President Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 3 transferring roughly 8,000 career federal positions into the newly created Schedule Policy/Career classification.
The move makes it easier for the Trump administration to fire employees in policy-making positions who are not carrying out their job duties effectively.
The order follows a final rule published by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in February that officially established Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service.
“This is very much about accountability,” OPM Director Scott Kupor told reporters during a press briefing on Wednesday. “In order to affect the policy priorities of the administration, we need to have people who are in these senior policy-making [roles] willing to and capable of carrying out those directives.”
Kupor explained that if federal employees allow their political views to interfere with their willingness to conduct “lawful orders and policy directives” of the administration, then the executive order provides a mechanism for agencies to remove those employees at will.
A senior administration official emphasized that the order explicitly states that hires and terminations are not to be based on an employee’s personal political affiliation, but on their job performance and effectiveness in conducting the law and the president’s agenda.
“The president has required agencies to stand up enforcement procedures to see to it that that’s carried out,” the official said.
Under the order, the hiring process for filling these positions will not change.
The senior administration official added that the order will cover just under 8,000 positions across the executive branch that are almost exclusively GS-15 or senior-level positions. GS-15 is the highest non-executive grade in the General Schedule.
“Ninety-seven percent of these positions are at the GS-15 level or higher,” the official told reporters. The official said that there are a small number of GS-14 and GS-13 positions, most of which are in the Office of Management and Budget.
While there is a range of positions that are included in Schedule Policy/Career, they include agency subcomponent leaders and chief agency officers, such as chief information officers (CIOs). Other positions include deputies, chiefs of staff, program managers, regulation writers, attorneys involved in setting agency policies, senior officials in agency policy offices, and policy advisors.
More broadly speaking, the senior administration official said that the classification also includes employees responsible for setting internal administrative policy and operations policy, such as “people involved in determining logistics for the agency or setting cybersecurity policy.”
“We’ve also been very explicit that this is not a tool for doing significant reductions in force or layoffs, so that, again, these are just individuals who will be evaluated based on their own merit,” Kupor said. “This cannot be a tool to remove large swaths of individuals from government.”
Initially, in its final rule, OPM estimated that approximately 50,000 positions would be moved or transferred into Schedule Policy/Career.
A senior administration official said the president decided to move forward with 8,000 positions to focus on the most senior policy-making career officials. There are no plans to add additional positions to Schedule Policy/Career at this time.
A classification years in the making
The new classification revives a concept first introduced by Trump in an October 2020 executive order that created “Schedule F,” which similarly would have made it easier to fire federal employees in policy-making positions.
That order was never implemented and was canceled by former President Joe Biden shortly after he took office in 2021, with Biden arguing it would provide “a pathway to burrow political appointees into the civil service.”
Under the Biden administration, OPM issued a final rule in April 2024 that reinforced long-standing civil service protections and merit system principles. That rule made it more difficult, though not impossible, to reestablish a Schedule F-type framework.
Last year, Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office to reinstate the Schedule F policy, renaming it “Schedule Policy/Career.”
“There’s a common criticism that these are all going to be made political appointments,” the senior administration official told reporters today.
However, the official said that the Trump administration is trying to dispel this belief “both through the name itself, which indicates that these remain career positions, and then the fact that the hiring procedures are not going to change.”