On April 23, 2025, the Trump Administration unveiled a proposed rule, titled “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness of the Civil Service.” The goal is hard to contest: every American wants a government that is efficient, effective, and responsive. We, too, have long argued that agencies should be able to hire quickly and remove chronic underperformers so new programs can succeed. True accountability is essential for rebuilding public trust.

Unfortunately, the draft rule does not deliver on that promise. Instead, it revives Trump 1.0’s “Schedule F” as “Schedule Policy/Career” (aka, Schedule PC). While the preamble extols “performance,” the substance dismantles more than a century of bipartisan civil service protections, creating a fast-track to dismiss any federal employee, at any time, for any reason.

Rather than genuinely attempting to build a better government, Schedule PC revives an all-too-familiar tactic: cloaking partisan control over the civil service in the language of “efficiency,” and “fitness.” By enabling arbitrary dismissals, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) abandons a genuine opportunity to streamline and strengthen the current system. If Washington truly wants to distinguish high performers from poor ones, it will require thoughtful cooperation with Congress and civil society partners.

A regulation’s substance–not its name–is what matters

As an 1826 Congressional Committee on political patronage observed: “Names are nothing. The nature of a thing is in its substance.” So it is in evaluating Schedule PC. To judge its merits, we must examine what the rule actually does.

Schedule PC would: a) create a new schedule of excepted service employment, define that employment as being limited to ‘career’ (that is, non-political) appointees performing ‘policy-influencing’ work based on the President’s determination, and b) specifically exclude those employees from procedures granting excepted service employees the right to appeal their dismissal to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). 

Yet there are several critical factors that OPM fails to spell out. 

First, while OPM claims that ~50,000 positions (or about 2% of the federal workforce) may one day occupy such a category, nothing stops them (or any future President) from going much further. Current political appointees in Schedule C, for instance, perform a wide variety of ‘policy-influencing’ duties from clerical to management to strategic that mirror those performed by virtually all other employees. It is practically impossible to distinguish, then, from a federal employee that might be eligible for conversion and one that is not. In fact, during the first Trump Administration, the same Director now in office proposed moving nearly all of the Office of Management and Budget into an earlier version of this schedule, including obviously non-policy roles like office managers, IT support staff, and administrative assistants. Similarly, in April, the Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration indicated that his plan was to reclassify large portions of the agency into this new schedule, including in offices that handle benefits determinations and adjudicate administrative appeals–organizations that implement policy and law, like verifying disability claims, but do not influence it.

Second, employees reclassified to Schedule PC may be unable to appeal their classification to a court or independent entity. The President generally has very broad power to reclassify employees into the excepted service, and the courts will likely determine whether they can contest their removal from the competitive service. Although Roth v. Brownell (D.C. Circuit) preserved one attorney’s ”competitive service” rights after reclassification, today’s statutes differ enough that new litigation would be needed to settle the question. 

Third, following a reclassification, employees would be unable to appeal their dismissal–politically motivated or not– to a court for violation of the Merit Systems Principles. Normally, federal employees challenge adverse actions first at the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and may elect to pursue their appeals further to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals following the MSPB’s decision. But the Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling in United States v. Fausto held that employees who lack MSPB appeal rights are also barred from seeking judicial review. If that precedent continues to hold, Schedule PC employees would have no forum to appeal their adverse actions.

The potential for abuse is plain: If nearly any career job can be reclassified into Schedule PC, and neither the reclassification nor a subsequent firing can be appealed, a President could bypass Congress’s carefully crafted removal safeguards whenever they prove inconvenient. OPM’s assurance that employees need not “personally or politically support the current President,” offers little comfort; a rule without an enforcement mechanism is no rule at all.

Ghosts of the spoils system

Invoking “performance” or “fitness” to justify sweeping dismissal powers is not new; it has long been a way to expand partisan control over the federal workforce.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, described the need to drum up charges of “malversation or inherent disqualification” to fire Federalists in order to make room for Republican appointments and thus avoid popular outcry about partisanship in government. He significantly remade the civil service to favor Republicans using this mechanism. 

The 1820 Tenure in Office Act, which limited many federal jobs to four-year terms, was originally presented as a mechanism to remove poor performers without embarrassing them. It formed the core statutory basis for the Jacksonian spoils system eight years later where “offices, instead of being considered as public trusts, to be conferred on the deserving, were regarded as the spoils of victory, to be bestowed as rewards for partisan services, without respect to merit.” 

Richard Nixon’s team famously felt that it was untenable to keep referring to their management strategy as “‘politicizing the Executive Branch,’ and instead call[ed] it something like strengthening the Government responsiveness.” That scheme ended with a disgraced president and clamor for reform, ultimately serving as the impetus for the last major piece of civil service reform legislation in 1978.

In each case, presidents wrapped partisan aims in the language of efficiency but offered no real performance‑management improvements—precisely what OPM does now with Schedule PC.

Recognizing this danger, Congress has progressively restrained arbitrary removals, starting with the Lloyd-La Follette Act in 1912, through the Veterans Preference Act of 1944, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and the sharply-titled Civil Service Due Process Amendments of 1990. Together these laws give career civil servants the right to independent and judicial review of dismissals, safeguarding nonpartisan expertise and institutional stability. OPM cannot cast those protections aside whenever it finds them inconvenient. 

Fear is a poor management strategy

Fear of arbitrary dismissal stifles candor and undermines the intellectual integrity of government service delivery. 

In its 1874 report to President Ulysses S. Grant, as its own efforts were wound down by Congress, the first formal civil service commission recognized that:

The practice of making appointments and removals in controlling reference to personal and partisan influence and spoils, directly and powerfully tended, in every grade of life, to discourage and overawe honest and manly thought and speech….the courage and fidelity that might, under a better system, have disclosed and removed great abuses were overawed and silenced.

The report recounts how fearful civil servants were to go on the record to Congress about the goings on of their agencies for fear of reprisal, citing a Congressman who declared in 1868 that “[n]othing but the assurance of secrecy could procure us evidence of how the people were being plundered.”

Modern research confirms those nineteenth‑century insights. For instance, business literature has developed a robust evidence base showing that the ability of employees to speak up without fear of retribution directly contributes to improved team and firm performance. At the same time, studies on the impact of fear on work performance found that “fear is negatively and significantly related to job performance” among other undesirable organizational and firm outcomes. 

Evidence from across disciplines suggests that decision-making processes improve when a variety of viewpoints–including political–are considered. Employee attitudes and engagement are likewise linked to performance outcomes across time, organizations, industries, and locations. Federal data echoes these findings; results from the (now‑suspended) Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey link employee empowerment and open dialogue to higher agency effectiveness.

The Trump Administration has itself acknowledged this effect in a way when attempting to impose requirements for more ideological diversity at America’s universities. But, while it’s not clear that the Federal government can or should have any constitutional say in the intellectual life of academia, it should seek to create a robust discourse inside its own agencies and among its own employees. Hanging the threat of arbitrary dismissal over every career employee creates pressure that discourages dissenting opinions and degrades policy quality—precisely the outcome a high‑functioning civil service must avoid.

This effect is already playing out in real time at the Social Security Administration. For example, as the agency implemented a fraud detection scheme that resulted in significantly degraded service and failed to catch much fraud–a result that could have been foreseen had career staff felt comfortable speaking up. Instead, public reporting suggests that career staff stayed silent because “they were afraid to lose their jobs” and Social Security’s customers paid the price.

We can’t afford a government that goes bust

Private companies that silence dissent or starve their managers of information eventually fail and disappear. Conversely, government agencies don’t have that market discipline or kind of clear feedback loop. In fact, in the case of some agencies, implementation of a poorly considered or underbaked decision can be lethal, as it was in the case of NASA’s flawed management of the Challenger mission.

More recently, the chaotic rollout of the Administration’s January 2025 freeze on all federal financial assistance illustrates the need for careful decision making: the Administration claims that it didn’t intend to shut down Medicaid payments to states but the initial memo instructed agencies to do so. Without robust internal discourse, these apparently inadvertent impacts weren’t surfaced until after the fact. Yuval Levin, who served in the Bush Administration, described how a well-functioning policy process would have prevented this recently in an interview with Ezra Klein:

“You would have had a meeting at the Office of Management and Budget where you bring in the chiefs of staff or senior political appointees from the various cabinet departments and lay out for them: What’s in this memo? What is it going to mean for you? Are we shutting down the Medicaid payment portal? And somebody at OMB would have said: Well, no, this doesn’t affect payments to individuals. And the guy would have said: Well, those payments actually go to hospitals. Am I supposed to shut them down? It would have been a conversation. And they would have said: No, we’re not touching Medicaid.”

Anyone who has worked at OMB—under presidents of either party—will recognize this scenario. Reclassifying wide swaths of the federal workforce to employment at the pleasure of any President–including and especially OMB–would make this type of improvisational policymaking process the norm rather than an embarrassing exception. Ironically, this particular episode involved at least one long-term, career OMB civil servant dutifully carrying out the President’s orders–a fact which was not lost on at least one “senior GOP congressional aide” who observed to CNN that at the time that it “[k]inda runs counter to whole reason Trump’s guys are taking a blow torch to federal workers up and down agency organizational charts, doesn’t it?”

A better government is possible

Evidence from abroad and at home shows that nonpartisan, merit-based program management is essential to effective government. That is why Congress originally professionalized and protected the civil service in the late 1800s and steadily strengthened those safeguards throughout the 20th century. The era of “brawling politicians, broken-down hacks, and imbecile persons” should be a cautionary tale, not a blueprint.

If the Administration truly wants to tackle performance and misconduct problems, it should work with Congress and civil‑society experts—­not sidestep them. The Niskanen Center’s State Capacity Initiative, for example, is already convening bipartisan voices to craft pragmatic reforms. 

In the case of employee misconduct, Congress could articulate a set of standards for all federal employees that draws inspiration from the “10 Deadly Sins”– mandating removal for clearly defined violations (e.g., fraud, workplace harassment, overt partisanship on duty). Such a set of standards could clearly define what constitutes active, illegal resistance to the President’s agenda and what constitutes constructive differences of opinion among experts. Appeals would be sped up by focusing strictly on factual questions–was there an overt display of partisanship in the workplace? Did a prohibited offense actually occur?—with strict time limits for decisions.

Congress could also, for example, create a single, streamlined appeals process for all personnel cases by merging the MSPB and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) federal portfolios, limiting duplicative appeals. It could look to create more parity between unionized and nonunionized staff to limit parallel processing of cases or give career managers more flexibility to make decisions about their teams and programs. These are reforms that could be debated, in the open, in Congress.

Regarding performance management, appropriators could take a cue from the private sector by creating and experimenting with performance appraisal systems that actually differentiate low-performers from high-performers. Congress could adopt some of the pay-for-performance proposals that other administrations advocated for, allowing managers to incentivize their best employees financially and sustain performance over time. 

OPM could also reverse the closure of programs like the Federal Executive Institute that were designed to give managers the tools to direct work, coach employees, and solicit superior performances from their teams. Private companies spare little expense in training managers, which has proven to be a worthy investment. There is a hundred-year body of research on how to maximize talent management that the federal government could learn from.

There are many proven paths towards building a high-performance government; Schedule PC’s arbitrary firings are not among them. We have just one federal government, and the cost of mismanaging it is too high to gamble on untested, partisan shortcuts. 

OPM is still accepting public comments on its proposed regulation implementing Schedule PC until June 7th. Anyone can submit a comment here via Regulations.gov. For real-time visualization and analysis of the comments coming in, check out this tool built by Abigail Haddad and Michael Boyce.