# Administrative Law Judge **Administrative law judges (ALJs)** preside over formal adjudications inside federal agencies — Social Security disability claims, SEC enforcement, NLRB and immigration-adjacent proceedings, and much more. Executive Order 13843 (July 2018) moved ALJ hiring out of the [[Competitive Service]] into **Schedule E** of the [[Excepted Service]], letting agency heads select ALJs directly rather than from an OPM register. ALJs are the structurally instructive case in the second-term personnel fight: their removal protection lives in a **statute** — 5 U.S.C. § 7521 requires a good-cause finding by the [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] — so the reclassification stripped the hiring process without stripping the tenure. The vulnerability, in other words, is in the regulatory layer rather than in excepted status as such. See [[Federal Workforce Structure Tree]]. This is a stub — expand with *Lucia v. SEC*, the appointments-clause line, and the SSA ALJ corps. ## See Also - [[Federal Workforce Structure Tree]] - [[Excepted Service]] - [[Merit Systems Protection Board]]