OPM recently proposed rules to restrict the movement of employees between the competitive service and the excepted service. Image: Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffA vote during House consideration of a general government spending bill revealed some opposition among members of the Republican majority there to a potential return during a future GOP administration of an excepted service Schedule F.
Fifteen Republicans joined all 206 Democrats in voting against a smoother path to implementing a Schedule F order. They did so by rejecting an amendment that would have stopped OPM from putting in place rules to make it harder to reinstate the Trump administration policy – one President Biden had quickly overrode on taking office.
The House has held up a vote on the full bill because of a dispute over an abortion-related provision affecting the District of Columbia opposed by a group of more moderate Republicans, whose votes would be needed for passage.
A late-2020 executive order required agencies to identify competitive service employees involved with making or carrying out policy and shift them into a new excepted service Schedule F category—where they would lose most of their civil service protections, and positions could be filled without competition. Several Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, have said that if elected next year they would reinstate that policy, affecting an estimated 50,000 employees.
OPM recently proposed rules to restrict the movement of employees between the competitive service and the excepted service, effectively barring reviving Schedule F with a new executive order. A future administration however could in turn go through a rule-making process to take those rules off the books, although that would take time—during which legal challenges no doubt would be filed.
A recent letter from more than a dozen federal employee unions urged that the rules be finalized promptly, as did a letter from nearly two dozen Democratic House and Senate members.
During House voting on the general government spending bill, Rep. Andrew Ogles, R-Tenn., offered an amendment to block the proposed rules, using the same argument that Trump and other supporters of Schedule F have used. He said the rules would “threaten a President’s ability to ensure that the executive branch is appropriately staffed to carry out his or her policies . . . We must allow an administration the flexibility to decide that certain people are a bad fit for certain key roles and to let them transfer people so that the role can be filled with someone better suited for it.”
However, Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., said that a return of Schedule F would mean “gutting civil service protection that has been in place since the 1880s. Congress created by statute a politics-free professional cadre of federal employment to protect federal employees and the public from the previous corrupt spoil system and political interference of President after President, irrespective of party. Going back to that system is an enormous step backward and a huge disservice to federal employees and to the public they serve and we serve.”
In the prior Congress with Democrats in control of both chambers, the House several times passed language with support of about a half-dozen Republicans, to put a ban against a new Schedule F in law—which would be an even higher hurdle for a future administration to overcome than the proposed rules.
Some Democrats in Congress including Connolly have proposed similar language, although that has not come to a vote. The latest House vote however could signal a renewed effort to change the law, not just the regulations.
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