Nearly 50 good government organizations, federal employee groups and other policy advocates on Thursday urged leaders in Congress to pass legislation blocking Republican-led efforts to strip tens of thousands of career federal employees of their civil service protections before the end of the legislative session in December.

In the waning days of his administration, then-President Trump signed an executive order establishing a new Schedule F within the federal government’s excepted service for federal workers in policy-related jobs and exempting the positions from most civil service rules. The edict instructed agencies to identify positions that would qualify for this new job classification and to convert employees in those jobs to Schedule F, effectively making them at-will employees.

Although two agencies submitted plans to reclassify a portion of their workforce—including the Office of Management and Budget, which slated 68% of its employees for conversion—to the Office of Personnel Management, ultimately no positions were reclassified before President Biden was sworn in, at which point the executive order was swiftly rescinded.

But earlier this year, reports indicated that conservative activists have continued to work on Schedule F and plan to be ready to re-institute the measure immediately upon the election of the next Republican president. That news triggered a renewed push by congressional Democrats to pass the Preventing a Patronage System Act, which would...

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