Rule aims to secure US job protections

WASHINGTON — The government’s chief human resources agency issued a new rule Thursday making it harder to fire thousands of federal employees, in response to an executive order former President Donald Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2 million federal employees as political appointees or as other at-will workers.

President Joe Biden nullified Schedule F, the executive order issued by Trump, upon taking office. But if Trump 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.

Biden called the rule a “step toward combating 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 potential effects of the change are wide-reaching since the number of federal employees who might have been affected by Schedule F is unclear. The National Treasury Employee Union used freedom of information requests to obtain documents suggesting that workers such office managers and specialists in human resources and cybersecurity might have been among those subject to reclassification.

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.

Good-government groups and activists have cheered the change. 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 a plan spearheaded by former Trump administration officials and the Heritage Foundation think tank, known as Project 2025.

It 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” governmental bureaucracy.

Doreen Greenwald, president of the treasury union, said the new rule “will now be much harder for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for handpicked partisan loyalists.”

But Kentucky Rep. James Comer, Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, countered that it was “yet another example of the Biden Administration’s efforts to insulate the federal workforce from accountability.”

“The Biden Administration’s rule will further undermine Americans’ confidence in their government since it allows poor performing federal workers and those who attempt to thwart the policies of a duly elected President to remain entrenched in the federal bureaucracy,” Comer said in a statement.

He also promised that his committee “will continue to conduct rigorous oversight of the federal workforce” while exploring legislation “to make the unelected, unaccountable federal workforce more accountable.”

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which has led a coalition of nearly 30 advocacy organizations supporting the rule, called it an “extraordinarily strong” counter to the “highly resourced, anti-democratic groups” behind Project 2025.

Running to 237 pages, the rule is being published in the federal registry and set to formally take effect next month.