Imagine you’re smart and just starting your career at a federal agency. In six months, you master the work. You breeze through tasks your coworkers avoid, delivering results your supervisor calls the best she’s seen in years. She wants to promote you. But even though you’re outperforming a regulation written in the 1950s stops cold your promotion opportunity. Why? Because you haven’t sat in your chair long enough.

That was the time-in-grade rule. For roughly 80 years, it required most federal employees to wait 52 weeks at each grade before they could even be considered for the next one. Not 52 weeks of results. Just 52 weeks on the calendar. Whether you mastered the job in six weeks, six months, or six years, the clock was the clock.

That’s all changing.

This week, the Trump administration published a rule eliminating that restriction. Previous Administrations of both parties tried to do this, in June 1994 and again in November 2008, and failed. This time, we got it done.

This isn’t a shortcut around standards, and every employee up for a promotion must still meet the substantive qualifications and standards to be considered for promotion. But we removed the waiting period, the requirement that has nothing to do with whether a person could actually do the job. Time-in-seat is not a merit-based principle; performance is.

No serious organization competing for talent would handicap their top talent with a rule like this. The time-in-grade requirement told our most capable employees that their promotions were dictated by a stopwatch instead of their performance. It told managers that recognizing excellence was against the rules. In effect, legally barred star performers from competing.

Time-in-grade protected people from merit, and it drove the best out of federal service to companies willing to recognize their talent. That was the quiet cost to the American people, year after year, decade after decade.

The evidence is in our demographics. Only about 7 percent of the federal workforce is early career, compared with roughly 22 to 23 percent of the broader American workforce. Nearly half of federal employees are approaching retirement.

High achievers, especially new entrants to the workforce, want to grow fast and go far, but the federal government’s system was built to constrain them.

The federal government doesn’t lose the competition for talent on mission. There is no more consequential work than serving the American people. The success of OPM’s Tech Force initiative proves that smart, capable, emerging talent will seek out federal service if we empower them to tackle big challenges. But we do lose by not having a high-performance culture that rewards outperformance and enforces accountability.

I’m spending this fall on campuses making the case for public service and candidly sharing that we’ve done a poor job attracting early-career Americans. When a talented potential employee asks, “If I come work for you and I’m great at it, what happens?”, the honest answer has been that you wait a year. And then another. A student who hears that from us, and something very different from a startup, isn’t making a mistake when she chooses the startup. We were the ones making the mistake.

Eliminating time-in-grade is one piece of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reshape the federal workplace into a high-performance, merit-based environment. This is in top of our changes to the performance management standards to make it easier for managers to hold low-performers accountable and to disproportionately recognize and reward those who consistently over-perform on behalf of the American people. Be it through OPM’s Early Career Talent or U.S. Tech Force initiatives, the message is the same: what you can do matters more than how long you’ve done it.

Federal employees should be rewarded for what they can do, not for how long they’ve been on the job. To do otherwise is industrial strength, institutionalized, mediocrity, at the cost of encouraging the public servants we should work hardest to flee from federal service. For 80 years, our own rules said otherwise. Now they don’t.

To Americans deciding what to do with your talent: the federal government is hiring, the mission is real, and we just removed one more reason to look elsewhere. Come show us what you’ve got. That’s all that counts now.