OPM Issues Rule Protecting Civil Servants Against Future Schedule F Orders
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management released a final rule Thursday intended to clarify and reinforce protections for career civil servants and defend against future versions of former President Donald Trump’s Schedule F executive order (see 2010300048). “This final rule…
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honors our 2.2 million career civil servants, helping ensure that people are hired and fired based on merit and that they can carry out their duties based on their expertise and not political loyalty,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a news release. Trump’s Schedule F order, which was reversed in the first week of President Joe Biden’s administration, would have reclassified many career civil servants, making it easier to terminate them and transfer their positions to political appointees. Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party have announced detailed plans -- partially authored by FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr -- to make sweeping changes to federal agencies, including the FCC, during a second Trump term. Thursday’s final rule is aimed at preventing another Schedule F order, and clarifies that a career federal employee who has earned civil service protections retains them until the worker voluntarily waives them. The order also establishes a transparent, appealable process for changing which positions receive civil service protections. “With these regulations, President Biden’s administration has strengthened the guardrails around the merit-based civil service,” said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald in a release. “It will now be much harder for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for hand-picked partisan loyalists.” An “independent federal workforce ensures that our government works for all of us, not for one party or one person,” said Bitsy Skerry, regulatory policy associate for Public Citizen, in an emailed release. The final rule will be published in the Federal Register Tuesday, OPM said.