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 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…
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