The Biden administration has finalized a new rule bolstering protections for career federal workers, marking a move to preemptively halt or significantly slow any efforts by former President Donald Trump, should he win in November, to reduce or alter the federal workforce.
“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,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Thursday.
Biden called the rule, first proposed last September, a “step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference.”
The rule, Office of Personnel Management director Kiran Ahuja said, “honors our 2.2 million career civil servants. … The Biden-Harris Administration is deeply committed to the federal workforce, as these professionals are vital to our national security, our health, our economic prosperity, and much more.”
The move amounts to a strengthened effort to preempt a president from gutting the federal civil service, a step then-President Trump had begun attempting in his final days in office.
Days before the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order that provided him and his agency appointees more leeway in the hiring and firing of federal employees deemed disloyal, a move that critics say politicizes civil service and could lead to career officials being pushed out for political reasons.
Trump vilified some career officials as the “deep state” during his term and sought to rid the federal government of people he viewed as not being ideologically in sync with his agenda. Critics warned that the order would allow the president to fill the federal workforce with his loyalists.
Trump’s executive order created a new classification of federal employees titled “Schedule F” for employees serving in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” that typically do not change during a presidential transition.
Biden reversed Trump’s executive order during his first week in office.
The rule finalized Thursday helps “safeguard federal employees from political firings” and “ensures that they are not being hired based on their political affiliations, but on merit and expertise,” said Bitsy Skerry, regulatory policy associate for the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization Public Citizen.
It strengthens and clarifies existing rights for career civil servants by making clear that civil service protections cannot be taken away from employees unless they give them up voluntarily. And it makes it harder to shift jobs into a status where protections could be stripped away.
That impacts a diverse range federal workers in Washington, DC, and across the country – from US Customs and Border Protection to the US Postal Service.
“We need an independent federal workforce, not one that is beholden to an individual,” Skerry said.
A senior Biden administration official told CNN that the rule could not easily be rolled back in the event of a second Trump term. Trump has repeatedly promised on the campaign trail that he would reinstate his Schedule F executive order on day one.
“An executive order would not have impact with this regulation in place,” the senior Biden official said. “A future administration would have to go through a new regulatory process, which would also entail like explaining specifically through that rulemaking process why a different rule is better than the existing regulations that OPM (the Office of Personnel Management) finalized and are announced … and how that new approach was consistent with the law.”
A future administration, the official said, would have to justify through any new regulation “why federal career employees should be focused on something other than the merits and expertise that they bring to their specific job, including political allegiance and they would have to explain how their rule was consistent with the merit system.”
That would likely be challenged in court, the official added.
Skerry said that the rule could slow any efforts in a future administration.
“It could definitely slow down the next administration in the sense that they couldn’t put in place their policy before reversing the Biden policy. Whatever the next administration’s policy was would only be effective after the rule was repealed through the full notice and comment rulemaking process,” Skerry said.
But the new rule could ultimately be reversed.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who also serves as ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, applauded the rule but warned more must be done.
“The threat of a politicized civil service is too great, and too real, for this to be the end of our efforts,” he said in a statement.
Connolly introduced legislation last year with Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Pennsylvania, aimed at further codifying those protections, calling it “the only permanent solution to a problem that is not going away anytime soon.”
In a divided Congress, however, any such legislation is unlikely to pass.
Unions representing federal workers praised the final regulation.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union representing 750,000 federal and District of Columbia government workers, said that the move would help maintain the stability of the government regardless of the political administration.
“President Biden’s action reinforces and clarifies federal employees’ due process rights and civil service protections, strengthening the apolitical civil service and hampering efforts to return the government to a corrupt spoils system,” Everett Kelley, the union’s national president, said in a statement Thursday.
“President Biden’s predecessor and other conservatives have made clear they would support stripping hundreds of thousands of federal employees of their civil service rights and protections and turning them into at-will workers who could be hired or fired at any time for political reasons,” he continued.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in 35 federal agencies and offices, applauded that it will now be “much harder for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for hand-picked partisan loyalists.”
“Frontline federal employees are not political appointees, and for good reason,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement.
CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.