Outgoing OPM chief hits incoming GOP policies on hiring and firing feds
WASHINGTON: Beth Cobert was named acting director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) soon after news broke about the cybertheft of personal information belonging to 22 million federal employees, contractors, applicants and their families.
She leaves office this week as the federal workforce faces other potential afflictions – incoming Trump administration policies and increasingly aggressive Republican efforts to plunder workplace protections.
With workplace-related pledges by President- elect Donald Trump looming, coupled with congressional actions and proposals, the federal workforce is bracing for a turbulent term.
Cobert, during an exit interview with Washington Post reporters and without mentioning anyone’s name, cautioned against a broad hiring freeze of the kind that Trump has proposed, and she warned about the dangers of congressional assaults on civil service due-process rights.
So while the future gives workers reason to worry, OPM’s recent past is a source of pride for Cobert, even if some of it stems from efforts to correct the agency’s biggest debacle - the massive electronic pilfering of personnel records that included Social Security numbers and, in some cases, fingerprints.
“I spent a lot of time on cyber. That was an incredibly important effort,” said Cobert, who took office in July 2015. “We’ve made a ton of progress. We are much stronger, and we’ve taken those lessons and spread them all across government.”
In her exit memo this month, Cobert said OPM’s “overarching focus has been to modernise the way OPM supports agencies, current and former Federal employees, and their families” to allow the federal workforce to better serve the people. She cited actions to improve employee recruiting, hiring, retention and engagement. In addition to major increases in the employment of veterans and people with disabilities, her memo says, “OPM finalised a new policy to ‘ban the box’ for Federal employment by delaying inquiries into criminal history until a conditional offer has been made.”
Those actions might be safe from Republican proposals for change, but workplace protections are not.
The House has already reinstated the largely forgotten Holman Rule, an obscure but potentially treacherous measure that makes no mention of due process while allowing Congress to cut the pay of individual federal employees.
Last year, the House approved legislation sharply undercutting due process for senior executives across the government, mimicking a 2014 law that attacked civil service protections for Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) executives. Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., said he will soon reintroduce his bill allowing political appointees to fire federal employees for “no cause at all.” Cobert says slashing civil protections like this is bad for Uncle Sam’s business.
“There is a critical role for due process. There is a critical role for making sure decisions are not politically motivated,” she said during the interview.