Appendix L: Civil service, accountability and public capacity

Supports staffing and delivery.

Project 2029 needs a government that can move quickly and explain what it is doing. It also needs officials willing to report that a loan program is failing, an application process makes no sense, or a presidential priority cannot proceed under the law as written. Those requirements belong together. A coordinating team that hears only what the president wants to hear will be unable to coordinate anything useful.

The new administration should therefore judge the inherited civil-service changes individually. Some hiring reforms make it easier to find people who can do the work. Others make career employment depend more heavily on the wishes of political leaders. Reversing everything wastes useful machinery; keeping everything leaves the Mission dependent on a workforce that may be afraid to speak.

Appendix K explains the appointments and hiring authorities. The decisions below will make that workforce effective, alongside restoring the Department of Education's ability to perform its statutory work.

Keep the hiring improvements

The administration should retain the useful direction of the 2025 hiring reforms: broader candidate selection instead of rigid reliance on the old rule of three, shared competitions that can fill positions across agencies, assessments that test relevant ability, and the 80-day hiring target. The implementing laws, regulations, and exceptions govern each tool. The point is to make hiring both faster and more closely connected to the work. OPM's Merit Hiring Plan.

Applicant self-rating is a poor substitute for finding out whether somebody can perform the job. A questionnaire that rewards every applicant for claiming mastery can screen out the person who answers carefully and honestly. A useful technical assessment gives the government evidence. Shared hiring lets several agencies use that evidence without repeating the entire competition.

Those improvements matter immediately to Project 2029. The administration needs people who can underwrite, manage grants, administer construction, and make public services usable. It should keep the tools that identify them and ensure managers have the capacity to use those tools. Speed is valuable when the vacancy is filled by somebody equipped to do the job.

Remove the presidential-loyalty question

The 2025 plan introduced four short essay questions for many competitive-service vacancies at GS-05 and above. One asks applicants how they would advance the president's executive orders and policy priorities. Project 2029 would remove that question while retaining the other useful parts of the questionnaire.

The precise rule matters. OPM's subsequent guidance provides exceptions, says the answers are not scored or rated, prohibits using them as an ideological litmus test, and says applicants are not disqualified for leaving them unanswered. The source's description of four mandatory answers in every covered vacancy was too broad. OPM's Merit Hiring Plan questions and answers.

The political objection remains. A career applicant seeking to administer loans should demonstrate competence and commitment to lawful public service. Asking for a personal account of which presidential initiatives they would advance invites a judgment that does not belong in that decision. Political appointees are selected to carry an administration's policy; the career workforce must be able to serve successive administrations and tell each the truth. We should not build a test we would object to when the other party administers it.

Remove positions from Schedule Policy/Career promptly

Schedule Policy/Career places designated policy-influencing career positions in an excepted-service category with reduced statutory removal protections. Executive Order 14171 revived the approach in January 2025; OPM published its implementing final rule in February 2026. The plan's later baseline records roughly 8,000 positions designated through the June 2026 executive action. That is a dated account of designated positions, not a verified count of employees who will still occupy them at inauguration. OPM's Schedule Policy/Career implementation materials.

The proposal is to begin reversing the designations on day one and return the affected positions to the appropriate protected status, while initially leaving the unused category in the regulations. The president should prepare the necessary order with OPM and agency personnel offices during the transition. The order, employee notices, and personnel actions must accomplish the actual restoration. Revoking one document should not be described as automatically repairing every employee's status without implementation.

Removing the category from the regulations is a different task, potentially involving rulemaking and litigation. The plan expects that route to consume much of a year; it is a planning judgment, not a fixed legal timetable. The administration should prioritize restoring protections and seek a statutory settlement when a suitable legislative vehicle exists. Congress can make the result more durable than an executive order that a later president can reverse.

Restore all three sets of protections

The problem is wider than an appeal against dismissal. Three legal protections are implicated. Chapter 75 of title 5 provides notice and appeal procedures for covered adverse actions. Chapter 43 supplies protections for performance-based demotion or removal. Section 2302 prohibits specified personnel practices, including retaliation against whistleblowers, for covered positions. The classification and the implementing rule affect access to each. The February 2026 final rule, 5 U.S.C. §2302.

Those statutory routes should not be confused with every other legal protection an employee may hold. OPM says the category remains career and merit-based, and requires agency policies addressing whistleblower retaliation, political discrimination, and other misconduct. Other applicable laws continue to matter. The objection is that administrative policies are different from the ordinary statutory rights, independent enforcement and appeals being removed. OPM's explanation of its final rule.

The transition must identify the protections attached to each affected position and ensure the restoration reaches all three areas. A promise that employees will be treated fairly is not a replacement for an enforceable route when they are not.

Protect the people who report failure

For this plan, whistleblower protection has an immediate operational purpose. The temporary RFC team exists partly to discover why available programs fail to deliver. The officials who see an application stall, a contractor evade a condition, or a reporting system hide failure are often the people with the most useful information.

If speaking threatens their employment and the ordinary protections are unavailable, the White House may never hear what it needs to know. The failure will not necessarily appear as a dramatic dismissal. It may be a phone call that nobody makes, followed by months of reports saying the program is on schedule.

Public pressure on a named blockage must therefore be paired with a credible ability to explain it. Sometimes the agency needs another employee. Sometimes the application is incomplete. Sometimes Congress has prohibited the requested action. The coordinating team has to distinguish those cases. Protecting truthful reporting is part of building an administration that can deliver its own program.

Date the litigation and prepare for the law in force

The legal position can change before 2029. The Congressional Research Service's March 26, 2026 account described an NTEU challenge in the District of Columbia and a separate challenge brought by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and four unions in Maryland. It recorded the procedural position then, including the NTEU case's relationship to the issuance of implementing designations. Those suits questioned the order and its implementation; that dated account is not a claim that neither case has advanced since March. CRS, *Schedule Policy/Career: 2026 Final Rule, Legal Challenges, and Issues for Lawmakers*.

The transition should track the actual orders, rules, judgments, and personnel actions it will inherit. The plan does not depend on predicting which challenge succeeds. It depends on restoring an effective, protected career workforce through the lawful route available at inauguration. If litigation has already changed the category, the implementation must start from that position.

Publish the coordinating team's people and work

A few dozen people recruited through exceptional hiring routes and placed close to the president can influence access to very large federal programs. Their work must be visible. The temporary RFC staff should publish who works in it, what they did before, what role they hold, and what actions they take, beginning in its first week. Its public account must distinguish its recommendations and coordination from the awards authorized agency officials make.

GAO's August 2026 DOGE review shows why a general assurance is insufficient. Nine executive agencies provided information concerning 64 people who had held relevant positions in those agencies and the Executive Office of the President during January 20, 2025–January 31, 2026. The agencies supplied 38 financial disclosures and information supporting completion of records-management training for 18 people. EOP did not supply the requested individual training and disclosure records. These are findings about information obtained, not proof that every person without a supplied record violated a requirement; some were detailees whose home agencies held responsibilities. GAO-26-108403.

The answer is to establish responsibility for disclosures, training, and records when people join, and publish the lawful public record of the team's work. The register of blockages then identifies what is stuck, the office able to act, and how long the issue has remained unresolved. Confidential financial disclosures and protected personal or commercial information retain their legal protections. Public accountability means explaining decisions and responsibility clearly enough that the work can be checked.

Industry experience is valuable, but it brings financial and professional interests that must be identified. Federal conflict-of-interest law can require recusal from particular matters involving those interests; applicable impartiality and post-employment rules also govern the work. The team will establish responsibility for ethics review when each person joins, alongside its disclosure and records obligations. 18 U.S.C. §208, OGE's standards of conduct.

Restore Education's operating capacity

The president will reverse the direction to dismantle the Department of Education and begin restoring its capacity to perform the duties Congress assigned. The March 2025 executive order directed steps toward closure within the law; it did not itself repeal the department's statutory establishment. November's announcement described six interagency agreements with Labor, Interior, HHS, and State, repeatedly retaining Education oversight. These were arrangements for administering programs, not six statutes abolishing departmental offices. Executive Order 14242, Education's November 2025 announcement.

The transition will identify the agreements, personnel assignments, records, contracts, and funds that must return, then prepare a schedule that keeps grants and benefits moving. One published example shows why this takes implementation: the Education–Labor Postsecondary agreement allows termination on 90 days' advance written agreement by both parties, permits written modifications by mutual agreement and provides for reasonable termination costs. The instruments and amendments in force at inauguration will govern the actual steps. ED–DOL Postsecondary agreement, section 5.

The first week can establish direction, accountable officials, and the restoration schedule. Returning experienced staff and rebuilding operations require available resources and lawful personnel actions. A signature can start that work; it cannot guarantee its completion in a week at no cost.

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