Trump signed EO 14171 reinstating Schedule F, stripping civil service protections from policy-influencing federal employees

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14171, "Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce," immediately reinstating Executive Order 13957 — the "Schedule F" order from his first term that President Biden had revoked in January 2021. Renamed "Schedule Policy/Career," the reclassification applies to career federal employees in "confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating" positions, moving them from the competitive service — which carries full civil service protections and Merit Systems Protection Board appeal rights — into an excepted-service category where they can be removed at will. The order listed "subversion of Presidential directives" as an explicit ground for removal, directly tying continued employment to political compliance. OPM was directed to rescind the Biden-era rule (89 Fed. Reg. 24982, April 9, 2024) that had restored affected employees' protections.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was enacted specifically to prevent political appointees from treating career staff as at-will employees, establishing an independent Merit Systems Protection Board and codifying just-cause removal standards precisely to insulate government expertise from partisan purges. EO 14171 circumvented that structure by reclassifying covered employees outside the competitive service, bypassing the legislative process that would be required to formally alter the CSRA. OPM estimated approximately 50,000 positions would ultimately be eligible for reclassification under Schedule Policy/Career.

In February 2026, OPM published a final rule implementing the Schedule Policy/Career framework. On June 3, 2026, Trump signed a separate executive order moving approximately 8,000 specific positions into the new category — the first large-scale reclassification under the framework established by EO 14171. Federal employee unions including AFGE, AFSCME, and the AFL-CIO filed lawsuits challenging the OPM rulemaking on Administrative Procedure Act and due-process grounds, with litigation pending as of mid-2026.