For some, the White House’s public information on Schedule Policy/Career leaves a lot of guesswork on exactly which and how many employees will be reclassified.
Agencies have a matter of days to fully implement Schedule Policy/Career, as they face a June 10 deadline to inform impacted federal employees of their reclassifications and update their personnel files.
As that deadline approaches, many are searching for information about exactly which, and how many, career civil servants will be reclassified — but many of those details remain unclear.
The White House has published an appendix, 229 pages long, listing the agencies, position titles and corresponding position description codes that are being transferred to Schedule Policy/Career. To date, it’s the best information publicly available on the types of roles being reclassified.
But for some, the White House’s public information leaves much to be desired. Protect Democracy, one of several organizations suing the Trump administration over Schedule Policy/Career, pointed out that the appendix does not include the exact total number of positions affected, how many employees are affected within each position, the seniority levels of the different positions, or their governmentwide occupational series numbers.
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“There’s a lot of guesswork that the public has to do, and frankly shouldn’t have to do, about exactly who is being moved and what work is now deemed ‘policy-influencing’ in the way that they’re using that phrase,” Jules Torti, counsel for Protect Democracy, said in an interview. “We’re hearing from civil servants that they don’t know their position description number, and many of them have not yet been told whether or not they’ve been moved. There is a lot of confusion about exactly what this means.”
The Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget did not respond to Federal News Network’s requests for comment on the administration’s decision for what data to include in the appendix, or if more detailed information would be released in the future.
The appendix does answer some questions, such as how many different agency position titles will be affected. And according to the White House, about 97% of reclassified employees are either GS-15 or Senior-Level (SL) positions.
Governmentwide, the reclassified positions include employees involved with work in human capital, procurement, financial management, federal grants, communications and public affairs, among many other areas. Some of the most frequently listed position titles include program managers, attorney advisors, program analysts and human resources specialists, according to data analysis compiled by Leadership Connect.
The White House appendix lists thousands of position description numbers, which are multi-digit codes that define specific federal positions and that vary by agency. In many cases, the appendix contains multiple different codes under a single position title, which is typically dependent on factors like a position’s duties and seniority level. For instance, there are six different codes listed for a position as an HR officer at the Defense Department.
In total, there are just under 4,900 position description codes listed in the White House’s document. Senior administration officials said close to 8,000 employees have been reclassified, meaning that multiple employees would likely be reclassified under some singular position titles. Some positions on the list, such as chief-level executives or deputy directors, would in most cases have just one employee filling the role. But other positions, such as various agency advisors, analysts and specialists, may have multiple employees who will be reclassified under one position title.
“A single listing of a position could indicate that a single job is being reclassified, or it could mean that three dozen jobs with that job title are being reclassified. There’s simply no way to know by looking at the list,” Protect Democracy wrote June 4 in an online post. “Given that the administration clearly has these numbers, as it’s been citing numbers and statistics publicly, the fact that it has kept that data secret does not seem accidental.”
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Federal employees who are looking to see if their position is being affected may be able to check their SF-50 personnel form for their position description number, then match it to the White House’s appendix.
Based on the White House’s appendix, the number of reclassified positions also varies widely by agency. Some agencies are converting hundreds of different position titles into Schedule Policy/Career, while other agencies are reclassifying just a handful.
The Defense Department is reclassifying more than 1,600 different position “codes” — the most of any executive branch agency. The departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services are reclassifying 571 and 400 position codes, respectively, making them the next two highest agencies.
At the Treasury Department, 223 types of positions are being reclassified, along with 172 at the Commerce Department and 158 at the Interior Department. OMB is reclassifying 137, and the departments of Veterans Affairs, Justice and Transportation are all reclassifying roughly 120 each.
Agencies’ June 10 implementation deadline follows President Donald Trump’s executive order on Wednesday, which finalized nearly 8,000 conversions into Schedule Policy/Career, a new excepted category of career federal employment. The rough estimate of 8,000 impacted positions is far below the Trump administration’s initial estimate of 50,000.
Schedule Policy/Career will strip long-standing civil service protections from thousands of career federal employees across the executive branch who hold “policy-influencing” positions. The president’s order reclassifies “senior federal workers in policy-related roles as at-will employees, enabling swift accountability for those in influential positions,” the White House said in a fact sheet Wednesday.
While many of the reclassified positions affect senior officials like agency component leaders, directors and executive officers, some of the impacted positions appear less policy-oriented and more operationally focused, according to Torti.
“I’m seeing positions like epidemiologist, health scientist, public health analyst — people who, in my mind, are doing the on-the-ground work,” Torti said. “But it is absolutely unverifiable at this point, absent doing an extraordinary level of work — and even then, I don’t think the public really knows much from this list.”
Read more: Workforce
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Drew Friedman is a workforce, pay and benefits reporter for Federal News Network.
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