WASHINGTON — The government’s top human resources agency on Thursday issued a new rule that makes it harder to lay off thousands of federal workers, hoping to avoid former President Donald Trump’s promises to radically reshape the workforce along ideological lines when he takes office in November. House reclaims. .
The Office of Personnel Management regulations will prevent career officials from being reclassified as political appointees, or as other arbitrary employees, who are more easily dismissed from their jobs. It comes in response to “Schedule F,” an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that aimed to allow the reclassification of tens of thousands of the country’s 2.2 million federal workers, reducing their job security protections.
President Joe Biden destroyed Schedule F upon taking office. But if Trump were to revive it during a second administration, he could dramatically increase the number of roughly 4,000 federal employees who have political appointees, which typically change with each new president.
It is unclear how many employees may be affected by Schedule F. However, the National Treasury Employee Union used Freedom of Information requests to obtain documents indicating that federal employees, such as office managers and human resources and cybersecurity specialists, may have been subject to reclassification — meaning the scope of the Trump’s order might have been broader than before. believed.
The new rule could counter a future Schedule F order by outlining procedural requirements for reclassifying federal employees and clarifying that civil service protections accrued by employees cannot be taken away regardless of job type. It also makes clear that policy classifications apply to non-career political appointments and cannot be applied to career civil servants.
“It will now be much more difficult for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for hand-picked partisan loyalists,” said National Treasury Chairman Doreen Greenwald. Employees Union, in a statement.
Good government groups, liberal think tanks and activists have welcomed the rule. They considered strengthening federal worker protections a top priority, as replacing existing government workers with new, more conservative alternatives is a key part of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page playbook known as “Project 2025.”
That plan calls for vetting and possibly firing dozens of federal employees and recruiting conservative replacements to root out what leading Republicans have long labeled the “deep state” government bureaucracy.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which has led a coalition of nearly 30 advocacy groups supporting the rule, called it “extremely strong” and said it could effectively target “very well-resourced, anti-democratic groups” behind Project 2025 counter.
“This is not a crazy issue, even though it is sometimes billed that way,” Perryman said. “This is really fundamental to how we can ensure that government delivers for people, and for us that’s what a democracy is about. .”
The final rule, which runs to 237 pages, will be published in the Federal Register and will formally take effect next month. The Office of Personnel Management first proposed the changes last November and then reviewed and responded to more than 4,000 public comments on them. Officials from some top conservative organizations were among those opposed to the new rule, but about two-thirds of comments were positive.
If Trump wins another term, his administration could order the Office of Personnel Management to create new rules. But the process takes months and requires a detailed explanation of why new regulations would mean improvements, potentially inviting legal challenges from opponents.
Rob Shriver, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the new rule ensures federal employee protections “cannot be erased by a technical HR process,” which he said “Schedule F tried to do.”
“This rule should ensure that the American public can continue to rely on federal employees to apply their skills and expertise to do their jobs, regardless of their personal political beliefs,” Shriver said on a call with reporters.
He noted that 85% of federal employees are located outside the Washington region and are “our friends, neighbors and family members” who are “dedicated to serving the American people, not the political agenda.”