H.R. 492: Saving the Civil Service Act

The Saving the Civil Service Act would block the federal government from creating or using a new excepted-service category like Schedule F, the Trump-era plan designed to move certain policy-related federal jobs out of the traditional civil service system. In simple terms, the bill tries to stop a future administration from reclassifying career employees into a category with fewer job protections and then removing them more easily.

The bill does this by freezing the allowable excepted-service schedules to the ones that existed on September 30, 2020 — schedules A through E under current federal personnel rules. That means agencies could not create a new schedule outside that framework, and they could not shift jobs into some new category built to bypass normal hiring and firing protections. It also says agencies need advance approval from the Office of Personnel Management before moving any occupied job into Schedule C, which is generally used for confidential or policy-related positions.

It also puts numerical and procedural limits on moving workers out of the competitive service. During a presidential term, an agency could transfer no more than 1% of its workforce — or five employees, whichever is greater — from the competitive service into the excepted service. On top of that, employees would generally have to give written consent before their job is moved from the competitive service into the excepted service, or from one excepted-service schedule to another.

Politically, this is a direct response to long-running fights over the independence of the federal workforce. Backers argue that expert civil servants should not be turned into at-will political employees when administrations change. The bill does not create new spending or a new program; instead, it rewrites the guardrails around how federal jobs can be classified. Its real impact would be on presidential personnel power, agency flexibility, and the stability of the career bureaucracy.