BIDEN BLOCKS TRUMP FROM FIRING BUREAUCRATS
Friday, April 5th, 2024
Biden moves to block Trump, future presidents from firing bureaucrats
President Biden finalized new civil service protections on Thursday aimed at preventing the sort of bureaucratic housecleaning that former President Donald Trump plans, should he win reelection.
At stake are potentially tens of thousands of policymaking jobs across the government and the ability to have them follow the president’s direction or face firing.
That has become a top goal of Republicans after the deep state thwarted or watered down many of Mr. Trump’s initiatives. It also has become a chief fear of Democrats.
Mr. Biden said his rules would insulate employees from such political pressure by making it tougher to reclassify their jobs and then fire them.
“Day in and day out, career civil servants provide the expertise and continuity necessary for our democracy to function,” Mr. Biden said. “This rule is a step toward combatting 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 rules shield federal workers from losing civil service protections if they are involuntarily moved into job classifications that lack those protections. The rules also create an appeals process for workers who are shifted.
The target is indisputably Mr. Trump, who issued an executive order late in his administration that could have allowed thousands of career civil service positions to be reclassified, making it easier to fire workers.
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:
