Trump’s Schedule F would have hurt govtech recruitment, OPM official says
If President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to reinstate an executive order that eases the president’s ability to fire federal workers, the government’s ability to recruit top talent for tech, IT, cyber and artificial intelligence positions will be harmed, according to a senior Biden administration official.
The 2020 executive order concerning the creation of Schedule F in the excepted service was issued just 13 days before the 2020 election and was overturned by an executive order from President Joe Biden to enshrine protections for the federal workforce in 2021. The Office of Personnel Management announced a final rule this April that aimed to reinforce protections and merit system principles for career civil servants.
“The people OPM is trying to recruit to join the federal government need to know that, too,” the Biden official said in an email to FedScoop, referring to workforce protections. “If they believe they’ll be constrained from offering their honest, informed professional input, and that they or their colleagues could be removed following a presidential transition based on their personal beliefs and not on their performance, this will reduce their desire to work for the government.”
They added: “Attracting top talent, including the best tech talent, to serve the American people means respecting and protecting their expertise and service, not undermining it.”
In a video on his campaign page from March 2023, Trump said that he “will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively.” Trump said that would be the first point of his plan to “dismantle the deep state” and “reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all.”
In OPM’s final rule, the agency stated that the implementation of Schedule F would have “sidestepped” statutory requirements that are embedded in the federal hiring process that is “intended to promote the objective of merit-based hiring decisions.”
This classification was put into place during the first Trump administration for those in excepted service positions, which is any civil service or federal position that is not in the competitive or the senior executive services, according to USAJobs. Excepted service agencies “set their own qualification requirements” and “are not subject to the appointment, pay and classification rules” within Title 5, United States Code, but are subject to veteran preference.
If fully implemented, Trump’s previous Schedule F executive order would have removed protections from significant portions of the federal workforce and turned the targeted civil servants into “at-will” employees, according to OPM’s final rule.
The Trump administration has pointed to a 2016 Merit Principles Survey that reported that fewer than 25% of federal employees believed that their agency addressed poor performers “effectively.”
According to Biden’s executive order, Schedule F was “not only unnecessary to the conditions of a good administration but also undermined the foundations of the civil service and its merit system principles. … Accordingly, to enhance the efficiency of the civil service and to promote good administration and systematic application of merit system principles, executive order 13957 is hereby revoked.”
