Create more non-career appointee positions at the department
What the document says“Personnel Management should be engaged on ways to provide authorities for a higher number of non-career PA positions.”
The chapter says the White House personnel office can be inclined to discount the department's importance, but that given the political attention it generates it should understand the importance of finding talented political appointees to serve there.
What the document actually says“Personnel Management should be engaged on ways to provide authorities for a higher number of non-career PA positions.”
Work with the personnel agency. Get more posts that political staff can fill.
Most VA jobs are career jobs. A few are filled by the president's own picks. The book wants more of those.
Creating Schedule G in the Excepted Service
2025-07-17 · 90 FR 34753
Executive Order 14317 of July 17, 2025 creates Schedule G in the excepted service for noncareer positions of a policy-making or policy-advocating character that normally change at a presidential transition, a category the order says did not previously exist, and directs the Office of Personnel Management to write the implementing regulations. Its implementation section addresses the Secretary of Veterans Affairs directly on how to make those appointments. That is the personnel agency providing a new authority to appoint noncareer political staff, which is what the chapter asks for. The fit breaks down because Schedule G is an excepted service schedule, not the noncareer Presidential Appointment positions the chapter names, it is government-wide rather than an authority granted to the department, and it sets no number, so nothing indexed raises the count of political appointees at Veterans Affairs.
An order of July 17, 2025 sets up Schedule G. It covers policy jobs that change when a new President comes in. That is a new way to hire political staff, as the chapter asked. But Schedule G is not the job type the chapter names, it covers all agencies, and it sets no number.