# Excepted Service The **excepted service** is every federal civil-service position that is neither in the [[Competitive Service]] nor in the [[Senior Executive Service]] (5 U.S.C. § 2103). These positions are excepted from competitive examination by statute, by [[OPM]] regulation (5 C.F.R. Part 213) or by presidential order. CRS puts about one-third of the civilian workforce here. That includes agencies excepted wholesale by statute, such as the FBI and the intelligence agencies, which sit outside the lettered schedules entirely. ## The schedules | Schedule | Covers | Career or political | Protection | |---|---|---|---| | **A** | Jobs where examination is impracticable: agency attorneys, chaplains, the disability-hiring authority | Career | MSPB appeal after the trial period | | **B** | Noncompetitive examination for specialized or critical needs | Career | MSPB appeal | | **C** | Confidential or policy-determining, GS-15 and below | Political | Serve at pleasure | | **D** | Pathways: interns and recent graduates | Career | MSPB appeal | | **E** | [[Administrative Law Judge]]s (EO 13843, 2018) | Career | Removal requires an MSPB good-cause finding (5 U.S.C. § 7521) | | **Policy/Career** | Formerly [[Schedule F]]: career "policy-influencing" posts | Career | No adverse-action procedure, no MSPB appeal | | **G** | [[Schedule G]]: noncareer policy-making or policy-advocating posts (2025) | Political | Serve at pleasure | Excepted status alone is not a loss of protection. Schedule A, B and D employees keep appeal rights, and Schedule E's protection survives because it lives in a statute rather than a regulation. What matters is which schedule a job is in, and whether its protection rests on a statute or on an executive order that the next order can undo. ## The 2025–26 expansion Before 2025 there were five lettered schedules in use, A through E. The second term added two: - **Schedule Policy/Career.** The OPM final rule was published in the Federal Register on February 6, 2026 (public inspection February 5) and took effect March 9, 2026. [[Executive Order 14410]] (June 3, 2026) then moved about 8,000 positions into it. - **Schedule G.** It was created by [[Executive Order 14317]] (July 17, 2025). On September 18, 2026, OPM proposed rewriting its excepted-service rules to write Schedules E, G and Policy/Career into regulation. The proposal would allow noncompetitive Pathways conversions *into* Schedule Policy/Career, which gives interns and recent graduates a route into the at-will career schedule. It would also replace the old employment-list and order-of-selection structure with a single "priority consideration" framework, keeping veterans' preference. Comments close November 17, 2026. ## See Also - [[Federal Workforce Structure Tree]] - [[Competitive Service]] · [[Schedule C]] · [[Schedule F]] · [[Schedule G]] - [[Administrative Law Judge]] · [[Merit Systems Protection Board]]