Senior Executive Service SES

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 created the Senior Executive Service, which began on July 13, 1979, replacing the top three grades of the General Schedule with a separate system modeled partly on the British senior civil service. Its designers wanted executives who could be moved among assignments, paid for performance, and held accountable for results, rather than tied to a single position. The Office of Personnel Management sets the rules and allocates SES positions to agencies.

The SES includes about 8,000 positions, such as heads of bureaus, regional administrators, and chief financial and information officers. Most are career executives selected through a merit process and certified by a qualifications review board, while by law no more than 10 percent governmentwide may be noncareer political appointees. SES members are paid within a pay range tied to executive branch levels, receive annual performance ratings that can bring bonuses or removal from the service, and can be reassigned, though a career executive cannot be involuntarily moved within 120 days after a new agency head takes office.

The SES sits at the line between political leadership and the career workforce, and every administration has wrestled with how much control to exert over it. In 2025 the Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to adopt new SES performance standards emphasizing carrying out the President's policy priorities, and many senior executives were reassigned, removed, or left during workforce reductions. Supporters said the changes made senior managers accountable to elected leadership, while critics said they turned career executives into political loyalists and drained institutional knowledge.