The Biden administration is enacting a rule to protect lifelong federal employees from potentially being fired by a future president.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a rule on Thursday designed to prevent career bureaucrats from being involuntarily shifted into employment categories exempt from civil service protections.
“This final rule honors our 2.2 million career civil servants, helping ensure that people are hired and fired based on merit and that they can carry out their duties based on their expertise and not political loyalty,” said OPM director Kiran Ahuja.
Former president Donald Trump issued an executive order towards the end of his administration creating a new category, “Schedule F,” for policy-making employees that would make it easier to fire them for perceived disloyalty to the president and his agenda. President Joe Biden repealed the executive order upon entering office.
The OPM rule clarifies that the policy-making designation for executive branch employees only applies to political appointees and not career bureaucrats. Trump’s executive order used the policy-making designation to determine the positions exempt from employment protections. Civil employees are allowed under the new guidelines to waive their employment protections voluntarily, but the protections cannot be removed against their will.
Trump and his allies plan on restoring Schedule F if he is elected to a second term and using it to remove lifetime bureaucrats opposed to Trump’s presidency. The Heritage Foundation is leading a coalition of conservative organizations involved in building “Project 2025,” a personnel development effort intended to staff the next Trump administration. These efforts are being conducted with the purpose of removing the anti-Trump “deep state” that plagued the former president throughout his first term.
During the 2020 presidential election cycle, U.S. government employees donated overwhelmingly to Democrats and liberal groups, according to data from campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. The support for Democrats from career bureaucrats continued in the 2022 midterm election cycle and appears to be taking shape again as the 2024 presidential election nears. Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and will be facing off against Biden in a rematch of the 2020 cycle.
Nearly two-thirds of Democrats, 65 percent, have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in career federal employees compared to 38 percent of Republicans, according to Pew Research data collected in 2022.
“OPM’s final rule is yet another example of the Biden Administration’s efforts to insulate the federal workforce from accountability. The federal workforce exists to serve the American people, yet many Americans have a deep and growing distrust of the federal bureaucracy,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) said in a statement.
The new rule will be added to the federal register on April 9 and take effect in May.