Former executives warn Schedule F poses risk to national security

Former federal executives and good government groups on Tuesday warned lawmakers that the reimplementation of Schedule F and subsequent conversion of tens of thousands of federal employees into at-will political appointees could harm the nation’s security posture.

The ex-officials’ testimony came as part of a hearing on Schedule F, the abortive 2020 effort to remove the civil service protections of employees in “policy-related” jobs throughout the federal government that former President Trump has vowed to revive if elected this fall, hosted by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. No Republican spoke at the hearing; James Sherk, an architect of the initiative and an advisor to Trump during his first term, was initially scheduled to appear but ultimately was not listed in a press release announcing the hearing Monday.

“The prior administration sought to replace 50,000 nonpartisan career civil servants with appointees who followed the former president’s politics,” said Committee Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich. “This change would not just hinder government efficiency, it would also be disastrous for the American people, draining the federal government of institutional knowledge, expertise and continuity. It would slow down services, make us less prepared for when disaster strikes, and erode public trust in government.”

Former leaders at the Defense and Homeland Security departments said that arguments by proponents in favor of Schedule F—that it is too hard to fire poor-performing federal workers and that presidents are stymied by entrenched bureaucrats resistant to their policies—fundamentally misunderstand the role of nonpartisan civil servants.

“There are two essential roles for civil servants, and one is to inform policy,” said Elaine Duke, who served as deputy Homeland secretary and undersecretary for management at the Homeland Security Department under presidents of both parties. “With years of experience, it’s important for civil servants to understand the policy objective and help inform it so that it can be tailored to be most effective. The second role that civil servants have is executing the policy, and that’s tied to the first role, because we learn a lot through execution of the policy like what works and doesn’t work.”

Both Duke and Peter Levine, former deputy chief management officer and acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness at the Defense Department from 2015 through 2017, said they had never seen a career federal employee resist the policy decision of a political appointee.

“The ability of career civil servants to provide open and candid advice without losing their jobs enables political appointees like me to benefit from their knowledge and expertise,” Levine said. “The risk that political appointees will fail to listen to the informed views of career civil servants is far greater than the risk that civil servants will fail to carry out a directive from a political appointee once it has been made.”

Levine said that even if a second Trump administration implements Schedule F but is constrained in how it uses its authority, ultimately it will begin a trend toward an even more unwieldy presidential transition every four or eight years.

“The president who first imposes Schedule F would probably figure, ‘I can just replace people over time so there won’t be this great discontinuity [between administrations],’” Levine said. “The problem is that if one president replaces 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 then the next president will feel they can’t rely on those 2, 3, 5 or 10,000 people . . . If instead of replacing a few hundred political appointees and being able to rely on the career employees [during a transition], you head to replace 2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000, you wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on.”

Jenny Mattingley, vice president of governmental affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, said in addition to taking action to protect the federal workforce from attacks on the merit system, lawmakers should examine other ways to improve management to address “root causes” like difficulty in dealing with poor performers.

“One thing that we see often across federal agencies is an ad hoc—or often cut—training budgets, leadership development budgets,” she said. “These are not things that we do in terms of really developing our workforce and our leaders. So to do the things that we talk about, creating good environments, a good culture, a strong leadership culture, in the private sector, particularly at large companies, you see a lot of investment in that employee piece, and so we would encourage you to look at how to strengthen those things within the government as well.”