PEER Applauds the Biden Administration’s Effort to Protect Civil Service from Politicization
Last week, the Biden administration issued a final rule to protect civil servants from being stripped of their workplace protections if a new administration attempts to revive a Trump-era policy to reclassify many federal workers as at-will employees.
One of President Trump’s last acts before the 2020 Presidential Elections was to sign an executive order that threatened to gut a century and a half of civil service reforms. Trump’s order created a new Schedule F within the civil service, which gave political appointees the ability to easily hire and fire civil servants in policy-determining, policymaking, and policy-advocating positions. Biden repealed Trump’s Schedule F executive order in one of his first acts as President.
The new rule will make it more difficult for a future administration to bring back a spoils system where federal workers are hired and fired based on their political loyalties rather than merit. Under the new Biden rule, an employee who is being converted from competitive service to excepted service “retains the status and civil service protections they had already accrued by law unless the employee relinquishes such rights or status by voluntarily encumbering a position that explicitly results in a loss of, or different, rights.”
The rule also narrows the definition of “policy-related employees” to mean non-career, political appointments only. It grants employees a right to appeal reclassification to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).
If elected again, Trump has vowed to dismantle the “deep state” that he believes improperly stymied his previous administration. In addition, his supporters are promising to “gut” and be a “wrecking ball” for the administrative state on day one of the new administration.
This new rule will not stop a Trump wrecking ball, but it will make it more difficult for a future administration to change federal employees’ status through policies and executive orders. Unlike policies and executive orders, federal rules take time to change, and individuals and groups can challenge them in court if they are not based on the law.
To protect Americans and preserve democracy, we must remove the infection of politics from our public service, which is crowding out experts and facts. This rule is an important tool in this effort.
Tim Whitehouse is the Executive Director at PEER.
