The Office of Personnel Management on Friday appeared to give agencies wide latitude in determining which career federal employees should be converted to at-will political appointees under a controversial executive order signed by President Trump this week.
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order creating a new Schedule F within the excepted service for “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions,” pulling those jobs out of the traditional competitive hiring process and making it such that employees in those positions can be fired without cause, stripping workers of their civil service protections.
Outcry against the measure has been swift and nearly unanimous. Good government groups, federal employee unions and lawmakers accused the president of trying to sidestep more than a century of federal employment law and bring the spoils system back to agencies.
Despite the pushback, the Trump administration is moving swiftly to implement the president’s directive, with a Jan. 19 deadline for agencies to conduct a preliminary review of which jobs should be converted into the new job classification, one day before the next presidential inauguration. Acting OPM Director Michael Rigas offered “instructions” to agencies on how to move forward less than 48 hours after the order was published.
The memo highlights what it calls “guideposts” in the text of the order that agencies can use to determine the types of jobs that should have their civil service protections stripped from them. Those include “substantive participation in the advocacy for or development or formulation of policy,” supervision of attorneys, discretion in determining how an agency exercises its functions, involvement in developing regu ..
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