Biden moves to defang political assaults on federal workforce

The Biden administration put the finishing touches Thursday on a plan to restrict presidents from unilaterally nixing civil service protections from large swaths of the federal workforce, as former President Donald Trump renews his vow to uproot a perceived "deep state" if he is returned to the White House.

While a future president could take steps to squelch the new directive, it reflects a larger effort by the Biden administration to put a protective wall around its policies.

Under a final rule issued by the Office of Personnel Management, employees whose jobs include civil service protections would not lose them if their position is converted to an exempt category. However, they could choose to waive that security or voluntarily move to a role that serves at the will of the president — typically highly coveted positions toward the top of an agency’s org chart.

The regulations also establish several procedural hurdles for an administration to clear if it wants to shift jobs between categories. Federal workers who believe they are being stripped of their protections could challenge the move with the independent Merit Systems Protection Board.

By issuing formal regulations on the personnel protections, the administration made it more time-consuming for a future president to reverse them.

“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,” OPM Deputy Director Rob Shriver told reporters.

The change is widely viewed as a pointed response to a fall 2020 executive order from Trump that created a new designation — known as Schedule F — for employees in policymaking roles that effectively made those workers easier to hire, fire or otherwise shuffle around.

“Today’s final rule is a necessary step to prevent partisan abuse of the civil service rules and a return to the failures and corruption of the spoils system of the 1800s," Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said in a statement.

Trump's directive would have affected tens of thousands of federal workers who help develop or carry out policies. Records from the Office of Management and Budget released in February by the National Treasury Employees Union indicated the agency's own plan would have swept up roles like IT specialists and office managers at OMB, in addition to the more-expected attorneys and analysts.

The government-wide overhaul was immediately halted when President Joe Biden took office. Labor unions and other liberal-leaning groups advocated for additional safeguards to prevent similar upheaval to the merit system.

OPM’s rule takes direct aim at one of the key phrases the Trump executive order relied on to identify positions without protections — those of “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” The rule aims to ensure that those roles are defined narrowly, to refer only to political appointees rather than career civil servants.

“President Biden has made strengthening and empowering the federal workforce a top priority from his very first day in office,” OMB Deputy Director Jason Miller told reporters. “He knows that career civil servants are the backbone of our federal government, providing the expertise and experience necessary for our democracy to function.”

Conservatives and other supporters of the Trump-era plan argue that the existing system makes it far too time-consuming and cumbersome to fire civil servants for performance reasons and allows unelected bureaucrats to impede an administration’s ability to enact policy decisions they disagree with.

During his presidency, Trump repeatedly railed against a “deep state” of government actors opposed to his agenda, and his desire to root out those perceived threats raised concerns about politicizing the federal workforce and devaluing professional expertise.

With Trump again the Republican party’s presumptive nominee and vowing to revive Schedule F, the issue is one of many that the Biden administration is trying to finish in the coming weeks to lock in policies and make them tougher to unwind if the president fails to win reelection.

The regulations are expected to take effect in early May after they are published in the Federal Register in the coming days.

Democratic lawmakers have attempted to pass legislation that would further entrench civil service protections for federal workers, though those efforts have yet to gain steam and appear to have no chance of succeeding prior to the elections given the divided control of Congress.