Public Service Recognition Week is May 4-10! The need to recognize the public servants who make up the federal work force is more crucial than ever this year, as civil servants continue to face bullying and threats to their livelihood by the very Administration they work for.
One of the most recent attempts to take away the rights of federal employees has come in the form of a Proposed Rule issued by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). If effected, the rule would make it easier to fire the thousands of civil servants who could be moved into a new employment category under “Schedule Policy/Career” (which was formerly proposed and referred to as “Schedule F”). OPM estimates that approximately 50,000 federal employees who are deemed by President Trump as being in policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions could be moved into Schedule Policy/Career. You can read the Proposed Rule at the following website: https://www.regulations.gov/document/OPM-2025-0004-0001
Under the Proposed Rule, federal employees hired or moved under Schedule Policy/Career would have no due process or appeal rights if they suffer a major adverse employment action. As acknowledged by OPM, they would be treated as at-will employees who can be fired for any reason, or no reason at all. This stripping away of rights is unprecedented, and is a clear diversion from the longstanding, tried-and-true principle that our federal government functions better with a workforce of career civil servants whose backgrounds, knowledge, training, and experience make them experts in their respective fields. Instead, the Proposed Rule would seemingly revert employees placed in Schedule Policy/Carrer to a Spoils System, where an employee’s worth is judged not on merit-based principles, but instead on political allegiance.
Federal employees are public servants who have voluntarily accepted positions that are subject to the rigorous salary caps imposed by the federal government as an employer. They do not work in public service for fame or fortune; rather, the stability and job security traditionally associated with government employment tend to be major draws for hard-working, high-performing individuals to work in civil service.
As noted by OPM, if the Proposed Rule is implemented, there will be no need for employees in Schedule Policy/Career jobs to serve a probationary or trial period, because, in essence, the entirety of their government career will be spent in a probationary period, in which they are constantly at risk of being terminated for no reason whatsoever, without any viable recourse. While the operation of government services has benefited greatly from career civil service employees who have become experts in their respective fields based on years of training and experience in their jobs, moving these employees to at-will employment categories will surely lead to a huge amount of turnover of many of the best and brightest civil servants. Employees in these positions will undoubtedly be constantly applying for and seeking other jobs that either afford them more job security or that pay higher salaries.
In addition to the foreseeable problems in recruiting and retaining high-performing individuals to these Schedule Policy/Career jobs, the act of moving jobs into a category in which the incumbents have no appeal or other due process rights will have the effect of removing vital accountability mechanisms that are necessary to ensuring merit-based hiring and firing actions among federal government employees. By its very nature, removing employees’ due process rights does not “improve accountability;” rather, it removes accountability.
Oddly, OPM’s Proposed Rule is titled: “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service.” However, by its very acknowledgment that it would take away appeal rights and convert employees in Schedule Policy/Career to an employment-at-will scheme, the rule itself would remove performance, accountability, and responsiveness measures currently in place for those employees. A more fitting title would thus be “Removing Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service.”
The comment period to comment on the Proposed Rule is open until May 23, 2025. Commenting is open to everyone, whether you are a federal employee or not. If you are interested in advocating for the livelihood of federal employees, one simple way to do so is by commenting your opposition to the Proposed Rule. Comments can be entered at the following website: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OPM-2025-0004-0001