United States federal civil service
non-elected workforce of the US government
The United States federal civil service is the civilian workforce (i.e., non-elected and non-military public sector employees) of the United States federal government's departments and agencies. The federal civil service was established in 1871 (5 U.S.C. § 2101). U.S. state and local government entities often have comparable civil service systems that are modeled on the national system to varying degrees.
The U.S. civil service is managed by the Office of Personnel Management, which in December 2011 reported approximately 2.79 million civil servants employed by the federal government. This included employees in the departments and agencies run by any of the three branches of government (the executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch) and the over 600,000 employees of the U.S. Postal Service.
Types of employees
There are three categories of U.S. federal employees:
The competitive service includes the majority of civil service positions, meaning employees are selected based on merit after a competitive hiring process for positions that are open to all applicants.
The Senior Executive Service (SES) is the classification for non-competitive, senior leadership positions filled by career employees or political appointments.
The excepted service (also known as unclassified service) includes jobs with a streamlined hiring process, such as security and intelligence functions (e.g., the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, State Department, etc.), interns, foreign service professionals, doctors, lawyers, judges, and others. Agencies with excepted service authorities create their own hiring policies and are not subject to most appointment, pay, and classification laws.
Hiring authorities
A hiring authority is the law, executive order, regulation that allows an agency to hire a person into the federal civil service.
“United States federal civil service” enters the record as non-elected workforce of the US government. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what United, States and federal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“United States federal civil service” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, United, States and federal provides the most credible route into that argument.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3075260. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1871 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “United States federal civil service” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.