Recent news coverage of the federal workforce has mentioned a variety of new ‘Schedules’ including ‘G’ and ‘P/C.’ Trying to understand what they mean? You are not alone.
So, there are a number of ways we can describe the federal workforce utilizing characteristics of the job, appointment, pay scale, tenure, and hiring route to name a few. This blog will delve into just two of those characteristics, namely career/political appointment and the competitive, excepted, and Senior Executive Service types. Trust me, it's enough for one blog. I’ll do another down the road explaining the others.
Defining terms
Let's start by clarifying terminology, because without a clear understanding of terms, the rest of this discussion would be pretty confusing. These are the terms I’ll be bringing into this explanation:
Appointment - An individual is appointed to a job in the federal government. Appointments are typically to a career position or as we most often hear it to a noncareer position (i.e., political). This blog covers civilian appointments only.
Career - Used as a category in several of the job categories, we are using it in this blog in referring to the opposite of political appointment, and not other uses of the term as it informs tenure.
Schedule - This term is used to define a specific group of positions within the excepted service. The General Schedule, or GS, is a completely different usage of this term referring to a specific pay scale frequently used in government.
Digging in
When we try to understand the recent new ‘types’ of positions, it is necessary to break down the characteristics of the appointment and consider whether it is entirely new or is renaming or modifying a previous type of appointment. This lovely grid begins to uncover the differences.
| Service type | Career appointment (nonpolitical) | Noncareer appointment (political) |
|---|---|---|
| Competitive service | Career-conditional, Career, Term, and Temporary hires | N/A |
| Excepted service | Schedule A Pathways Schedule P/C |
Schedule C Schedule G PAS1 |
| Senior Executive Service | Career SES | Noncareer SES |
Schedule G is the most recent term hitting my LinkedIn feed. The addition of this schedule to the list of noncareer, excepted service positions reflects a desire to make a distinction within the political appointments specifically as a different focus (e.g., policy). Schedule G positions may have been labeled as Schedule C previously. Schedule G’s distinguishing feature is being focused on policy-development or policy-influencing work. This change does not impact career employees and feels like a ‘happy to glad’ change if you ask me even if the Executive Order establishing it cited a gap in schedules.
Three types of political appointees (Schedule C, PAS, and noncareer SES) have historically been tracked in the publication titled United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (also known as the Plum Book). The Plum Book is updated once every 4 years, usually during the lame duck period before a new administration arrives. When the next volume is published (expected December 2028), I have to believe Schedule G will be added at that time. The Partnership for Public Service recently published a look at Schedule G’s implementation.
Shifting to the other side of the table (and the alphabet), we have the new Schedule P/C (stands for Schedule Policy/Career), previously known as Schedule F. Like Schedule G, Schedule P/C positions are to be focused on ‘confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating’ roles, but Schedule P/C does something that Schedule G does not.
Schedule P/C shifts positions from competitive/career to excepted/career. Positions moved into Schedule P/C stay career jobs filled on a nonpartisan basis, but they become at-will positions excepted from adverse action procedures and appeals. A career/competitive employee, who has passed their probationary period and receives acceptable ratings, is protected from a variety of management abuses by their status. Schedule P/C employees do not have the same protections² as a career/competitive employee. The introduction of Schedule P/C and the plan to convert employees to it ultimately allow the administration greater ability to dismiss employees working in or near policy development.
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¹ PAS is shorthand for Presidential Appointment with Senate confirmation. PAS positions are typically the most senior positions in government including agency heads, Department Secretaries, etc.
² The comparison is a bit more nuanced than I have described. Those shades of gray would be hard to explain in plain language. For additional details, I encourage you to dig into the code available here.
Founder’s Note: I started my federal career as an excepted service employee on a two-year appointment. About a year and a half into that role, I was told by the new office director that my appointment would be renewed. Time passed and paperwork was not completed. As the remaining time in my appointment ran short, the director did not take any action. I felt as though the renewal was being used as a carrot. It got complicated after that — for a lot of reasons.
That director never extended my appointment because he was removed from the position a few months later. I ended up in a new office where my director, seeing my contributions in the first few months, worked to extend my appointment well in advance of its expiration. She invested in me and encouraged me to apply to career/competitive appointments open in the office. I was beyond thrilled when I landed one and was finally in a career/competitive position.
These were some of the scariest months in my career. I truly felt like at any time, I could be dropped off payroll. I worried all the time about my finances as I had just bought my first house. My original Director, the one who used my renewal as a bargaining chip, is not typical in the federal government — at least not in my experience. But the protections that apply to a career/competitive appointment are there for the one manager who abuses their role — not the majority who do not.
If I had stayed in government last year, I likely would have been converted to Schedule P/C. The changes I have seen implemented — including removal of telework, reasonable accommodations, reassignment without negotiation, and who knows what else — have broken the spirit of career/competitive feds. We all made our choices based on the best available data and our priorities. For me, the idea of losing the protections I had fought for was a critical factor in my decision to leave. I don’t know about you, but this is an alphabet I’d rather not be a part of.