House leaders this year have blocked Democrats from offering an anti-Schedule F amendment, but Senate Democrats, for now still in control in that chamber, have raised the prospect of adding such an amendment to their version of the annual DoD authorization measure. Image: Vivvi Smak/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe effort by the Biden administration and congressional Democrats to change the law to block the return of Schedule F is down to its last—and very slim—chances as Congress wraps up the legislative year in post-election session projected to end December 20.
President-elect Trump is expected to promptly act to restore that provision, created by his late-2020 executive order that the Biden administration quickly revoked, to require agencies to identify competitive service positions involved with advising on, writing or carrying out policy and shift them into the excepted service. That would effectively turn such positions into political appointees by allowing them to be filled without competition and by depriving those in them of most civil service protections.
Officials of the first Trump administration estimated that some 50,000 jobs could be involved but federal employee organizations and others have said the figure could go much higher, given how expansively the few agencies that actively worked to carry out the short-lived order defined the potentially affected positions.
OPM earlier this year finalized rules aimed at preventing such conversions, while guaranteeing that employees would retain their rights in any conversion to the excepted service of other types of competitive service positions. It is uncertain how serious a barrier those rules would be to the incoming Trump administration, though, since it could replace those rules with a new set of its own. Legal challenges are virtually certain to follow.
The White House and Capitol Hill Democrats have been working to create an even higher barrier by banning Schedule F in law, which would require another revision of law to reinstate it. They came close several times during the first two years of the Biden administration when they also controlled Congress, but the effort became a longshot with Republican control of the House in 2023-2024.
House leaders this year have blocked Democrats from offering an anti-Schedule F amendment, but Senate Democrats, for now still in control in that chamber, have raised the prospect of adding such an amendment to their version of the annual DoD authorization measure. That would appear to hold the best prospects, since the defense spending bill is an annual “must-pass” measure, but would require the GOP-led House to agree to it in a conference.
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