This Seemingly Boring Issue Could Transform Government

Few people have come across Schedule C employees in their newsfeeds, but the sheer number of them is an unsolved problem with serious consequences.

Too many presidential appointees are impractical, but they can also lead to meddling in agency expertise. Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Unless you’re a policy wonk, you probably have no reason to know what Schedule C employees are. However, they’ve become a major obstacle to allowing expertise to run federal agencies.

Schedule C employees are employees in federal agencies that the president appoints directly. They often require Senate confirmation, which can make it take even longer to appoint them.

That means many positions remain unfilled. By the end of May 2024, Joe Biden had chosen about half of the appointments that require Senate confirmation. The number of appointments became too high when Carter roughly doubled them, and no president has reduced the number of Schedule C employees to manageable numbers since.

There’s a reason presidents want those direct appointees. They allow the president to increase his influence within regulatory agencies. That sounds bland, but it gives the president outsize control over policy that should be left to experts.