Dudek calls for entire SSA offices to be converted to new Schedule F

Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek this month instructed staff to prepare to convert wide swathes of his agency to the revamped Schedule F, a move that experts say would stretch even the Trump administration’s wide definition of “policy-related” jobs “beyond all recognition.”

The Trump administration last week began moving forward with implementation of the newly-renamed Schedule Policy/Career, a new job classification within the federal government’s excepted service for career federal workers in “policy-related” positions. Employees reclassified into the new job category would be stripped of their civil service protections.

In an April 7 internal email obtained by Government Executive, the acting commissioner took a sweeping view of the role of policy at the independent agency.

“For SSA, policy-making positions encompass a wide range of responsibilities, including shaping regulations and sub-regulatory guidance, overseeing administrative law, managing contracts, guiding information resources management, and integrating research into decision-making,” he wrote. “Individuals in these roles often develop and implement both formal rules and informal policies, interpret and apply laws, and influence how SSA operates.”

Dudek instructed staff to reclassify all senior executives, senior leaders and GS-14 and GS-15 senior advisors, except the chief actuary, to the new Schedule F, as well as the entire Office of the Commissioner. Also on track for reclassification are more than half a dozen offices within the Office of the Chief Information Officer; the offices of Appellate Operations, Disability Determinations, Hearings Operations and Quality Review within the Office of Disability Adjudication; as well as several components within the Office of External Affairs, Office of General Counsel and the Office of Mission Support.

“The Office of Mission Support is instructed to take the necessary steps to align positions within these components as Policy/Career within the next 90 days,” Dudek wrote.

The agency did not respond to a request for comment.

Employee groups and Social Security experts were taken aback by Dudek’s maximalist approach to implementing the new job category. Reclassifying the Office of Hearing Operations entirely into Schedule Policy/Career would impact upwards of 20% of the workforce represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, including jobs that start at as little as $40,000 per year.

“If this email constitutes SSA’s full decision, then the agency has contorted the term ‘policy-influencing’ beyond all recognition,” said Rich Couture, a spokesman for AFGE’s Social Security Administration general committee. “AFGE bargaining unit employees at SSA dutifully apply policies and procedures, established by agency leadership, in the performance of their duties for the American people every day. The employees are not policy-makers . . . The agency cannot take a chainsaw to necessary civil service protections to thousands of SSA workers in an attempt to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Kathleen Romig, director of social security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said Dudek’s plan seems to bely a misunderstanding of employees’ whose job is to follow policy, not set it.

“We’re talking about all of external affairs, all of disability adjudication and half of mission support—that’s so many people,” Romig said. “The idea that all of the people who work in each one of those components and subcomponents are somehow policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating is just absurd on its face. Looking at some roles specifically, in communications, it’s people writing pamphlets—they’re not policy-influencing. At the Office of HR—now ‘personnel’—that’s not policy-influencing, they’re just signing employees up for benefits, hiring and running security clearances. You can just point in any direction and say, ‘That doesn’t pass the smell test.’”

Romig, a former SSA researcher, took particular issue with Dudek’s targeting of the agency’s research functions.

“The statistics that the agency puts out—how many people are getting benefits each month and for how much, and performance stats—all this stuff is just the facts,” she said. “That’s not policy-influencing, it’s just describing what the agency is doing and where our tax dollars are going.”