Broad Categories Of Government Workers Eligible To Lose Civil Service Protections, Trump HR Chief Says

A new memo from the Office of Personnel Management lays out descriptions for jobs that could be removed from the “competitive” service.

A memo from the Trump administration’s top human resources official Monday laid out expansive descriptions of workers who could be stripped of civil service protections this year.

The memo concerns a broad new category of federal workers that could be removed from the so-called “competitive service” and exempted from protections against “adverse actions” like being fired or suspended. These employees would be eligible to be transferred into “Schedule Policy/Career,” which was previously known as “Schedule F.”

According to an executive order President Donald Trump issued in 2020 — and reissued, with some changes, after taking office last week — this new “schedule” of workers will include people in “policy-influencing positions,” defined as “positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”

And according to an interim guidance memo sent Monday by Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, the Trump administration thinks this description could fit a whole lot of government workers.

In a bulleted list, Ezell wrote that agencies should consider “rescheduling” positions involved in, among other things, “directing the work of an organizational unit,” “being held accountable for the success of one or more specific programs or projects,” “substantive participation and discretionary authority in agency grantmaking,” including “evaluation of grant applications,” and “publicly advocating for the policies of the agency or the administration, including before the news media or on social media.”