A group of former senior officials sent a letter to congressional committee leaders last Thursday, in protest of the controversial Schedule F executive order implemented during the Trump administration.

This years-long national debate over Schedule F has recently been a steadily growing angle: a proposed a middle-way answer to the problem of proper federal workforce accountability.

The former officials called the pending return of Schedule F “dangerous”, and are calling on Congress to enact specific reforms to update the civil service to a more modern build. One of their goals is to hold federal employees more accountable which was in fact the same goal the Trump administration said was the intent of Schedule F. However unlike Schedule F, the group’s recommendations would maintain merit system principles as well as long-standing job protections for federal workers.

“We contend that the Congress must forever preclude anything that has the potential to make partisan political loyalty the litmus test, whether express or implied, for any personnel action affecting a federal career civil servant, including senior career executives,” the former officials wrote in the letter to committee leaders. “However, at the same time, we believe that the Congress must also dramatically simplify the well-intentioned but too-cumbersome, too-attenuated and too-complicated processes that we are currently forced use to hold those same civil servants accountable.”

Former Homeland Security Deputy Secretary James Loy,  former CIA Director Mike Hayden, former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, former Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and former Navy Secretary Sean O’Keefe who were all senior officials during previous Republican administrations, stamped their signature on the letter.

“We believe that our career federal civil servants must be accountable to the American people and those that are elected to represent them,” the group wrote. “But while that core principle is essential to the effective functioning of our democratic system of government, it is in desperate need of reform and modernization.”

Schedule F, a now-overturned Trump administration executive order that sought to reclassify certain federal employees to make them at-will workers in addition to being easier to fire, has of late gained more public awareness. Former Trump administration officials have been revisiting plans to revive a new policy akin to Schedule F, that is if Trump wins the presidential election.

The urgent call to action from the former officials is far from the only effort various stakeholders have made in the months leading up to the presidential election this fall. Separate from the letter, a new working group has recently stepped up on the topic of Schedule F as well. The group, composed mainly of academics and former public sector executives, outlined five areas — agility, accountability, collaboration, outcomes and capacity — that the next administration should focus on for creating lasting civil service reform.

“The ideas put out by Project 2025 and Schedule F are certainly worth considering. But we think that they’re the wrong solutions to the problems that we’ve got,” Don Kettl, former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, and a leader of the working group, said in an interview. “What we wanted to do was to put together an alternative set of ideas from across the political spectrum as an alternative to think about what it is that we might be able to do to make government more efficient, more effective and ultimately more responsive.”

In the letter to Congress on Thursday, the former national security officials said while they don’t believe Schedule F is the answer, they also don’t want to continue what they said is the “status quo” for federal employee accountability. The group recommended striking a balance that takes action to fix the problems, while avoiding the reenactment Schedule F.

“The blueprints proffered by both sides of the political aisle are problematic,” the group wrote in the letter. “One side is firmly rooted in a status quo that inadvertently impedes accountability, while the other, if implemented, may end up politicizing the very civil servants we all want to be politically neutral.”

Ron Sanders, former chairman of the Federal Salary Council appointed by former President Donald Trump, resigned from his position in 2020 in direct response to the Schedule F executive order. For the last several months, Sanders has been working with former officials to create a plan of action to recommend to Congress. Although only five Republican former officials signed the letter to Congress this week, Sanders said the group is bipartisan and much larger.

“They’ve all had to deal with poorly performing or misbehaving employees, and they know how hard that is,” Sanders said in an interview. “They don’t think politicizing the civil service is the answer. They don’t think political loyalty should be the criterion. But they also think [the current system] is too hard.”

The letter comes just as House and Senate lawmakers are taking up the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The group said the NDAA is the best, most likely vehicle that can propel forward the proposals in the short-term.

“In part because that’s the only ‘must-pass’ bill likely to move this session — but also because, in theory, those are the committees that worry about national security, and the former officials have said this is a national security issue,” Sanders said.

Last week, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) introduced a bipartisan amendment to the 2025 NDAA that would in effect prevent a presidential administration from creating Schedule F or a similar type of excepted employee classification.

At this point in the process for the 2025 NDAA, any further changes to the legislation would have to come from a Congress member introducing a floor amendment. NARFE National President William Shackelford urged lawmakers to move Connolly’s amendment to a floor vote.

“It is clearly germane to the NDAA due to its application to DoD civilian employees, 700,000 of whom make up more than a third of the federal workforce,” Shackelford said in a June 4 letter. “Moreover, past NDAAs have routinely included governmentwide federal workforce provisions due to their impact on the DoD civilian workforce.”

A spokeswoman for House Oversight and Accountability Committee Democrats declined to comment on whether any committee members had plans to introduce an amendment on the floor related to the further civil service reform recommendations in the letter. But she expressed agreement with the intentions of the former officials.

“[We] agree with this impressive bipartisan group of public servants that public service must be based on qualifications and merit, not political fealty,” the spokeswoman said in a statement to Federal News Network. “Wholesale firing of federal experts who use data, science and law to improve federal government is not acceptable. We hope our Republican counterparts will join Democrats in discussions to revitalize and improve the federal workforce rather than blindly following Trump into causing irreparable harm to essential government services.”

And lastly, the group proposed instating periodic reviews of the balance between political appointees and career civil servants in the Defense Department, as well as other national security and intelligence agencies.