classification unlawfully applies the CSRA’s narrow exceptions regarding job protections to career federal employees — when they were expressly intended only for political appointees.

Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for AFGE, said the thousands of reclassifications have a far greater impact than what may first meet the eye.

“A lot of the news is about making it easier to fire people, but it’s not about that — it’s about what you do as federal employees … It’s about their ability to carry out their duties to serve the American people in a nonpartisan way,” Sanghvi said in the June 17 webinar. “We’re fighting for your jobs because you care about what you do, you care about the American public, and we need this system to protect our democracy and the services that we all rely on.”

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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