The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a final rule creating the excepted service “Schedule Policy/Career” (Schedule P/C) category, first introduced as Schedule F in October 2020. FMA has loudly criticized this action since 2020, and has consistently supported legislative attempts to prevent its return. Most recently, FMA submitted comments in opposition of this rulemaking during the comment period. A full 94 percent of the more than 40,000 comments submitted to the rulemaking were in opposition.

As he promised on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) on the first day of his second term reinstating Schedule F as Schedule P/C. It is a federal job classification for positions deemed “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition.” Career civil servants reclassified into this schedule will essentially be “at-will” employees, stripped of statutory procedural rights. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), who published the rule pursuant to the new EO, expects 50,000 feds will be impacted, while others believe the number of feds could be much higher.

In January 2026, the White House told agencies to further widen considerations for roles affected by Schedule P/C, including:

• Roles directing programs, projects, or organizational units and shaping policy goals.
• Positions with authority to bind the agency to decisions or actions.
• Jobs exercising delegated discretionary authority from the agency head.
• Roles with substantive discretion in grant-making or funding decisions.
• Positions advocating agency or administration policies to Congress, other governments, or budget officials.
• Roles publicly promoting agency or administration policies, including media or social media.
• Any position formally defined as policy-making, policy-determining, or policy-advocating.

In FMA’s formal comments, we noted the association’s strong support for strengthening management in the federal workforce, “including the stated goals of the rule: improving performance, accountability and responsiveness in the civil service.” We cited multiple examples of efforts President Trump pushed in his first term that FMA supported, including minimizing the burden on supervisors when addressing poor performers, calibrating and tailoring the penalty for misconduct based on facts and circumstances, calibrating disciplinary action, and giving agencies discretion to take into account an employee’s past misconduct when taking disciplinary action.

FMA objects to Schedule Policy/Career as a unilateral, short-sighted overhaul approach to the workforce that overturns a century and a half of precedent from the Supreme Court and Congress. As the rule itself points out, more than fifty years ago the Supreme Court held that a federal employee has a constitutional due process interest in continued federal employment. And Congress has consistently legislated on this issue, most notably with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and subsequent amendments.

“Both Congress and the administration should endeavor to maintain America’s non-political civil service,” we argued. “The unacceptable elimination of due process for affected federal employees leaves feds solely at the whim of politicians – intolerable under any administration, Democratic or Republican. A hallmark of America’s civil service is the foundational, fundamental understanding that federal employees swear an oath to the Constitution and provide services to all Americans, regardless of political party. The federal government cannot function effectively without this nonpolitical civil service capable of preserving institutional memory and competence across administrations.”

The rule furthering Schedule Policy/Career cites a handful of news stories of federal employees resisting or undermining the policy agenda of the administration as a justification for the action. We at FMA agree that resisting or undermining a duly-elected President’s policy agenda is unacceptable. It is also already against the law. Insubordination and failure to comply with a lawful order or policy can and should be punished, up to and including termination. Misconduct, such as unauthorized use of government property, failure to safeguard classified or sensitive materials, providing false information, misuse of position, and ignoring or defying direct orders are prohibited. We view Schedule Policy/Career as a solution in search of a problem.

We cited a December 2016 report from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) titled Addressing Misconduct in the Federal Civil Service: Management Perspectives, which found “supervisors want the process of taking adverse actions to be easier while keeping employee protections.” The report states, “supervisors overwhelmingly want a merit-based system where employees are protected from managers who either make mistakes or act in bad faith.”

Among the other concerns we outlined, we gave significant weight to the negative impact on recruitment and retention to the federal workforce, and the likely deterioration of the services Americans rely on if Schedule Policy/Career is implemented.

The now-finalized rule itself states:

“It is true that adverse action procedures and appeals give federal employees greater job security than exist in most other jobs. To the extent that workers value this job security, Schedule Policy/Career's removal of adverse action procedures would reduce the relative value of the total federal compensation package. However, OPM no longer believes that this change will significantly impair federal recruitment or hiring.”

The rule then proceeds to outline the “more generous” benefits package federal employees enjoy. However, we noted the significant cuts to benefits Congress was considering at the time as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill. We are pleased that FMA successfully prevented these egregious cuts.

“The proposed rule explicitly says it would reduce the value of the total federal compensation package, while Congress simultaneously works to reduce federal employee retirement benefits,” we wrote. “Meanwhile, federal pay has not kept pace with inflation and the Federal Salary Council reported in November 2024 that federal workers earn nearly 25 percent less than their private sector counterparts. Reducing job security and benefits, combined with a freeze in pay that will further widen the gap between the private sector and the civil service, is a recipe for disaster for the American taxpayers.”

FMA will continue to advocate strongly against Schedule Policy/Career and will support legal efforts to eliminate the new rule.