Washington, DC — Today, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) submitted comments in opposition to a new rule, “Promoting Employee Accountability,” Docket ID 2025-OPM-0012, proposed by the Trump administration. PEER urged the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) to withdraw the draft rule in its entirety.

While recognizing that reforms are needed within the civil service to better handle poor performing employees, PEER stated in its comments that this new rule, “replaces a structured, judicially tested disciplinary framework with vague, discretionary standards and it makes highly technical changes to current regulations that would allow employees to be fired from federal service even if they do nothing wrong.”

PEER’s comments go on to state, “the rule is part of a broader effort to strip away meaningful civil service protections for public employees, leaving those who report waste, fraud, abuse, scientific misconduct, or other improper conduct with no reliable way to have their removal reviewed promptly by a neutral administrative body. It reflects a further push by the Trump administration to move to a spoils system of government — one that will result in widespread corruption, grift and patronage throughout the civil service.”

The proposed rule touches on at least five parts of the federal disciplinary process, and each piece shifts toward the manager doing the firing, and away from a neutral reviewer and the employee in question. These changes, working in tandem with other changes to the civil service, will lead to more corruption, more grift, and less accountability in the federal government.

“This rule is one piece of a broader, ongoing effort by this administration to strip protections for the federal workforce and convert the federal civil service from a nonpartisan workforce to one that is answerable only to the political leaders of the moment,” said Tim Whitehouse, Executive Director of PEER. “This is how institutional corruption becomes normalized: not through one dramatic move, but through a series of what may appear to be individually defensible, procedurally clean actions that collectively make the workforce answer to only those with power rather than to the law, Congress, or the public. We urge OPM and MSPB to drop this rule.”

Read PEER’s full comments in objection to the rule here.

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PEER protects public employees who protect our environment, natural resources, and public health. We support current and former environmental and public health professionals, land managers, scientists, enforcement officers, and other civil servants dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values across federal, state, local, and tribal governments.