Biden moves to block Trump, future presidents from firing bureaucrats

Mr. Trump said removing “poorly performing employees” who fell under civil service protections had become too difficult, so reclassifying them was a way to get better results from the bureaucracy.

Known as Schedule F, the order was aimed at positions that create policy. Trump officials said those jobs ought to be responsive to the president.

The National Treasury Employees Union, a major public-sector labor union that sued to block Schedule F, said it could have swept up “tens of thousands of frontline federal employees.”

Mr. Biden revoked Schedule F when he took office, derailing the lawsuit.

Mr. Trump has been eyeing a revival should he win the White House in November.

The new rule, finalized Thursday by the Office of Personnel Management, will make it tougher for Mr. Trump or another administration, but not impossible, to surmount.

To overcome a regulation, a president must either go through the rulemaking process again, which can take months or years, or persuade Congress to pass legislation.

James Sherk, who led the Trump administration’s civil service efforts, said the new regulations will be a speed bump but not a roadblock. He said the chief wrinkle is that writing the rules could give Mr. Trump’s opponents more room for court challenges to a policy.

Mr. Sherk said federal employees have long leaned to the left but appear to have skewed hard left since the Obama years, based on campaign donation data.

“In most agencies, the career employees are more liberal than 90% of Americans,” he said.

He released a report, “Tales From the Swamp,” highlighting areas where Trump plans were thwarted by the liberal ideological bent of bureaucrats.

Among them:

• Justice Department prosecutors refused to pursue cases against a college that discriminated against Asian Americans and cases against health institutions that pressured nurses and doctors to assist in abortions against their beliefs.

• Education Department employees thwarted attempts to reform due process rights in campus sexual assault cases.

• The Health and Human Services Department circumvented a hiring freeze by backdating

paperwork to make it appear that employees had been brought on before the freeze.

Mr. Sherk said translating voters’ wishes through the presidential election into policy is a matter of basic accountability.

“Schedule F was a tool to allow the president to say to these employees, ‘Look, do your job. You didn’t win the election, I did,’” he said.

Rep. James Comer, Kentucky Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said his panel would look at legislation to try to return some of that 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,” Mr. Comer said in a statement.

Rep. Gerald Connolly, Virginia Democrat, said Congress should consider legislation to more fully enshrine civil service protections.

“This rule is a vital and necessary step toward ensuring that the federal workforce is always defined by expertise, not political fealty. But the threat of a politicized civil service is too great, and too real, for this to be the end of our efforts,” he said.