Schedule F Is Really a Fight Over Who Answers to the Voters

Imagine a company where the chief executive is hired by the shareholders, fired by the shareholders, and blamed by the shareholders for everything, but cannot decide who in the building sets the price of the product. That company would not last a quarter. Washington has run that way for generations, and when a President tries to change it, the coverage treats the attempt as a coup against the filing cabinet.

Schedule F is the latest name for that fight. The name is awkward, the paperwork is dull, and the stakes are not dull at all. The question underneath is the oldest one in our constitutional order: who governs, and who answers for it?

Define the terms first

A federal job is in one of two services. The competitive service is the one most people picture: you apply, you are ranked against others on merit, you are hired, and after a probationary period you hold strong protections against removal. Title 5 of the U.S. Code lays out the process for firing a competitive-service employee, including notice, a chance to respond, and an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The excepted service is made up of jobs Congress or the President has taken out of the competitive process because open competition does not suit them. It is a large and mixed category. It includes lawyers at the Justice Department, many positions in the intelligence agencies, and the political appointees who staff a President's team.

Inside the excepted service there are named schedules. Schedule C covers positions of a confidential or policy-determining character, the aides and advisers who work directly for a political appointee, and it has existed since the 1950s. Its holders serve at the pleasure of the appointing officer. Nobody thinks a cabinet secretary's speechwriter should have tenure.

Schedule F was a new schedule, created by Executive Order 13957 of October 2020, titled "Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service." It would have covered career employees in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character. These employees would stay career, not political, and would not be chosen by party. They would, however, serve without the competitive-service removal protections. The wider case for control by the voters is in Conservatives Are Not Against Government, We Are Against Rule by Bureau. President Biden revoked the order on January 22, 2021, in an order on protecting the federal workforce, before any positions had been moved into it. President Trump revived the idea in January 2025, and the Office of Personnel Management has since moved it through rulemaking under the name Schedule Policy/Career.

That is the whole mechanical story. The rest is argument.

The strongest case against it

I will not pretend the critics have nothing, so let me state their case in words they would sign.

First, they say, the Pendleton Act of 1883 ended the spoils system for a reason. Before it, jobs were rewards for political service and a new administration meant a purge. The long story of the cure is in The Spoils System Was Bad, and the Cure Built a Workforce Voters Cannot Reach. Garfield was shot in 1881 by a disappointed office-seeker, and Congress answered with a merit system. Anything that makes career jobs easier to fire risks bringing the spoils back.

Second, they say, expertise is not partisan. A nuclear safety inspector, an actuary at the Social Security Administration and a Customs officer who knows what a forged bill of lading looks like cannot be replaced by someone who read the manual on the way in. Fire them for the wrong reasons and the government forgets how to do things.

Third, they say, the category is too elastic. "Policy-influencing" can be stretched to cover tens of thousands of positions, and a vague test in the hands of any administration invites abuse. A future President of either party could use the same tool against officials he dislikes.

Fourth, they say, the protections are not an obstacle to democratic control but a guard against a President ordering employees to break the law, and employees who fear for their jobs will not report waste or wrongdoing.

Those are serious points. Here is the answer.

The numbered argument

One. The Constitution vests the executive power in one person. Article II, Section 1 begins: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Not in a council. Not in the civil service. Not in a commission of experts. In a President, who is elected by the whole nation every four years and who can be turned out of office at the polls or removed by impeachment.

Two. That power comes with a duty, and the duty requires the means. Article II, Section 3 says the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." You cannot be responsible for faithful execution of laws that you cannot direct anyone to execute. A duty without authority is a trap, and the Founders knew it. Federalist 70 argued for a single executive and warned that plurality in the executive tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility. When many hands share a decision, blame disperses. When one person owns the decision, voters know whom to judge.

Three. The Founders expected the President to control his subordinates. The Decision of 1789, the First Congress's debate on the power to remove the head of the new Department of Foreign Affairs, has long been read, though scholars dispute it, as favoring presidential removal, with Madison among those arguing that the executive power must include the power to remove the officers who help execute the laws. The Supreme Court revisited the question in Myers v. United States in 1926, in an opinion by Chief Justice Taft, a former President, and held that the President could remove a postmaster without the Senate's consent. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2020, the Court reaffirmed the principle that the President's removal power over those who wield executive power on his behalf is the rule, with narrow exceptions. The idea that a President must be able to direct the executive branch is not a Trump invention. It is the default reading of the text.

Four. The civil service is an employee protection, not a fourth branch. The merit system answers a real problem, the spoils. But what it protects is a person's right not to be fired for being in the wrong party or for refusing a bribe. It does not give career employees a veto over a President's policy. A worker who thinks a lawful order is wrong can say so, can resign, can use the channels Congress provides for whistleblowers. He cannot decide that the election was a misunderstanding.

Five. The line is policy, not paperwork. Here is where honest critics are right to worry, and where conservatives should insist on discipline. The test in Schedule F's design is functional: positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character. A person who processes claims at a regional office, inspects a plant, or audits a return is applying policy, not making it. A person who writes the rule, decides the enforcement priority, or testifies for the agency's budget is shaping policy. The categories are knowable, and the Office of Personnel Management and the courts can police the boundary. Schedule C proves the concept: the government has used a confidential-and-policy test since the Eisenhower years without the republic falling.

Six. Accountability runs through the voter or it runs through no one. When a career official writes a rule that raises costs on a family, the family cannot vote the official out. It can vote the President out. If the President cannot then direct that official, the vote is a ritual. The majority speaks and the bureau goes on as before. That is not the rule of law. It is the rule of the permanent staff.

Why the "spoils" objection misses

The spoils system was a system of patronage: jobs for loyalty, regardless of competence, in exchange for votes and money. Schedule F, as designed, does not hand jobs to anyone. It changes the removal protections on a defined class of existing positions. It does not authorize hiring by party card. Merit hiring would remain the rule at the front door, and the Pendleton Act's ban on political pressure and coercion still stands, as does the Hatch Act of 1939, which restricts partisan activity by federal employees.

Could an administration abuse the tool? Of course it could. So could an administration abuse any power. The answer to an abusable power is not to deny the power to the one office the Constitution gave it to. The answer is the same as it has always been: a statute that spells out limits, courts that enforce them, an Inspector General who audits, a Congress that reads the reports and holds the hearings (see How to Read an Inspector General Report and Use It to Hold an Agency to Account), and voters who punish abuse. If you think a future President will misuse it, you have the two chambers and the courts to check him. What you do not have, in a republic, is the right to put a career class beyond the reach of every one of those checks.

Notice, too, the asymmetry in the critics' own logic. If these officials are neutral experts who simply carry out the law, then removing the protection costs them nothing, because a President who fires a neutral expert for doing the law's work will answer for it in the press, in the courts and at the ballot box. If they are not neutral, if some of them steer the policy, then the case for accountability makes itself.

What about expertise?

The expertise argument is the strongest emotional card and the weakest logical one. Nobody proposes that the people who inspect meat or land planes be chosen by their party. The practical question is who sits at the junction where expertise meets decision: the one who tells the Secretary what the law allows, drafts the rule, and chooses what to enforce first. At that junction expertise is advice. The decision belongs to someone the voters chose.

There is a name for a government in which experts decide and elected officials ratify: it is called technocracy, and Woodrow Wilson wrote it up with admiration in 1887. His essay on administration argued for a science of administration set apart from politics. The Founders' system answered him in advance. The point of republican government is that those who rule are accountable to those who are ruled, and a decision does not become wise merely because the person making it holds a degree. If you want to see how the idea of rule by expert grew, read Woodrow Wilson Wanted a Government of Experts, and Washington Still Runs on It.

The honest response to the worry about lost knowledge is that the government has an obligation to keep institutional memory, and a President who purges a whole office of those who know how things work will pay for it in failures that voters can see. That is not an argument for tenure. Every private company faces the same tradeoff and manages it.

A worked example, labeled as hypothetical

Picture a hypothetical agency that regulates a widely used consumer product. A new President campaigned on easing a particular safety rule that he believes costs families more than it saves. The agency's career policy director, who has served three administrations, believes the rule is right and believes, sincerely, that the new President is wrong.

Under the present arrangement, the President can order the political appointee at the top of the agency to start the rulemaking. The appointee relies on the policy director to draft it, and the director can slow the work in a hundred ways that leave no fingerprints: a longer review, a request for another study, a memo flagging "legal risk," a draft that technically complies with the order and does not do what was meant. Firing for that conduct means a case record, a hearing, an appeal and months of delay. By then the term is half over.

I am not accusing any real official of that behavior. The point is that the structure makes the slow-walk rational. Under a Schedule F arrangement, the director would be an at-will policy employee: the President's appointee could replace him, and the President would own the choice of replacement and the result. If the replacement is incompetent, voters can see it. If the new rule is a mistake, voters can see that too. Either way the decision is made in daylight by someone who answers to them.

The record on how this came about

It is worth telling the history straight, because both sides tend to tell it badly. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 created the merit system, at first for a small share of positions. Presidents then extended coverage by executive order for decades. By the middle of the twentieth century most of the federal workforce was in the competitive service. In 1953 President Eisenhower created Schedule C, in an order recognizing that some positions needed to be filled on a confidential, policy-determining basis, a deliberate acknowledgment that the merit system could not cover everything.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 reorganized the system, abolished the old Civil Service Commission and created the Office of Personnel Management, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Labor Relations Authority. It also created the Senior Executive Service, a corps of top career managers who were meant to be more mobile and more accountable to political leadership, which tells you that even in 1978 Congress understood that the people at the junction needed to answer to the elected branch.

So the principle behind Schedule F, that some career jobs touch policy so closely that accountability should win over tenure, is not an outsider's theory. Congress and Presidents have agreed with it for decades. The fight is over where to draw the line, and over whether an order, a rule or a statute is the right instrument. That last point is fair, and a conservative who cares about the separation of powers should say so plainly: the more durable path is statute. If Congress writes the line into law, a future President of the other party cannot erase it with a pen, and the courts will have a clear text to apply.

Measured against the Founding

The Framers did not live under a bureaucracy of this kind, and they did not draft for one. They drafted for an executive of a few departments with a few hundred clerks. But they were not naive about the risk of power slipping from the people's representatives to officials who could not be removed. They had just thrown off a king's placemen and customs commissioners. The Declaration's list of grievances includes the charge that the King "has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance." That is a line about unaccountable officials, written by men who had learned the cost of officeholders answerable to a distant authority rather than to the governed.

The difference, of course, is that today's career officials are Americans operating under American law, and the President to whom they report is chosen by Americans. The point is not that they are the King's agents. The point is that the chain of accountability that the Founders designed, people to President to officers, only works if the last link holds.

Where conservatives should be careful

A few honest cautions, because a good argument includes them. Do not oversell. Schedule F will not by itself shrink government, repeal a regulation or balance a budget. It is a tool for direction, not for downsizing. Do not undersell the due process side either: employees who are fired deserve to be told the lawful basis, and Congress should insist on a clear definition of what counts as policy-influencing so that the schedule does not swallow ordinary jobs. And do not forget that the same power will be held, someday, by a President you did not vote for. A conservative who truly believes in the separation of powers builds rules he would accept in the other side's hands. I would accept this one. A President of either party is entitled to a government that carries out his lawful policies, because the voters gave him that mandate and will take it back if he abuses it.

The case in brief

1. Article II vests the executive power in the President and charges him to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. He cannot do that without the ability to direct those who execute them.
2. The merit system rightly protects workers from political coercion, but it was never meant to give career officials who shape policy a veto over elected leadership.
3. The critics' best points, spoils, lost expertise and an elastic definition, are answered by a narrow functional test, merit hiring at the front door, and checks by Congress, courts and Inspectors General.
4. Executive Order 13957 was revoked in 2021 and revived in 2025, which shows the weakness of acting by order alone; a statute would give the principle durability and clear limits.
5. Accountability runs through the voter or it runs through no one.

What you can do: Look up the text of Article II on the Constitution page and read the Vesting Clause and the Take Care Clause aloud, then write your member of Congress asking where they stand on writing a clear policy-position standard into law.