AFGE will be submitting formal comments challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to make it easier to fire mass numbers of federal workers for political reasons.
A proposed rule from the Office of Personnel Management, published in the Federal Register March 5 with a 60-day comment period, would revise the rules for conducting reduction-in-force actions targeting federal employees. The new rule would upend existing RIF procedures and give political appointees new, unregulated authority to determine who survives federal agency layoffs.
“By gutting seniority protections and handing agencies sweeping new discretion over who stays and who goes, OPM is making it easier to conduct politically motivated layoffs dressed up as ‘performance-based’ decisions,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said.
Federal agencies lost more than 300,000 employees last year as the Trump administration carried out massive layoffs and forced workers to quit amid targeted attacks on their workplace rights and protections. Now this proposed rule sets the stage for Trump’s political appointees to arbitrarily fire even more federal employees.
OPM proposed two additional policy changes last month that, combined with the latest proposal, represent a coordinated effort to dismantle the non-partisan civil service.
The first proposed rule, published Feb. 10 with a 30 day comment period, would transfer responsibility for reviewing federal employee appeals of proposed RIFs from the Merit Systems Protection Board to OPM. The second, published Feb. 24 with a 30-day comment period, would set artificial caps on how many employees can receive high performance ratings. The latest rule would weaponize those now-subjective ratings – making performance instead of seniority the dominant factor in determining who is retained in a RIF.
“This proposal is part of a coordinated campaign,” Kelley said. “Together, these proposed rules represent a blueprint for faster, less accountable mass firings and another step in the administration’s effort to dismantle the nonpartisan civil service.”
President Kelley said AFGE will be filing public comments on the newest proposed rule and will be reviewing all legal options if OPM moves forward with implementing the rule.
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