Trump’s Civil Service Reforms Are A Necessary Correction

For more than a century, Americans have taken pride in a professional civil service insulated from raw political patronage. The Pendleton Act of 1883 was a pivotal reform that moved federal employment away from the spoils system and toward merit-based hiring.

But it is possible to honor Pendleton’s purpose while still recognizing that the modern civil service has drifted far beyond it. What began as protection against crude patronage has, in many corners of today’s administrative state, turned into something closer to de facto lifetime tenure for policy actors, people who aren’t just implementing law but are actively creating it in ways that are difficult for voters to see and for elected officials to correct.

That is the real context for the Trump administration’s civil service reforms, including the revival of Schedule F, a policy first introduced during Trump’s first term, now called Schedule Policy/Career. These changes have been caricatured as authoritarian and corrupt. In reality, they are better understood as a belated reckoning with how policymaking actually works inside federal agencies, and with how often “expertise” functions less like neutral knowledge and more like policy advocacy.

From Schedule F to Schedule Policy/Career

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14171, directing the executive branch to create a new excepted-service category known as Schedule Policy/Career for positions that are “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating.” Agencies were instructed to identify roles meeting that standard, while the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was tasked with updating personnel rules to reflect the new classification.

Within days of the executive order, OPM issued formal government-wide implementation guidance clarifying how agencies should identify and reclassify covered positions. By spring, OPM had moved into rulemaking, publishing a proposed regulation explicitly designed to strengthen performance accountability and employment flexibility for policy-influencing roles. By late 2025, multiple outlets reported that final regulations were being circulated internally, a strong signal that the reform is nearing finalization.

Under Schedule Policy/Career, certain policy-influencing positions remain career roles filled through merit-based hiring, but they no longer carry the same near-automatic tenure protections. Employees in these roles may be removed more easily when their performance or policy alignment conflicts with an administration’s lawful priorities.

Who These Jobs Really Are

The reforms are aimed at the policy bloodstream of the administrative state. They do not target the employees who deliver government services day to day—such as TSA screeners, park rangers, or Social Security claims processors—but rather the staff whose work quietly shapes policy behind the scenes. These are the roles that live between law and policy, translating statutes into guidance, writing regulatory text, defining enforcement priorities, and controlling the analytical machinery used to justify major rules.

In practice, this includes many GS-13 through GS-15 positions, along with career attorneys, economists, scientists, and other technical specialists whose work materially influences policy outcomes. Some career Senior Executive Service (SES) officials also fall into this category, particularly where their responsibilities involve steering policy direction rather than simply managing operations.

The Myth of Apolitical Expertise

The strongest argument for these reforms begins with a basic truth polite Washington culture prefers to ignore. In much of government, the line between neutral analysis and policy advocacy is blurry to the point of meaninglessness.

Economic analysis is a clear example. Regulatory impact analysis is presented as a scientific exercise where costs and benefits are weighed and an optimal policy is revealed. In reality, outcomes depend heavily on subjective choices about which costs and benefits count and how much they should count. These are not always or even usually technical decisions. They are value judgments wrapped in numbers.

None of this is scandalous. It is simply how policymaking works. The problem arises when advocacy is dressed up as neutral expertise and then insulated by near-permanent tenure. Once this reality is acknowledged, it becomes harder to defend the idea that policy advocates should enjoy protections entirely detached from electoral accountability.

What Critics Get Wrong

The standard critique of Trump’s civil service reforms is that Schedule Policy/Career revives the spoils system and undermines the Pendleton reforms. Patronage was bad, therefore any reduction in tenure protections must be bad as well.

But in practice, the modern civil service already functions as a one-sided spoils system. Federal policy workers skew heavily toward one party, shape outcomes accordingly, and enjoys near-permanent tenure regardless of elections. Schedule Policy/Career challenges the idea that partisan policy influence should be permanently insulated from democratic accountability.

Critics also tend to ignore the moral hazard embedded in the current system. Granting a politically lopsided policy class something approaching lifetime job security while it exercises enormous discretionary power is dangerous. Corruption does not only take place in smoky back rooms; it can also emerge through institutional norms that reward ideological conformity. The same dynamic is now widely observed in universities, where hiring and professional advancement practices have produced increasingly uniform ideological cultures even without explicit political litmus tests.

The Partisan Workforce Reality

No serious observer believes the federal workforce is a random cross-section of American political opinion. Donation patterns show that federal-employee giving leans heavily Democratic. Nearly 84 percent of reported presidential donations in 2024 went to the Democratic ticket, with the imbalance even more extreme in policy-intensive departments such as EPA (99%), Energy (97%), Commerce (96%), and State (94%).

That does not mean individual employees are necessarily unprofessional or malicious. But it does undercut the comforting fiction that the administrative state is an ideologically neutral priesthood of disinterested experts.

The need for stronger executive control over the bureaucracy was made especially clear during Trump’s first term, which many view as a case study in bureaucratic resistance to a president. Beyond the obvious overt forms of resistance, agencies have many quieter tools to derail elected priorities, such as slow-walking directives or invoking internal legal and procedural arguments to block change. If elections are supposed to matter, that arrangement is hard to justify.

The Reality of Workforce Reduction

Defenders of the status quo argue that federal employees can already be fired “for cause.” In theory, that is true. In practice, the process is slow, burdensome, and uncertain. GAO reported 7,411 federal removals for misconduct in FY2016, only a tiny fraction of a workforce of roughly two million. Meanwhile BLS data show private-sector layoffs and discharges typically run around about 1% of employment per month.

These civil service reforms are also unfolding alongside aggressive efforts to shrink the federal workforce. By early 2026, federal employment was roughly nine percent lower than at the start of Trump’s second term, representing 271,000 fewer workers. Workforce trimming has been a central feature of the administration’s governing strategy, particularly through the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to shrink and restructure agencies.

Schedule Policy/Career is not the only tool being deployed. In mid-2025, the administration also created Schedule G, a new classification for noncareer policy-advocating roles that are expected to turn over with a change in administration. This closes a loophole in federal hiring and allows openly political policy roles to be staffed honestly.

A Necessary First Step

The Pendleton Act was meant to prevent corruption by patronage by building a merit-based civil service insulated from political reward. But when advocacy is disguised as neutral expertise, job protections can become a political weapon. Schedule Policy/Career is an attempt to disarm that weapon by restoring accountability precisely where expertise and policy are most intertwined. If the goal is a government that is both professional and accountable, Schedule Policy/Career is a necessary beginning.