New Biden rule aims to protect US federal employees if Trump is elected

Joe Biden’s administration issued a new rule on Thursday making it harder to fire thousands of federal employees, hoping to head off the risk that if Donald Trump wins back the White House in November he won’t be able to bully and decimate the workforce as he imposes the radical ideologies he’s been pushing on the campaign trail, escalating what he did while in office.

New regulations coming out of the government’s chief human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers – who are more easily dismissed from their jobs.

The move comes in response to so-called “Schedule F”, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2m federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections.

Biden nullified Schedule F upon taking office. But if Trump were to win the election for the Republicans and revive it during a second administration, he could dramatically increase number of federal employees – around 4,000 – who are considered political appointees and typically change with each new president.

In a statement issued Thursday, Biden called the rule 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 potential effects of the change are wide-reaching because the number of federal employees who might have been affected by Schedule F under Trump is unclear.

The National Treasury Employee Union used freedom of information requests to obtain documents suggesting that workers such as office managers and specialists in human resources and cybersecurity might have been among those subject to reclassification.

The Biden administration’s new rule moves to counter a future Schedule F order by spelling out procedural requirements for reclassifying federal employees and clarifying that civil service protections accrued by employees can’t be taken away, regardless of job type. It also makes clear that policymaking classifications apply to noncareer, political appointments.

“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,” said Doreen Greenwald, president of National Treasury Employees Union, in a statement.

Groups advocating for ethical government, and liberal think tanks and activists, praise the rule. They viewed cementing federal worker protections as a top priority given that replacing existing government employees with new, more conservative alternatives is key to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page playbook known as Project 2025.

That plan calls for vetting and potentially firing scores of federal workers and recruiting conservative replacements to wipe out what leading Republicans have long decried as the “deep state” governmental bureaucracy that allegedly worked against Trump from the inside. This is a debunked concept that even Trump acolyte Steve Bannon has dismissed as untrue despite being part of the hard right movement that first aggressively promoted the idea and continues to market it.

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which has led a coalition of nearly 30 advocacy organizations supporting the rule, called it “extraordinarily strong” and said it can effectively counter the “highly resourced, anti-democratic groups” behind Project 2025.

“This is not a wonky issue, even though it may be billed that way at times,” Perryman said. “This is really foundational to how we can ensure that the government delivers for people and, for us, that’s what a democracy is about.”

The final rule, which runs to 237 pages, is being published in the federal registry and set to formally take effect next month.

Trump as president could direct the Office of Personnel Management to draft new rules, although those would face legal challenges.

Rob Shriver, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the new rule ensures the protections “cannot be erased by a technical, HR process” that “Schedule F sought to do”.

“This rule is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs, no matter their personal political beliefs,” Shriver said on a call with reporters.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.