The Biden administration last week issued a final regulation to protect federal workers from being stripped of their workplace protections if there’s the return of the Trump policy seeking to make federal employees at-will workers.
The new rule, which will published in the Federal Register this week, makes it more difficult for a future administration to bring back a corrupt spoils system where federal workers are hired and fired based on political affiliations, not merits.
It’s written in response to the Trump-era policy that created a new category of workers called Schedule F that sought to turn policy-related employees into at-will workers without much workplace protection. Hundreds of thousands of workers would have been affected, including IT specialists, office managers, and administrative assistants, if Biden hadn’t repealed Trump’s Schedule F executive order.
Under the new rule, an employee who is being converted from competitive service to excepted service “retains the status and civil service protections they had already accrued by law, unless the employee relinquishes such rights or status by voluntarily encumbering a position that explicitly results in a loss of, or different, rights.”
The rule also narrows down the definition of “policy-related employees” to mean non-career, political appointments only. It grants employees a right to appeal reclassification to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).
AFGE applauds the administration for its efforts to prevent politization of the civil service and federal workforce.
“One reason for the stability of our federal government is the fact that federal employees continue doing their jobs and serving the American public even as political administrations come and go,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley. “Turning positions that demand technical expertise into political appointments filled based on partisan loyalty would undermine this fundamental tenet of our government and lead to chaos and corruption. Such actions would undermine our democratic, nonpartisan government and take us back to the 19th century, when civil servants were hired based on political loyalty rather than professional ability.”
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