Schedule F: A Federal Experiment in Politicizing the Bureaucracy

Louisiana voters do not need to imagine what happens when an elected majority gains the ability to reclassify career civil-service positions into at-will political ones. The federal government ran the experiment. It is still running.

I. What Schedule F is.

On October 21, 2020, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13957, titled "Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service." The order created a new category of federal employment — Schedule F — for positions "of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character." Positions in Schedule F were to be exempted from the competitive civil service and from the Merit Systems Protection Board's adverse-action protections. In plain English: they could be fired at will.

Federal agencies were directed to identify positions for reclassification. Agency submissions in late 2020 indicated that tens of thousands of career positions were being considered — including scientists, economists, attorneys, program managers, and technical specialists whose work had previously been understood as nonpartisan administration rather than partisan policy-making. The Office of Management and Budget alone proposed moving 88 percent of its workforce into Schedule F.

Executive Order 13957 was revoked by President Biden on January 22, 2021, before any significant number of employees were actually moved into the schedule. A new executive order, EO 14003, was signed the same day, reinstating career protections. In April 2024, the Office of Personnel Management issued a final rule establishing additional procedural protections against Schedule-F-style reclassification. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14171, "Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce" — reinstating and expanding the Schedule F framework, now renamed Schedule Policy/Career. Legal challenges and rulemaking proceedings remain active.

II. Why Schedule F matters to Louisiana voters.

Three features of the Schedule F experience should concern any Louisiana voter evaluating Amendment 1. They are not partisan points; they are structural points that would apply identically if the political valences were reversed.

A. The definition creeps.

The defining language of Schedule F — positions of a "policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character" — sounds narrow. In practice, it is capacious. Almost every substantive career position in federal government involves some policy implementation. Agency lawyers who draft regulatory interpretations can be described as "policy-making." Grant managers who set funding priorities can be described as "policy-determining." Scientists whose research informs rules can be described as "policy-advocating." The Congressional Research Service estimated that as much as 20 percent of the federal workforce — hundreds of thousands of employees — could fall within the ambit of a broadly interpreted Schedule F.

Amendment 1 contains no definitional guardrails at all. It simply authorizes the Louisiana Legislature to "remove or add officers, positions, and employees to the unclassified state civil service" by ordinary statute. There is no standard, no threshold, no factor test. Schedule F at least purports to be limited to a category. Amendment 1 is limited only by whatever the Legislature decides in any given session.

B. The politicization is structural.

The argument for Schedule F, made by its proponents, is that the career civil service has become "unaccountable" and that the president should be able to direct policy-relevant employees. The argument against is that the civil service is supposed to be insulated precisely because its work — enforcing laws, collecting revenue, administering benefits, inspecting workplaces — depends on continuity across administrations and on neutral execution of statutes Congress has already passed.

The structural problem is not that one side is right and the other wrong. It is that once the mechanism exists, it will be used whenever the majority wants to use it. A Republican administration will reclassify employees a Republican administration distrusts. A Democratic administration will reclassify employees a Democratic administration distrusts. The pendulum will swing. The institutional memory and subject-matter expertise of the agency will not swing with it; it will simply leave.

In Louisiana, the structural problem is worse, because the pendulum is unusually short. The Legislature meets annually and acts by simple majority. The Governor's party has changed three times in the last quarter-century. If Amendment 1 passes, Louisiana's civil service becomes available as a bargaining chip in every legislative session, in perpetuity.

C. The chilling effect begins immediately.

An employee does not need to be fired for the effect of an at-will reclassification to be felt. The mere possibility of reclassification changes behavior at the margin — the inspector who softens a report, the scientist who edits a finding, the attorney who waters down an opinion, the grant officer who reconsiders a disfavored applicant. The literature on organizational behavior is uniformly clear on this point, and the federal inspectors general who studied Schedule F's brief 2020 implementation reported measurable drops in staff willingness to engage in internal dissent during the pendency of the rule.

III. What the federal safety net provides — and Louisiana lacks.

Even with Schedule F, federal employees retain several protections that would not exist for reclassified Louisiana employees under Amendment 1:

The federal civil service survived Schedule F because it had layer upon layer of protective infrastructure built over a century and a quarter. Louisiana has fewer layers, fewer independent bodies, and a smaller legal ecosystem around public-sector employment. A Schedule-F-style reclassification at the state level, conducted without the federal safety net, would land harder.

IV. What the record shows about the real-world effects.

Research on Schedule F and comparable state-level reclassifications — including Georgia's 1996 Civil Service Reform Act, which moved all new state employees to at-will status — finds:

• Turnover rises sharply. Georgia post-1996 saw state employee turnover increase from roughly 15 percent to more than 21 percent annually in the decade after the reform, with the sharpest increases in mid-career professional classifications.
• Vacancy durations lengthen. When experienced employees leave, replacement requires recruitment, training, and ramp-up. The cost falls on agencies and, ultimately, on citizens waiting for services.
• Whistleblowing drops. MSPB surveys show that perceived retaliation risk is the single largest predictor of whether an employee will report observed misconduct. At-will status materially increases perceived retaliation risk.
• Partisan signaling in hiring grows. Studies of at-will state hiring patterns find statistically measurable increases in the proportion of hires with publicly identifiable political donations to the governing party.

V. A final note on "accountability."

Proponents of Schedule F, and of Amendment 1, use the word accountability frequently. It is worth asking what the word means when it is used this way. A classified employee today is accountable — to performance reviews, to disciplinary processes, to inspectors general, to the Civil Service Commission, and ultimately to the courts. What the word accountability is being used to mean, in this context, is firable. A merit system is accountable for performance. A spoils system is firable for disloyalty. These are not the same thing, and the conflation of them is the rhetorical move at the heart of Amendment 1.

Vote NO on Amendment 1.