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House rule ‘chilling’ for federal workers
Holman provision permits slashing a civil servant’s pay
WASHINGTON — House Republicans have reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to a $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service.
The Holman rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill that targets a specific government employee or program.
A majority of the House and the Senate would still have to approve any such amendment, but opponents and supporters agree it puts agencies and the public on notice that their work is now vulnerable to the whims of elected officials.
Democrats and federal employee unions say the provision, which one called “the Armageddon rule,” could prove disastrous to the federal workforce, when combined with president-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of the Washington bureaucracy, his call for a freeze on government hiring and his nomination of secretaries who seem to be at odds with the mission of the agencies they will lead.
“This is part of a very chilling theme that federal workers are seeing right now,” said Maureen Gilman, legislative director for the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal employees.
The rule is particularly troubling to Virginia and Maryland lawmakers and Washington, D.C.’s non-voting delegate, who represent large numbers of federal workers in the national capital region.
The Holman provision was approved last week as part of a larger rules package but received little attention amid the chaos of Republicans’ failed effort to decimate the House ethics office.
Republican leaders say the rule increases accountability in government and downplayed concerns — some within their own party — that it will usher in sweeping changes to the appropriations process.
As a concession to Republicans opposed to the rule, leaders designed it to expire in one year unless lawmakers vote to keep it in place.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said insofar as voters elected Trump in hopes of fundamentally changing the way government works, the Holman rule gives Congress a chance to do just that.
“This is a big rule change inside there that allows people to get at places they hadn’t before,” he told reporters last week.
Asked which agencies would be targeted, he said that “all agencies should be held accountable and tested in a manner and this is an avenue to allow them to do it.”
The rule was the first thing House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., railed against last week in a floor speech objecting to an overarching rules package, which includes the Holman provision.
“Republicans have consistently made our hardworking federal employees scapegoats in my opinion for lack of performance of the federal government itself,” he said. “And this rule change will allow them to make shortsighted and ideologically driven changes to our civil service.”
The rule changes the process of passing spending bills by allowing any rankand-file House member to propose an amendment that would cut a specific federal program or the jobs of specific federal employees, by slashing their salaries or eliminating their jobs altogether.
Before this rule change, an agency’s budget could be cut broadly, but a specific program, employee or groups of employees could not be targeted because of civil service protections.
Republicans and Trump advisers have been quietly drawing up plans since the election to erode some of the job protections and benefits that federal workers have received for a generation, starting with a hiring freeze Trump has pledged to put in place in his first 100 days in office.
An end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, less generous pensions and a ban on union business on the government’s dime — these changes are all on the table now under unified Republican rule in Washington.
Federal unions and their advocates in Congress — and even the Republican behind the rule himself — scrambled to understand how the rule would work.
“Now any back-bencher can make an amendment to hear his voice heard on a particular program or group of employees,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for the federal workforce. “We’ll see how it’s used, if it’s used.”
In light of recent inquiries by the Trump transition team for a list of Energy Department scientists who have worked on climate change, advocates for workers say they worry that bureaucrats could be targeted for political reasons.
Early in its history, the rule was used to eliminate patronage jobs, particularly customs agents, in the late 19th century before the federal workforce shifted to a non-political civil service.
The rule was dropped in 1983, when then-Speaker Tip O’Neill objected to spending cuts devised by Republicans and conservative Democrats.
The revival of the Holman rule was the brainchild of Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., who is intent on increasing the powers of individual members of Congress to reassign workers as policy demands.
Known as the unofficial parliamentarian in the hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus, the fourterm congressman sought the rule change out of frustration with an $80 million program that pays for the care of wild horses on federal land in the West, which he says is wasteful.
He favors a strategic application of the law, likening it to a bullet from a sniper rifle rather than a shotgun. It’s unlikely — but not impossible — that members will “go crazy” and cut huge swaths of the workforce, he said.
“I can’t tell you it won’t happen,” he said in an interview in his office. “The power is there. But isn’t that appropriate? Who runs this country, the people of the United States or the people on the people’s payroll?”
Although Griffith has few federal workers in his poor and rural southwest Virginia district, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., noted many of Griffith’s constituents rely on federal programs.
Connolly and Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who each represent thousands of government employees in their northern Virginia districts, said the rule heralds a new era of granular governing, giving the party in power the ability to mess with federal agencies at the microscopic level.