The Office of Personnel Management recently implemented a new rule that makes it easier to fire state people.
In an apparent attempt to thwart former President Donald Trump’s vow to flame “rogue bureaucrats” and fundamentally alter the national labor, the Biden administration has issued a new law making it harder to fire authorities employees.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management ( OPM) announced the new law on April 4 that strengthens job protections for job civil servants, hinting in a speech that it’s targeting a possible second Trump presidency’s plan to “drain the lake and root out the profound state” by making it simpler to flame government employees.
By creating a new excepted service schedule, known as” Season F,” and directing agencies to move potentially large swathes of career employees into this new excepted service status, President Biden revoked an Executive Order issued by the previous Administration, according to OPM in the first week of the Biden- Harris Administration.
This is in reference to a 2020 executive order issued during the Trump administration that made it easier to fire tens of thousands of the 2.2 million federal employees.
” Root Out the Deep State”
Roughly 4, 000 federal employees are now considered political appointees, who typically change with each administration, with the revival of a Schedule F potentially increasing that more than tenfold.
President Trump declared in mid-2020 that he would try to revive the idea in some way in the middle of 2022 while President Joe Biden nixed the Schedule F order when he took office.
In a speech to the America First Policy Institute on July 26, 2022, President Trump said that” we need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are intentionally undermining democracy or who at the very least just want to keep their jobs.” He also promised to “drain the swamp and root out the deep state.
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The former president went even further in his speech by calling on Congress to pass laws that would allow the commander in charge to fire any government employee, essentially at will.
” Congress should pass historic reforms empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary for the job can be told’ you are fired, get out,'” he said, adding that, after such reforms, Washington would be an “entirely different place”.
President Trump made numerous hints at his intentions during the campaign trail regarding how to fulfill this promise. His remarks align with a long-held desire on the part of many Republicans to reform what they claim is a bureaucracy that is overburdened, ineffective, and, in many cases, counterproductive.
On the other hand, many Democrats view the potential revival of a Schedule F or other similar initiative as a potential threat to the government’s operations and as a potential disruption to the provision of essential services.
This final rule honors our 2.2 million active civil servants, making sure that candidates are chosen and fired based on merit and that candidates can perform their jobs based on their skills rather than political loyalty, according to OPM Director Kiran Ahuja’s statement.
” The Biden- Harris Administration is deeply committed to the federal workforce, as these professionals are vital to our national security, our health, our economic prosperity, and much more”.
The new rule, which is nearly 240 pages long, appears to be trying to put up a stumbling block that prevents President Trump, or anyone else for that matter, from issuing another executive order that would reclassify civil servants.
By press time, a request for comment had been submitted to the White House.
What’s in the New Rule?
The rule, which is being published in the federal registry and is scheduled to go into effect next month, is intended to bolster a upcoming Schedule F executive order by establishing both the status and civil service protections that federal employees have received.
Similar to the new rule, shifting from one excepted service schedule to another would not deprive federal employees of those protections.
” Once a career civil servant earns protections, that employee retains them unless waived voluntarily”, the OPM said in a statement.
Additionally, the rule makes it clear that career civil servants cannot be classified according to policymaking classifications, just like noncareer and political appointments.
Specifically, the new rule stipulates that the phrase” confidential, policy determining, policymaking, or policy- advocating” positions ( which describe positions lacking civil service protections ) can be used to refer only to noncareer, political appointments and may not be applied to career civil servants to strip them of protections.
The final rule also establishes new procedural guidelines for moving positions both within the excepted service and from the competitive service. When any such movement is voluntary and involves removing workers of their civil service protections, it establishes an appeals procedure for federal employees in particular.
” This final rule builds on three years of the Biden- Harris Administration’s efforts to strengthen federal agencies and the federal workforce”, OPM Deputy Director Rob Shriver said in a statement.
The organization claimed to have reviewed more than 4, 000 comments made during the public comment period as part of the rulemaking process.
