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Excepted service

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The federal civil service is made up of individuals other than military personnel who are employed by the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of the federal government. The civil service is subdivided into the competitive service, the excepted service, and the Senior Executive Service.
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The excepted service is a subset of the federal civil service that is made up of civilian positions in the federal government outside of the competitive service or the Senior Executive Service. Excepted service positions, also known as unclassified positions, require specialized expertise and are not subject to the merit-based selection process or grade-level classifications of the competitive service.[1][2][3]

President Donald Trump (R) moved administrative law judges from the competitive to the excepted service in July 2018. Read more here.

Background

See also: Civil service, competitive service, Senior Executive Service

The federal civil service is made up of the competitive service, the excepted service, and the Senior Executive Service (SES). The excepted service functions as "a residual category covering all the many federal entities and groups of employees that are not part of the competitive service or the SES," according to the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO). An analysis by the GAO in 1996 found that excepted service positions made up the majority of civil service positions in the judicial and legislative branches and about half of the civil service positions in the executive branch. A September 2013 report by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) identified roughly 1,250,000 members of the excepted service across the federal government.[4][5]

Key features

The excepted service provides government entities with an avenue to fill specialized positions that cannot be properly recruited or evaluated through the competitive service's centralized, merit-based hiring process administered by OPM. Instead, federal agencies have the authority to determine the specific hiring criteria for excepted service positions. Examples of excepted service roles include federal attorneys, administrative law judges, intelligence officers, chaplains, and certain scientific or technical experts.[6]

Government entities may fill excepted service positions in the following hiring scenarios, according to OPM:[7]

“
  • To attract highly specialized professionals
  • To hire individuals with specific backgrounds
  • For hard-to-recruit occupations
  • For positions that deal with confidential information[8]
 ”

Excepted service positions are not subject to the competitive service's appointment, compensation, and classification rules under Title 5 of the United States Code, but must still follow veterans' preference—the practice of showing preference for veteran applicants over non-veteran applicants in the hiring process.[9][10]

See also

External links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Office of Personnel Management, "Excepted service," accessed August 6, 2018
  2. ↑ Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, "PART 213—EXCEPTED SERVICE," accessed August 6, 2018
  3. ↑ FedSmith.com, "Federal Job Classifications: Competitive vs. Excepted Service," November 28, 2010
  4. ↑ U.S. General Accounting Office, "The Excepted Service—A Research Profile," May 1997
  5. ↑ Office of Personnel Management, "Employment and Trends - September 2013," accessed August 16, 2018
  6. ↑ Encyclopedia Britannica, "Pendleton Civil Service Act," accessed September 29, 2017
  7. ↑ USA Jobs, "Unique hiring paths," accessed August 15, 2018
  8. ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
  9. ↑ USA Jobs, "Entering Federal Service," accessed August 6, 2018
  10. ↑ USA Jobs, "Veterans," accessed August 6, 2018
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