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The Office of Personnel Management  (OPM) plans to finalize a rule to uphold civil service protections and merit system principles after consideration of comments on OPM’s proposal. OPM proposed to clarify that employees who are moved involuntarily from the competitive to the excepted service, or from one excepted service schedule to another, retain the status and adverse action rights they had at the time of movement. OPM’s proposal also required federal agencies to follow specific procedures upon moving any employees without their consent from the competitive service to the excepted service or, if already in the excepted service, to a different excepted service schedule. Finally, OPM proposed to define positions of a "confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character," in accordance with legislative history and Congressional intent, to mean political appointments. Petitions from the National Treasury Employees Union and the Federal Workers Alliance informed the development of the proposed rule.