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:
• 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.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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