Sponsors (25)
Official title: Place limitations on excepting positions from the competitive service, and for other purposes.
Introduced January 16, 2025 by Timothy Michael Kaine · Last progress January 16, 2025
The bill strengthens civil‑service protections and transparency to limit politicized or noncompetitive hiring, at the trade-off of reduced agency flexibility and added administrative costs that may hinder specialized and emergency hiring (including at the VA).
Federal employees (competitive service) gain stronger job protections because transfers to the excepted service require the employee's written consent, reducing involuntary reassignments.
The bill constrains expansion of political or noncompetitive hiring (caps on conversions, limits to excepted schedules A–E as of 9/30/2020, and OPM approval requirements), reducing opportunities to politicize the civil service and protecting merit-based hiring.
Annual OPM reporting to Congress about excepted‑service conversions and any violations increases transparency and enables congressional oversight of hiring and personnel changes.
Agencies may be unable to create needed excepted positions for specialized, emergency, or hard-to-recruit roles (including certain VA clinical and health staff), hindering recruitment and potentially affecting delivery of services to veterans and the public.
Requiring consent, OPM approvals, and numerical limits can slow agencies' ability to quickly reclassify or move employees to meet mission needs, reducing operational flexibility and responsiveness.
Agencies will incur additional administrative burden and costs to track, justify, report every transfer, and meet approval timelines, which could increase overhead and impose costs on taxpayers.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Restricts agency conversions of competitive service positions to excepted service, requires OPM approval and employee consent, adds annual Congressional reporting, and mandates OPM regs in 90 days.
Prohibits most agency moves of jobs between the competitive service and the excepted service without meeting narrow conditions. It requires OPM approval and written employee consent for transfers, caps transfers into excepted schedules, extends coverage to certain VA positions, mandates annual reporting to Congress on conversions, and directs OPM to issue implementing regulations within 90 days.