Schedule F (renamed Schedule Policy/Career in the 2025 OPM final rule) is a federal job-classification category that strips merit-system protections from civil servants whose work involves policy-influencing duties. Employees reclassified into this schedule become at-will workers — the president, agency head, or a designated official can fire them without the appeal rights that career employees normally hold under Title 5.
President Trump created the category by Executive Order 13957 on October 21, 2020. President Biden revoked it on January 22, 2021 before significant implementation, and Trump restored and expanded it after returning to office in January 2025. The Office of Personnel Management's 2025 rulemaking covers tens of thousands of positions across virtually every federal agency.
The category collides with Lloyd-La Follette Act protections from 1912 and Pendleton Civil Service Act principles from 1883, both of which Congress passed to limit presidential authority to dismiss federal workers. Litigation by the National Treasury Employees Union and others has challenged whether the reclassification can apply to existing employees without violating those statutes.
Reclassifying federal workers as at-will employees gives any sitting president the power to remove inspectors, scientists, attorneys, and program managers without cause, the appeals process, or merit-based hiring for replacements — the same conditions that produced the spoils-system abuses Congress outlawed in 1883.
People often think Schedule F applies only to political appointees who already serve at the president's pleasure. In practice, it reaches career civil servants — career attorneys, career economists, career inspectors — and removes the protections that make their jobs distinct from political ones.
Reclassifying federal workers as at-will employees gives any sitting president the power to remove inspectors, scientists, attorneys, and program managers without cause, the appeals process, or merit-based hiring for replacements — the same conditions that produced the spoils-system abuses Congress outlawed in 1883.
People often think Schedule F applies only to political appointees who already serve at the president's pleasure. In practice, it reaches career civil servants — career attorneys, career economists, career inspectors — and removes the protections that make their jobs distinct from political ones.