Officials with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) made public late in the day Good Friday the Schedule F reform President Donald Trump promises will make the federal government’s 2.3 million-strong career civil service bureaucracy more efficient, accountable, and manageable.

Acting OPM Director Chuck Ezell described what is, in essence, a minor proposed regulatory reform that could make a huge difference in how Americans are served by their national government. It could also prompt much-needed reforms in state and local government personnel management.

“Policy-making federal employees have a tremendous amount of influence over our laws and our lives,”Ezell said in a statement late Friday.“Such employees must be held to the highest standards of conduct. Americans deserve a government that is both effective and accountable.”

The rule creates a new class of management-level career civil servant, formerly known as Schedule F but now dubbed “Schedule Policy/Career” (SPC). The most significant proposed change is that, while the SPC employee remains a career civil service member, he or she is classified as at-will rather than permanent, and thus, according to the OPM statement, “exempt from the standard, often burdensome adverse action and appeals procedures that currently make it difficult to address poor performance or misconduct.”

The new category is to be available only to high-ranking career managers in positions to make significant decisions that influence how the government bureaucracy enforces a presidential policy on a day-to-day basis. There are approximately 7,000 career managers at the GS-15 rank who are potentially in policy-making jobs subject to reclassification as SPC positions. Depending on which of 10 “Steps” the GS-15 employee ranks, his or her annual salary can range from $125,133 to $162,672.

The proposed rule repeals provisions of two executive orders (EOs) issued by President Joe Biden and his administration, the first in 2021 repealing Trump’s first-term EO establishing the Schedule F positions in 2020 and the second in 2024 through OPM that ensured, thanks to continuing regulatory “protections,” all career employees would be effectively all-but-impossible to discipline or terminate within anything remotely resembling a reasonable time.

The key issue underlying the new Trump proposal is that those protections, which were originally intended by the creators of the merit-based career civil service in the 19th century to insulate government workers from partisan influence, have become so complicated and time-consuming that what is supposed to be a non-partisan government workforce is in fact extremely partisan and often immune to management direction. It has become, in fact, little different from the spoils system of hyper-partisanship in hiring and firing government workers.

A crucial fact that will likely go unmentioned in the debate on Schedule SCP by Democrats in Congress, the federal employee unions that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to those same politicians, and the mainstream media is that the authors of the Pendleton Act of 1883, which ended the spoils system and created the merit-based civil service, kept a key feature of the old system — employees remained at-will.

As OPM explains in the proposed rule unveiled Friday:

“Though the Pendleton Act extensively regulated the process of filling classified positions, employees in the new civil service remained at-will. While the law prohibited executive branch officials from dismissing classified employees because they declined to render political services, they otherwise served at the pleasure of the President.

“Civil service employees also had no right to appeal or otherwise contest removals. Instead, the Pendleton Act was enforced through penalties on officials who violated its requirements. The reformers who created the Pendleton Act made a conscious decision to keep the civil service at-will.

“They wanted to create a merit system that would provide high-quality services; they feared that cumbersome removal protections would entrench poor performers. Civil service reformers saw little risk of patronage-based dismissals as long as civil service hiring forbid rewarding campaign supporters with new appointments.”

But as the decades passed, the federal government grew and, especially after 1962 when employee unions were made legal, the at-will character remained in name only. By 1978, when President Jimmy Carter secured passage of the Civil Service Reform Act, one of the legislation’s chief selling points was the reality that federal career bureaucrats had become all-but-impossible to fire.

Another misconception opponents of Trump’s reform proposal will likely advance is the claim the president is restoring the spoils system and plans to replace all 2.3 million current career employees with his political supporters.

To emphasize how wrong that misconception is, the OPM proposal points out multiple times that “covered positions remain career positions and are not being converted into political appointments — a common misperception of the original order. The order emphasizes that patronage remains prohibited by defining Schedule Policy/Career to only cover ‘career positions.’”

It also expressly describes what is and is not required of Schedule Policy/Career employees. They “are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration. They are required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability, consistent with their constitutional oath and the vesting of executive authority solely in the President. Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal.”

The proposal cites Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) research that shows that only 41% of current system supervisors are confident they could effectively discipline an employee guilty of serious misconduct, and only 26% are confident they could terminate a chronically poor-performing employee.

The above commentary first appeared on Substack.