The bill would “prevent future administrations from creating new employee classifications in order to hire more political loyalists and fire experts,” sponsors said in a statement. Image: Rob Wilson/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffCompanion bills (HR-1002 and S-399) to prevent a future excepted service Schedule F have been offered in both the House and Senate, a continuation of an effort from the prior Congress.
The measure, titled the Saving the Civil Service Act, continues a Democratic effort to head off the potential return of a short-lived Trump administration policy that would have caused agencies to shift potentially tens of thousands of competitive service positions involved with making or carrying out policy into that new category. As such, they would have lost many of their career protections and the positions could have been filled without competition.
Agencies took only limited actions toward carrying out the late-2020 Trump administration executive order in the several months it was in effect before President Biden revoked it as one of his first actions on taking office.
There is virtually no chance of such a policy returning during the remainder of Biden’s presidency. However, Trump—who has already declared his candidacy for 2024—and other Republicans have made reinstating the order a priority for a future GOP administration.
The bill would “prevent future administrations from creating new employee classifications in order to hire more political loyalists and fire experts,” sponsors said in a statement. Specifically, it would limit the excepted service to the currently existing five categories and further would place new limits on shifting positions among those categories.
However, with Republicans in control of the House during the present Congress, the new bill faces similarly long odds, needing to gain enough support from individual Republicans in both the House and Senate to overcome the party’s general position against it.
The initial sponsors on the Senate side are all Democrats, while one of the initial sponsors on the House side is a Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
In passing a similar bill last year a half-dozen Republicans—several of whom are no longer in Congress—had joined what was then the Democratic majority in the House. The House also included similar language in the DoD authorization bill. However, the Senate never took up the individual bill and the language in the defense bill was dropped as part of the final House-Senate agreement on that bill before its passage.
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