The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to reclassify hundreds of positions in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), potentially stripping many employees of traditional civil service protections.
This is according to a report from Reuters which obtained an internal agency memo detailing the planned reclassification of hundreds of positions to at-will status. According to the report, supervisors across multiple HHS agencies were informed that an initial wave of positions may soon be reclassified with more expected later.
This change means that federal employees in these roles could be fired more easily without the civil service protections traditionally afforded to most federal employees.
The Return of Schedule F
These ongoing reclassifications of some federal employees to at-will status are part of President Trump’s ongoing efforts to reshape the federal workforce that began during his first term with the creation of Schedule F, which targeted positions involved in policy-making, policy-determination, and policy advocacy.
Schedule F was paused during the Biden administration, but after returning to office for his second term on January 20, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14171, titled “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce,” which laid the groundwork for reclassifying certain jobs as excepted-service roles. This initiative was expanded in July 2025 with Executive Order 14317, which formally created Schedule G within the excepted service framework.
These executive orders were part of a broader effort to provide more flexibility in hiring and removing political appointees in sensitive policy positions.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) followed up by issuing a final rule in early February 2026 to implement the Schedule Policy/Career (formerly known as Schedule F) framework. This rule was estimated to impact approximately 50,000 positions, roughly 2% of the federal workforce, shifting them out of traditional competitive-service protections and performance management requirements and making them at-will employees, thereby enabling the quick removal of any employees in this new category for poor performance, misconduct, or subversion of presidential directives.
On April 28, 2026, OPM Director Scott Kupor issued a memo to federal agencies, directing them to exclude all Schedule C and Schedule G General Schedule (GS) employees from the performance appraisal requirements of Subchapter I, Chapter 43, Title 5.
This means that these positions no longer require the formal establishment of performance standards, progress reviews, or annual ratings of record. Instead, these roles are treated as effectively “at-will,” aligning with the policy goals outlined in the earlier executive orders.
The memo clarified, however, that these employees operate outside the structured appraisal frameworks that apply to most competitive-service GS employees. They are excluded due to the confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating nature of their positions.
OPM’s recent actions and now the follow-on changes reportedly pending at HHS both represent the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to streamline the management of policy-influencing positions and fully implement the framework envisioned by President Trump’s executive orders.
