(Headline USA) The government’s chief human resources agency issued a new rule on Thursday making it harder to fire thousands of federal employees, hoping to head off former President Donald Trump’s promises to once again attempt to drain the Swamp of its corrupt permanent bureaucracy if he wins back the White House in November.
The Office of Personnel Management regulations will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers, who are more easily dismissed from their jobs.
It comes in response to Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2 million federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections.
The final rule, which runs to 237 pages, is being published in the federal registry and set to formally take effect next month. OPM first proposed the changes last November, then reviewed and responded to 4,000-plus public comments on them.
“This is not a wonky issue, even though it may be billed that way at times,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the far-left Democracy Forward, which led a coalition of nearly 30 advocacy organizations lobbying the Biden administration to preemptively block the re-implementation of the Trump-era rule.
The organization has ties to George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the billionaire Arabella Advisors network. Its board includes notorious leftist operatives Marc Elias and John Podesta, as well as Maya Harris, the sister of Vice President Kamala Harris.
“This is really foundational to how we can ensure that the government delivers for people—and for us, that’s what a democracy is about,” Perryman claimed.
President Joe Biden nullified Schedule F upon taking office. But if Trump, the presumptive GOP nomineee, were to revive it during a second administration, he could dramatically increase the around 4,000 federal employees who are considered political appointees and typically change with each new president.
The reliance on a workforce of civil servants with extended job-security and protections first came about with the Pendelton Act of 1883 and was subsequently bolstered under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.
The intention was to do away with corruption under the previous “spoils” system, when the winning party had carte blanche over civil appointments and would often give preference to friends and benefactors over those more qualified.
However, it became patently apparent in Trump’s first term that the present bureaucracy has itself become inherently corrupt and anti-democratic, with unelected pencil pushers—many of whom identify politically with the extreme Left—exerting considerable power and influence to undermine the duly elected leader.
By contract, because the bureaucracy favors Democrats, there has been inadequate oversight and accountability for Biden and other Democratic leaders, who have indeed weaponized it against their political enemies as Biden did in using the National Archives to wage a lawfare attack on Trump.
The health and functionality of America’s democracy now hinges on the ability to hold its unelected officials accountable, in addition to those wielding elected power.
In a statement issued Thursday, Biden called the new OPM rule a “step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people.”
The National Treasury Employee Union used freedom of information requests to obtain documents suggesting that workers like office managers, specialists in human resources and cybersecurity might have been among those subject to reclassification under Schedule F.
The new rule moves to counter a future Schedule F order by spelling out procedural requirements for reclassifying federal employees and clarifying that civil-service protections accrued by employees can’t be taken away, regardless of job type. It also makes clear that policymaking classifications apply to noncareer, political appointments.
“It will now be much harder for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for hand-picked partisan loyalists,” National Treasury Employees Union President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement.
Left-wing activists have cheered the rule. They viewed cementing federal worker protections as a top priority given that replacing existing government employees with new, more conservative alternatives is a key piece of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page playbook, known as Project 2025.
That plan calls for vetting and potentially firing scores of federal workers and recruiting conservative replacements to wipe out what leading Republicans have long decried as the “deep state”.
Democrats have couched the political outcomes of the entire 2024 election in similar terms—suggesting that any critics or opponents of the Biden agenda constitute a “threat to democracy” while appearing to have a limited understanding of what “democracy” really means.
Traditional liberals, including current independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have noted that the authoritarian tendencies of the Biden administration, in coordination with the permanent bureaucracy that lays cover for him and attacks Republicans, constitutes a far greater threat to the fundamental process of democracy.
If Trump wins another term, his administration could direct the Office of Personnel Management to draft new rules. But the process takes months and requires detailed explanation on why new regulations would be improvements—potentially allowing for legal challenges to be brought by opponents.
Rob Shriver, a Biden political appointee serving as OPM’s deputy director, said the new rule ensures that federal employee protections “cannot be erased by a technical, HR process” which he claimed, Schedule F sought to do.
“This rule is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs, no matter their personal political beliefs,” Shriver claimed, without evidence, on a call with reporters.
He further claimed that 85% of federal workers are based outside the Washington area and are “our friends, neighbors and family members,” who are “dedicated to serving the American people, not political agendas.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
