University of Kwazulu-Natal

Proposed Opm Rule Would Change Procedures To Terminate Career Federal

Bonisiwe Shabane
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proposed opm rule would change procedures to terminate career federal

On May 23, 2025, the public commentary window ended for a proposed Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rule that would modify the procedures for terminating career federal employees, also known as civil servants. The OPM proposed the rule on April 23. The proposed “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service” rule would reclassify policy-influencing positions under a Schedule Policy/Career group of employees created by a January 20, 2025, executive order. Reclassifying these officials’ positions as Schedule Policy/Career (formerly known as Schedule F) would remove civil service protections and would allow them to be terminated more easily than their current competitive service status legally allows. Supporters of this move argue that it is necessary to ensure accountability when civil servants carry out presidential directives, while opponents have said that the move could politicize the civil service. On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump (R) signed Executive Order 14171, entitled “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.” This executive order reinstated the Schedule F classification established by the previous...

E.O. 13957 was revoked on January 22, 2021, by President Joseph Biden’s (D) Executive Order 14033, before any federal employees were formally reclassified. President Trump’s January 20 order revoked the Biden order in turn, and reinstated Trump’s October 2020 order while renaming Schedule F to Schedule Policy/Career. As reported by the Pew Research Center, 67.3% of the federal workforce are in competitive service positions, which require procedural legal protections for employees’ jobs such as protection from discrimination and protection from removal. Proposed Schedule Policy/Career positions would be classified as excepted from these procedural requirements, similar to senior political appointees, and this change would allow the President to decide if the position should be terminated. UPDATE: This post was updated on April 24, 2025, to include a link to comment on OPM’s proposed rule.

In a long-anticipated development, OPM published its proposed rule to implement Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F, and to rescind regulations issued by the Biden administration to protect civil servants. What does this mean for federal workers? On Friday, April 18, the Office of Personnel Management announced that it would soon be publishing a proposed rule in the federal register titled “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service.” The... Comments can be made online at: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OPM-2025-0004-0001 The proposed rule closely follows an executive order issued by President Trump on inauguration day, which we discuss here. The main goal of the rule is to deny job protections to a much larger number of federal employees than at any other time since 1883.

Under the rule, at least tens of thousands more federal employees will likely be designated “at will,” meaning that they can be fired for no reason at all, without any right to appeal. Due to aggressive automated scraping of FederalRegister.gov and eCFR.gov, programmatic access to these sites is limited to access to our extensive developer APIs. If you are human user receiving this message, we can add your IP address to a set of IPs that can access FederalRegister.gov & eCFR.gov; complete the CAPTCHA (bot test) below and click "Request... This process will be necessary for each IP address you wish to access the site from, requests are valid for approximately one quarter (three months) after which the process may need to be repeated. An official website of the United States government. If you want to request a wider IP range, first request access for your current IP, and then use the "Site Feedback" button found in the lower left-hand side to make the request.

RESTORING ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE: Today, President Donald J. Trump’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) took action to implement President Trump’s Executive Action titled “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.” FIXING A BROKEN SYSTEM: The proposed rule tackles systemic issues in federal workforce accountability, addressing unaccountable, policy-determining federal employees who put their own interests ahead of the American people’s. DRAINING THE SWAMP: President Trump is delivering on his promise to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our government from Washington corruption. President Trump vowed on the campaign trail to reinstate this Executive Order, a promise he kept on his first day returning to office. Our government depends on objective, evidence-based, information to make the best policy.

From national defense to our everyday quality of life, Americans depend on highly specialized government professionals doing research, gathering data, analyzing results, and delivering services. We depend on people doing this work, making the best decisions they can, without fear or favor. That objectivity is key to their work. Right now there’s a threat to government professionals’ ability to do their jobs: The Proposed Rule on Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service, also known as Schedule Policy/Career. If adopted, this rule will change the employment relationship for a significant number of federal employees, depending on the agencies’ reclassification determinations. It changes them to “at will” employees, stripping them of civil service protections if they are in positions that affect policy.

On the surface, changing a federal employee’s status seems like simply an administrative change. But, the reason Americans want federal employees with career longevity isn’t just for all their accumulated knowledge and expertise; it is to insulate our system from the shocks and cold-starts that come with constant... When we introduce “at-will” employment to government employees, we also introduce the potential for environments where people are more concerned about self-preservation than service to others. What makes this problematic, and even potentially dangerous, is that the Proposed Rule has few guidelines for agencies to determine what positions “influence policy” and therefore go into this new schedule. “Schedule Policy/Career” (“Schedule PC”) rescinds civil servant employment protections, placing unnecessary and undesirable political pressure on highly specialized scientific and technical career professionals serving in government. Assigning federal employees to this status could foster an environment of fear when reporting data that is viewed as politically incorrect or inconvenient.

For these reasons FAS believes this could have an outsized, negative impact on scientific and technical research in particular. Read our full policy statement here; we encourage citizens to submit public comment here through May 23rd, when the window for comment closes. How might a change like this proposed rule make it difficult to keep, or even do, one’s job? How might this be damaging not to just one person, but to our government’s capacity to pursue necessary scientific and technical research?

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