EPA is declining to make public a list of jobs that could be reclassified and stripped of standard civil service protections.
“The records are exempt from disclosure because they are predecisional and deliberative and would harm agency decision making if released,” an employee in EPA’s Office of Mission Support wrote in a response this week to a Freedom of Information Act request from POLITICO’s E&E News.
In the request, E&E News had sought the review of EPA positions “to be placed in Schedule Policy/Career, otherwise known as Schedule F.” EPA and other agencies were supposed to turn in their interim recommendations to the Office of Personnel Management by April 20, according to a memo from acting OPM Director Charles Ezell.
Near the end of his first term, President Donald Trump in a 2020 executive order created Schedule F, which would have made it easier to fire employees involved in policy-making positions. Trump framed the approach as a way to instill more accountability into the career federal workforce; critics said it would spur the workforce’s politicization.
