The Biden administration revealed a final regulation on Thursday designed to safeguard federal employees and make it more challenging to dismiss them, in an attempt to prevent former President Trump from drastically reducing the workforce if he is reelected.
The regulation, released by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), explains that nonpartisan career civil servants with protected status cannot have that status removed, and it prohibits nonpartisan career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees.
In 2020, Trump issued an executive order to allow the reclassification of thousands of federal employees, which would remove their protections. When President Biden took office, he rescinded that executive order, which the White House stated “risked altering our country’s long-standing merit-based civil service system.”
The White House mentioned that Trump’s order, known as “Schedule F,” “would have stripped career civil servants of their civil service protections that ensure that decisions to hire and fire are based on merit, not political considerations.”
This new regulation is anticipated to prevent Trump from issuing another executive order of this nature if he is reelected. It specifies that policymaking classifications cannot be applied to nonpartisan career civil servants, only to noncareer political appointees.
“Today, my Administration is announcing protections for 2.2 million career civil servants from political interference, to guarantee that they can carry out their responsibilities in the best interest of the American people,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday. “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 rule comes after OPM reviewed more than 4,000 comments submitted by the public during the rule making process, according to the agency.
