Submitted via regulations.gov
Charles Ezell
Acting Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
1900 E Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20415
Dear Acting Director Ezell:
We write to submit this comment on behalf of the Economic Policy Institute. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank working for the last 30 years to counter rising inequality. We study the impacts of economic policy decisions on low- and middle-income working families at the federal, state, and local level, and our work has also long centered the importance of a strong public sector and well-functioning federal agencies to protecting economic security for the working class. EPI submits this comment to express our strong opposition to the rule as proposed.
The proposed rule, as directed by the reinstated Executive Order 13957,1 outlines a process for revoking civil service protections for certain federal workers who traditionally discharge their responsibilities consistent with the priorities of the administration in office. This directs that civil servants in “positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” should be classified as “Schedule Policy/Career” (previously known as “Schedule F” in the first Trump administration). EO 13957 outlines steps for agencies to follow in recommending positions to reclassify to the OPM director. The director, in turn, must recommend to the president positions to be reclassified to Schedule Policy/Career in accordance with OPM’s corresponding guidance memorandum,2 with the president making the final decision regarding positions to classify as Schedule Policy/Career. In the following comment, we provide further detail on our highest priority concerns with this rule as proposed.
The proposed rule risks inappropriate politicization of the federal workforce and suggests no meaningful guardrails against this.
The proposed rule claims that employees in this category will not have to personally or politically support the president. However, there are no serious guardrails proposed in the rule to prevent this from happening. If federal employees could be fired at will—without any due process—it would not be difficult for this administration, or any future presidential administration, to target and terminate employees based on political views while claiming whatever justification they choose for doing so. Indeed, now-Vice President Vance once said in a 2021 interview that he would recommend that President Trump “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”3 Any duly elected President certainly has the right to place a limited number of people into positions of authority across the federal government to help enact their policy agenda. But we have broader civil service protections precisely to prevent this from happening too widely – and before these protections were put into place, government employees were able to be assessed not based on merit, expertise in their jobs, or performance of their duties, but on adherence to a particular political ideology, partisan support, loyalty to individuals, nepotism, or favoritism. Politicizing the federal workforce, or forcing federal employees to toe a certain political line to avoid termination, will further undermine the trust of the American people in the public goods and services that their tax dollars support.
A December 2023 review of research4 on the impacts of greater politicization of public services highlights the significant adverse consequences likely to result from removing civil service protections from policy-influencing employees, including:
- Greater federal workforce turnover, with changes in presidential administrations ushering in new cadres of policy-influencing employees, causing increased instability in agencies’ interpretations and implementations of laws;
- Decline in the institutional history and technical expertise career civil servants develop and bring to bear in formulating policy;
- Less accountability to Congress regarding the laws that agencies administer; and
- More opportunities for political favoritism in federal contracting.
The proposed rule could present serious risks to accurate data collection and analysis.
The proposed Schedule Policy/Career designation also threatens the integrity of federal data and the federal statistical system. This is particularly concerning to EPI given our role as a research institution: Conducting credible economic research requires access to reliable public data sources. The federal government has a well-deserved reputation for gathering and publishing high-quality economic data, including open access data that policymakers and policy-oriented organizations like ours rely on for economic decisionmaking and research. Statistical agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau require highly-trained staff to produce impartial and reliable data, but the Schedule Policy/Career designation would eliminate the norms and incentives critical to producing accurate data. Without professional autonomy, the statisticians and economists who staff these agencies will leave, employee productivity and morale will decline, and the remaining staff will face pressure to alter or suppress data in accordance with a political agenda. Career staff are also less likely to risk their jobs to leak embargoed market-moving data to insiders who can use the information to their advantage at the expense of other investors.
Businesses also require high-quality data to make sound investment decisions. A 2018 National Association of Business Economics survey of private sector members highlighted the vast importance of government data for the private sector, according to an analysis by Hughes-Cromwick and Coronado (2019).5 When asked “Are government data important to analyses and forecasting that drive business decisions,” 95 percent of respondents replied “yes.” At least half of respondents said that government data inputs were “critical” to each of the following activities: capital spending decisions, pricing decisions, financing decisions; and interest rate and asset allocation decisions. Over 90 percent of respondents used government data to inform business decisions from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve, and Census Bureau.
There is no substitute for data from the federal government. Even many private-sector data alternatives ultimately rely on the official data produced by the federal government. For example, the ADP National Employment Report is benchmarked to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.6 The politicization of federal statistical staff will undermine public trust in official data.
The proposed rule presents risks to government services and to the continuity and stability of the federal workforce.
Acting Social Security Administrator Leland Dudek recently outlined his plan to reclassify the staff of entire offices of the Social Security Administration under the Schedule Policy/Career designation in this proposed rule.7 Acting Administrator Dudek’s plan, in our view, would warp any reasonable interpretation of the term “policy-influencing,” as it would include staff who research and publish statistics of the agency’s performance, work in human resources, maintain the agency’s information technology and database operations, and adjudicate disability claims. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted, the SSA is one of the most nonpartisan and apolitical federal agencies, “with one of the highest ratios of civil servants to political appointees” in federal government – in 2024, just 19 political appointees out of 57,000 total employees.8 Radically changing this ratio to expand the share of political appointees would risk politicizing one of our most critical federal services, and exposing that many staff to the risk of at-will termination would exacerbate the long wait times, website crashes, and other operational disruptions that have already characterized the last few months at the agency. It could also lead to pressure on adjudicators to limit access to benefits. This would cause further harm to the millions of senior citizens, people with disabilities, and low-income individuals in the U.S. who rely on Social Security benefits and need reliable, trustworthy communication with SSA staff and infrastructure.9
We are concerned that this rule could be used not to improve accountability or responsiveness in the federal workforce, but to further carry out initiatives started by the White House’s new office of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE and its leadership have undertaken actions to reduce the size of the federal workforce and find related cost savings by any means necessary, with little regard for actually assessing the significance or quality of the work performed or the critical services being provided by those federal workers. This has included attempts to shutter whole federal agencies authorized by Congress, place employees on administrative leave, offer deferred resignation to employees, and to disregard the terms of collective bargaining agreements with federal employees. There is ongoing litigation against these actions from the executive branch – for example, recently a federal judge issued a restraining order in American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO, et al. v. Donald J. Trump, et. al.10 blocking the administration from making further reductions in force while the litigation is in progress to determine the legality of the administration’s actions. Advancing this rule could provide more cover for reclassifying many positions to be more easily terminated, bypassing other checks and balances on this authority and having a chilling effect on whistleblowers.
We oppose this rule as proposed and urge the agency to withdraw the proposed rule. We also urge this administration to respect existing laws – and collective bargaining agreements, where relevant – with regards to hiring, firing, and changing employment conditions for career civil servants and excepted service employees alike.
Sincerely,
Samantha Sanders
Director of Government Affairs & Advocacy
Economic Policy Institute
Ben Zipperer, Ph.D.
Senior Economist
Economic Policy Institute
1. White House. 2025. “Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce” (Executive Order). January 20, 2025.
2. U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). 2025. Memorandum, Subject: Guidance on Implementing President Trump’s Executive Order titled, “Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.“ January 27, 2025.
3. Prokop, Andrew. 2024. “J.D. Vance’s radical plan to build a government of Trump loyalists.” Vox, July 18, 2024.
4. Moynihan, Don. 2023. “The risks of Schedule F for administrative capacity and government accountability.” (Commentary), Brookings Institute website. December 12, 2023.
5. Hughes-Cromwick, Ellen and Julia Coronado. 2019. “The Value of US Government Data to US Business Decisions,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(1): 131-146.
6. ADP. 2025. Technical Notes to the ADP Employment Report, retrieved May 15, 2025.
7. Wagner, Erich. 2025. “Dudek calls for entire SSA offices to be converted to new Schedule F.” Government Executive, April 22, 2025.
8. O’Connor, Devin and Romig, Kathleen. 2025. “Trump Administration Politicizing Social Security Administration Will Further Undermine Benefits.” Off the Charts Blog (Center on Budget & Policy Priorities), May 8, 2025.
9. Perez, Daniel and Morrissey, Monique. 2025. “Southern and Midwestern districts are the most vulnerable to Social Security cuts and disruptions.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), May 13, 2025.
10. Order Granting Temporary Restraining Order and Compelling Certain Discovery Production, American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO, et al., v. Donald J. Trump, et. al. (N.D. Cal 2025) (No. 3:25-cv-03698-SI).