President Joe Biden's administration on Thursday issued a new rule making it harder to fire government employees in the hopes of heading off Donald Trump 's promises to radically remake the federal workforce if he wins the White House in November.
The new rule will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers, which would make them easier to fire.
Biden, in a statement, said he was offering '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.'
He added that the rule is '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.'
President Joe Biden is moving to protect federal workers from Donald Trump's wrath
The rule is aimed at preventing a return of Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that was aimed at reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers into at-will status, thereby making them easier to fire and making them more akin to political appointees.
President Biden nullified Schedule F when he took office.
But Trump often rails against a 'deep state' of government that he believed was working against him and has vowed to return to Schedule F if he wins a second term.
'Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,' the former president said in March of last year.
'First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.'
It's unclear how many of the 2.2 million federal employees would be affected by a return to Schedule F. Presidents currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level, making the rest civil servants.
Trump has long expressed a belief that a 'resistance' inside the federal government hamstringed him as president. If he wins a second term in the White House he is expected to try and fill government jobs with his own loyalists.
'Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state,' Trump has told supporters at his campaign rallies.
He would fill federal agencies with MAGA loyalists, giving them the over a range of issues, including protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, and determining immigration policy.
President Joe Biden 's administration issued a new rule making it harder to fire government employees in the hopes of heading off Donald Trump 's promises to radically remake the federal workforce
But Biden's new rule guarantees employment protections and establishes a series of hoops an administration would have to jump through anytime it wants to move positions out of the protected service.
'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,' said Rob Shriver, deputy director of Office of Personnel Management in a briefing with reporters.
He noted that 85% of federal workers are based outside the Washington area and are 'our friends, neighbors and family members,' who are 'dedicated to serving the American people, not political agendas.'
Labor unions and other progressive groups - who are major Biden backers - pushed for the additional worker safeguards.
The new rule has been in the works for 18 months and is expected to go into affect in May.
And the Biden administration notes that if Trump wins the White House and tries to reverse their move, his administration would have to go through the same long process - including a public comment period - in order to do so.
'If another administration were to disagree with the policies that are reflected in this regulation, first, they would have to follow that full rulemaking process themselves,' a Biden administration official told Federal Times.
'Then in that rulemaking, among other things, they would have to explain how a different rule would be better than the carefully crafted balance that OPM has struck here, and how their interpretation would be consistent with over 140 years of statutory language and congressional intent. Needless to say, that is no small task.'