Can Schedule F Save America?

What is Schedule F, and can Trump use it to declare war on the Federal bureaucracy, maybe parts of the deep state itself?

In October 2020, during the first administration, Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped firing protections from many civil servants. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category the executive order created (Schedules A–E already existed.) The administration created Schedule F based on language exempting certain positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress always understood the language in a gentlemanly way to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees, Schedule C, not civil servants.

It all makes more sense if you understand what the civil service is in practical terms. Simply put, there are basically three categories of federal government employees. There are political appointees, 7,000 of them, all listed in the “Plum Book,” who serve at the pleasure of the president (“at will”) and change with each administration. These might include the Secretary of State as well as the head of an obscure water board connected to some forgotten federal dam project. They are handed out as patronage or to ensure the president has his own people in “key” jobs, people who will loyally support his agenda and initiatives—his team, serving until he fires them or a new president is elected.

Next up are employees who are not appointed and are not civil servants but who hold their ranks and positions from administration to administration. The most obvious bunch are the uniformed military; the president does not appoint new generals and corporals when he assumes office. This category also includes the State Department’s Foreign Service, the career diplomats.

The largest category of Federal employees are the civil servants, the so-called rank and file of the government, literally 2 million million of them, 60 percent of whom work for the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. Civil servants were created by the 150-year-old merit-based civil service system, first established by the Pendleton Act of 1883, which ended the well-developed spoils and patronage system that proceeded it.

Earlier formats of government were all appointees, leading to massive corruption in the hiring process and incompetent partisans being appointed to what should have been key jobs. As a result, the mail did not get sorted properly and the tariffs were not collected correctly, except if by chance a competent person squeezed through the system. There was no way a president and his team could monitor employees at the day-to-day level, either to ensure their minimal competence or to protect them from arbitrary firing to clear the way for the nephew of someone more important.

Creating the civil service was a good idea in theory—protect the workers from politics, and make sure the mail gets sorted and the tariffs get collected. But fast forward to today and all sorts of employees, including many in organs like the National Security Council and the State Department, are now civil servants. Their protections against political interference have only grown stronger over the years, to the point where it is near impossible to fire one of them, even for cause. This leads to the legendary “lifetime jobs” most civil servants enjoy.

The problem is that some of those civil servants are in positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” which might see them oppose the president’s plans and initiatives (think civilian Alexander Vindman types.) They can block action relatively safely, protected as they are from being fired. Nobody voted for them; most people cannot name one of them. This is what Trump wants to change. He wants to be able to fire some of these servants (perhaps part of the deep state) at will. They would be “excepted service” employees under the new Schedule F. In addition to Trump’s first term nascent attempt, this has been tried before; an effort by President Nixon to exert “political control” over the federal bureaucracy failed. Schedule F proponents seek to implement the proposal through legal means.

“Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,” Trump said last year. “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.”

The Republican party’s platform makes similar claims toward removing civil servants deemed resistant of the president’s policies: “We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of government to unjustly prosecute their political opponents. We will declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees.” Independent of the Party and Trump, the now disavowed Project 2025 advocates for much of the same things, backed up by a database of some 20,000 people whom it feels might fill the newly-opened former civil service jobs. The Project is not kidding around as to its goal with Schedule F—the aim is “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

How many employees are we talking about out of the 2 million civil servants? A drop in the bucket. One Trump official who worked on Schedule F estimated it could apply to some 50,000 federal workers. Some Trump allies think it would not be necessary to fire anywhere near that many workers because firing a few would produce the desired “behavior change.” But other former Trump officials’ comments and actions led one professor to conclude that the 50,000 figure “is probably a floor rather than a ceiling.”

One can imagine what opponents of Schedule F are saying. The plan would completely transform the way in which “accountability works in the federal government, but to be able to do it with the full consent of law in a way that the Nixon administration never had,” said Don Kettl of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a co-founder of a group opposed to Schedule F. “It would remove all of the political, constitutional, and legal checks that the system current has. It’s worth thinking about how we might try to improve the responsiveness and accountability of the federal government, but is the fix an effort to try to politicize it?” The fear is that Trump unleashed could scramble the federal government, opening needed positions and not filling them, or filling them with patrons and returning the system to its bad old days when the government’s business was just not getting done properly.

Former federal executives warn Schedule F and conversion of tens of thousands of federal employees into at-will political appointees could harm the nation’s security posture. Others say it will hurt Federal recruiting efforts. “This change would not just hinder government efficiency, it would also be disastrous for the American people, draining the federal government of institutional knowledge, expertise, and continuity. It would slow down services, make us less prepared for when disaster strikes, and erode public trust in government,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Biden administration took steps to try to make it harder for a future administration to reinstate Schedule F, including publishing new regulations barring federal employees from losing their civil service protections due to an involuntary job reclassification. These regulations will have to be rescinded, which eliminates any chance of implementing Schedule F on Day One. The change would also be challenged in court, although it is unlikely to be blocked. “It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions, which at that point, even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice,” said Kettl. But with a few breaks and given enough time, Schedule F is difficult but doable. And badly needed.