OPINION:
Joe Biden’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is proposing a rule change on requirements and standards for vetting federal workers. But the updated guidance, if enacted, will effectively authorize the government to purge individuals based on their political or religious beliefs.
Under the proposed change, OPM will add criteria used to establish minimum standards of fitness based on character and conduct. The agency describes “suitability and fitness” as “a decision by an agency that an individual does or does not have the required level of character and conduct necessary to perform work for a Federal agency.”
These are arbitrary and subjective standards, which the agency essentially acknowledges when it separates suitability and fitness determinations as “distinct from the assessment of an individual’s job qualifications.”
Current federal law explaining criteria for making suitability determinations, § 731.202(b)(7), includes as grounds for denying employment: “Knowing and willful engagement in acts or activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government by force.”
That language is now being replaced with four separate criteria, which could be used by government officials to bar employment for individuals who hold political or ideological views disfavored by the government.
Those four criteria are:
1. Knowing engagement in acts or activities with the purpose of overthrowing Federal, State, local or tribal government.
2. Acts of force, violence, intimidation or coercion with the purpose of denying others the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution or any state constitution.
3. Attempting to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts.
4. Active membership or leadership in a group with knowledge of its unlawful aims, or participation in such a group with specific intent to further its unlawful aims.
The first criterion is similar to the one being replaced. The other criteria, however, is written vaguely enough to justify denying employment to anyone based solely on their political views.
Liberals across the country will readily agree that they believe speech is equivalent to violence. Many are choosing to redefine violence as generally “causing harm to someone,” rather than the narrowly-tailored definition of “the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage or destroy.”
So, what’s to stop a left-leaning government manager from declining to hire — or terminating — someone who refuses to use another person’s preferred pronouns? Similarly, what would happen to a pro-life activist who has protested outside an abortion clinic? Or someone opposed to critical race theory?
It’s not like there aren’t already examples of government officials claiming words are literal violence and pushing to codify the trampling of free speech.
In a domestic terrorism report, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson recently stated that domestic violent extremism includes “online disinformation” and “anti-government ideologies.” And, as demonstrated over the past three years, what is at one time labeled “disinformation” often turns out to be accepted truth.
For example, in early 2020, the idea that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China was considered disinformation – resulting in countless people being banned from social media platforms. These people would be flagged as “domestic violent extremists” if people like Ferguson have their way.
Yet, in 2023, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Energy now hold the lab leak theory as the most likely source of the pandemic. Under the OPM’s proposed rule change, a person could be barred from federal employment for the non-crime of saying something online that some government officials don’t like (and which may later turn out to be true).
The OPM’s updated rules could easily be weaponized to pressure government employees into towing the line of a particular political orthodoxy, allowing the federal government to fire anyone who is pro-life, lawfully challenges election procedures or opposes any number of left-wing policy priorities.
Writ large, codifying these types of dangerous policies could pave the way for the government to enact the type of ideological conformity that fueled the rise of authoritarian and communist regimes that are responsible for the deaths of more than 90 million people and counting worldwide.
Compelled speech is an affront to American ideals and antithetical to the values embedded in our nation at its founding.
OPM’s rule change should be rejected wholesale.
- Project 21 member Adrian Norman is a freelance writer, political commentator and social media influencer.
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