The White House has finished its review on a rule set to reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees in a new “Schedule Policy/Career” category that will make it easier to fire them, teeing up the regulation for final publication soon.
The regulation left the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs late Tuesday, typically the last step before it’s published in the Federal Register.
The Office of Personnel Management released a rule draft last April that called for shifting up to 50,000 federal workers into the new classification, accounting for about 2% of the US government workforce. President Donald Trump initially proposed the idea in 2020, near the end of his first term, at that time calling the new classification Schedule F. President Joe Biden scrapped it when he took office in January 2021.
The Trump administration says the new classification is needed to allow the government to more easily terminate individual employees based on poor job performance or unwillingness to execute the administration’s policy agenda. Critics including federal employee unions have said the rule undermines historic job protections for civil service and amounts to a loyalty test for federal workers, threatening the jobs of those who aren’t Trump supporters.
Publication of the final rule is likely to revive lawsuits challenging the policy, first filed in January 2025 in response to Trump’s related executive order.
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