Federal workforce policy changed twice in mid-2026 on the public record: Executive Order 14410 of June 3, 2026 created Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service, and a Merit Systems Protection Board final rule published September 3, 2026 ended the Board's deference to agency penalty choices in misconduct cases. Both move career civil service accountability toward removal.
What is Schedule Policy/Career?
Schedule Policy/Career is a new excepted service schedule — a category of federal positions outside the competitive hiring and removal rules — created by Executive Order 14410, published in the Federal Register on June 10, 2026. The order states its premise in its first section: "Officials in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, and policy-advocating roles (policy-influencing positions) play particularly important roles" in helping the President execute the laws, and "ensuring that such employees can be removed for misconduct or poor performance is essential to protecting democratic self-government by an elected President."
The order explicitly builds on Executive Order 13957 of October 2020 — the Trump-era first term order that created Schedule F, rescinded in 2021. The June 2026 version revives the concept with implementing machinery attached: positions whose occupants shape policy can be moved out of the competitive service, where adverse actions carry full Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) — the independent board that reviews federal personnel actions — appeal rights, and into the excepted service, where those protections are narrower.
What does the September 2026 MSPB rule do?
On September 3, 2026, the MSPB published a final rule amending 5 CFR Part 1201, docket OPM-2025-0012, titled Determining the Appropriate Penalty for Federal Employees Charged With Misconduct. The rule changes "the Board's review of the reasonableness of an agency's chosen penalty in misconduct-based adverse actions appealed to the Board" — in plain terms, the Board will no longer defer to the penalty an agency selected, but will review it on its own standard.
The direction matters as much as the mechanism. For four decades the Board applied the framework from its 1981 Douglas decision, which required balancing the aggravating factors against the employee's record and the leniency precedent in the agency's own penalty table. That balance functioned as a brake on removals. The 2026 rule shifts the balance point: agencies gain wider latitude to impose severe penalties, and employees appealing a misconduct removal face a Board that no longer starts from the assumption the agency's choice was reasonable.
How do the competitive and excepted services now compare?
The two changes work on different halves of the personnel system, and the comparison shows how they interlock.
| Feature | Competitive service (before 2026 baseline) | Schedule Policy/Career excepted service |
|---|---|---|
| Hiring | Competitive examining under OPM rules | Excepted appointment under the new schedule |
| Removal appeal | Full MSPB appeal rights | Narrower protections; removal for misconduct or poor performance facilitated by design |
| Penalty review | MSPB deference to agency penalty choice | Same rule change applies to the appeals that remain |
| Policy positions covered | Most career policy roles | Policy-influencing positions the order designates |
Read together, the table shows the strategy: the June order reduces how many policy employees reach the appeal stage at all, and the September rule changes what happens to those who do.
What are the arguments on each side?
The administration's argument is accountability and democratic control: elected presidents cannot execute the law if career staff in policy roles cannot be managed, and the order says as much in its purpose section. Supporters also note that excepted service schedules have always existed — Schedules A, B, and C predate this debate by decades — and that the order targets policy-influencing positions rather than the civil service wholesale.
The counterargument is institutional: competitive hiring and removal protections exist to prevent a spoils system, and career expertise in policy roles is what survives transitions. Federal employee groups and oversight watchers have warned that making policy staff removable at will pressures exactly the employees whose job is to give candid written advice. Both arguments now run through the MSPB's new penalty posture, where the practical meaning of "removable" gets tested case by case.
What does this mean for the Pentagon's own civilians?
The Department of Defense runs one of the largest civilian workforces in government, and its policy, acquisition, and intelligence-support staffs sit squarely in the population the June order defines as policy-influencing. A defense policy analyst who drafts positions on weapons programs, or a requirements officer who shapes what the department buys, does exactly the kind of work the order's language targets. How many defense positions are designated — and whether the national security workforce is carved out or included — will be visible in the implementing actions agencies publish.
The MSPB rule reaches defense civilians directly, because department misconduct appeals go to the same Board as every other agency's. A removal case from a defense components agency decided under the new penalty standard will shape how aggressively the department uses discipline, and the Board's published decisions are the record to watch.
What happens to employees already in the pipeline?
Both documents raise transition questions the texts themselves only partly answer. For employees moved into Schedule Policy/Career, the order's implementing provisions govern conversion terms — whether tenure, appeal rights, and time-in-service carry over — and affected employees' remedies will run through whatever administrative process the schedule provides, which is narrower than competitive service protections. For pending appeals, the MSPB rule applies to cases decided under the new regulation, and how the Board treats misconduct appeals filed before the effective date is a threshold question its early decisions will settle.
Unions and merit-system watchers have a further concern: the interaction of the two changes could concentrate removal power at exactly the career layer where institutional memory lives. The counterweight they point to is statutory — the merit system principles and prohibited personnel practices remain law, and the Office of Special Counsel, the agency that investigates prohibited personnel practices, keeps its jurisdiction regardless of which service an employee sits in. Whether that counterweight suffices is the live question of the next several years.
What should readers watch next?
Three documented markers: how many positions agencies actually move into Schedule Policy/Career — the Federal Register's June 10, 2026 publication runs to more than 200 pages of implementing detail; how the MSPB's penalty decisions cite the new rule in its first months; and whether Congress legislates, since the civil service rules the order amends are themselves codified law Congress can rewrite. What is settled on paper as of September 2026 is direction, not destination: the system is tilting toward removal, and the docketed cases will show how far it goes.
