Trump’s civil service reforms are a necessary fix

For more than a century, Americans have prided themselves on a professional public service insulated from crude political patronage. THE Pendleton Act of 1883 was a landmark 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 modern public administration has drifted far beyond it. What began as a protection against crude patronage has, in many corners of today’s administrative state, turned into something closer to de facto life tenure for policymakers, people who don’t just apply law but actively create it in ways that are hard for voters to see and for elected officials to fix.

This 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 characterized as authoritarian and corrupt. In fact, they are best understood as a belated reckoning of how policymaking actually works within federal agencies, and how often “expertise” functions less as neutral knowledge and more as policy advocacy.

From Program F to Policy/Career Program

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14171directing the executive branch to create a new category of exempt services known as the Policy/Career Schedule for positions that are “confidential, policy-making, policy-making, or policy advocacy.” Agencies were directed to identify roles that meet this standard, and 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 an official government-wide order application guidance clarifying how agencies should identify and reclassify filled positions. By spring, OPM had moved forward with rulemaking, publishing a proposed setting it is expressly designed to enhance accountability and employment flexibility for policy-influencing roles. By the end of 2025, many stores was mentioned that the final regulations were being circulated internally, a strong signal that the reform was nearing completion.

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

What are these jobs really?

The reforms are aimed at the political flow of the administrative state. They aren’t targeting the employees who provide government services every day—like TSA inspectors, 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, setting enforcement priorities, and controlling the analytical machinery used to justify important rules.

In practice, this includes many GS-13 to GS-15 positions, along with career lawyers, economists, scientists, and other technical experts whose work substantially affects policy outcomes. Some career Senior Executive Service (SES) officers also fall into this category, particularly when their responsibilities include guiding political direction rather than simply managing operations.

The Myth of Apolitical Expertise

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

Financial 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 what 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’s just how policymaking works. The problem arises when advocacy is dressed up as neutral expertise and then isolated by near-permanent tenure. Once this reality is recognized, it becomes more difficult to defend the idea that political supporters should enjoy protections completely detached from electoral responsibility.

What critics get wrong

The standard criticism of Trump’s civil service reforms is that the Policy/Career Program revives the spoils system and undermines Pendleton’s reforms. Support has been poor, so any reduction in tenure protections must also be poor.

But in practice, modern public administration already operates as a one-sided spoils system. Federal political operatives are heavily biased toward one party, shape outcomes accordingly, and enjoy near-permanent tenure regardless of election. Timeline Politics/Career challenges the idea that partisan influence in politics should be permanently insulated from democratic accountability.

Critics also tend to ignore the moral hazard built into the current system. Granting a politically one-sided policy class anything approaching lifetime job security while wielding enormous discretionary power is dangerous. Corruption doesn’t just take place in smoky rooms. it can also arise through institutional norms that reward ideological conformity. The same dynamic is now widely seen in universities, where hiring and promotion practices have created increasingly uniform ideological cultures, even without explicit political beacons.

The party reality of the workforce

No serious observer believes that the federal workforce is a random cross-section of American political opinion. Donation patterns show that federal employee giving leans heavily toward Democrats. Almost 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%).

This does not mean that individual workers are necessarily unprofessional or malicious. But it undermines the comforting fantasy that the administrative state is an ideologically neutral priesthood of disinterested experts.

The need for stronger executive control over the bureaucracy became particularly clear during Trump’s first term, which many see 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 late directives or invoking internal legal and procedural arguments to block change. If elections are supposed to matter, this arrangement is hard to justify.

The reality of a shrinking workforce

Defenders of the status quo argue that federal employees can already be fired “for cause.” In theory, this is true. In practice, the process is slow, burdensome and uncertain. GAO was mentioned 7,411 federal misconduct removals in 2016, just a tiny fraction of a workforce of about two million. Meanwhile BLS data show that layoffs and layoffs in the private sector typically account for about 1% of employment per month.

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

Political/Career Timeline is not the only tool being developed. In mid-2025, the administration also created Program Ca new classification for non-career policy support roles expected to change with a change in administration. This closes a loophole in federal hiring and allows overtly political roles to be filled honestly.

A necessary first step

The Pendleton Act was intended to prevent corruption through patronage by building a merit-based public service insulated from political reward. But when advocacy is disguised as neutral expertise, job protection can become a political weapon. Policy/Career Planning is an attempt to disarm this weapon by restoring accountability precisely where expertise and politics are most intertwined. If the goal is a government that is both professional and responsible, the Policy/Career Program is a necessary start.