SAN FRANCISCO—Federal worker hater Donald Trump is at it again.
He’s not content with arbitrarily firing 300,000 of his workers, or changing thousands of top career positions into “Schedule F” jobs with no protections so he can fill them with political hacks.
Now he wants to make his Office of Personnel Management—the government’s HR department—the judge, jury and job executioner of every federal worker by rewriting their performance evaluations, grading them on a curve, giving itself i.e. Trump, sole power to decide if a worker is “suitable” for her job, then firing her when he decides she flunks, and ensuring she has no real appeal.
That led Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, to declare Trump’s real aim is to fill the federal civil service, not just its top ranks, with loyalists beholden to a president or a political party, not to the U.S. people whom civil servants take an oath to serve.
In other words, a complete return to the spoils system that existed before 1883.
Right now, an agency head or Cabinet member could fire a federal worker, but the worker could appeal, under civil service laws, to an outside board and eventually the courts. Not if Trump and his OPM Director, venture capitalist Scott Kupor, have their way.
Instead in two proposed federal rules, Kupor’s OPM rewrites the worker’s performance evaluation, judges her performance on a curve compared to other workers—rather than by strict standards set by civil service law—and fires her if she flunks. If she appeals, Kupor’s OPM is the “judge.”
That scenario drove four unions which represent government workers, the Government Employees (AFGE), AFSCME, the National Federation of Federal Employees/IAM and the Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) to march into the U.S. District Court in San Francisco on August 25, seeking an injunction to stop his scheme.
The unions didn’t say so, but that Trump-ordered sequence sounds like the statement by the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.” Matt Biggs, the IFPTE president, compared the appeals under the Trump plan to “the fox guarding the henhouse.”
“OPM wrote the rule, brings the case, and judges its own work,” the unions wrote when they filed their court papers on August 25. “By OPM’s own estimate, half of all federal firings will run through this system. The standards are broad and subjective enough to reach political speech, which is an open invitation to fire public servants who speak out, without regard to their value to their agencies and the American people.”
And that’s after imposing a rule that lets OPM rewrite their evaluations, “ranking them against each other.” The net result of both is “large numbers of high performers will be rated lower for no reason other than the curve, and a lower rating makes them easier to discipline and easier to fire.”
“The federal workers who keep our food supply safe and air travel secure should be able to do their jobs without worrying about political hacks firing them without cause,” said Patrick Moran, the new president of AFSCME and the former president of its Maryland District 3.
Federal workers “deserve to be evaluated based on whether they are doing a good job for our country, not pitted against one another.” Moran called Trump’s plan a “transparent attempt to purge even more qualified public service workers from an already depleted civil service.”
NFFE’s Erwin was blunt, too, in explaining what the unions hope to accomplish by stopping Trump’s scheme by a federal court decree.
The lawsuit is “to protect the core principle that the civil service should be based on merit—not loyalty to a president or political party. We are confident the proposed regulations stretch far beyond the agency’s authority and the courts will share our view that these rules are simply unlawful.”
Loyalty to a president, though Erwin didn’t say so, means catering to the chief executive’s whims, interests, agenda and campaign contributors, even when the combination breaks the law and hurts the U.S. as a whole while benefiting a privileged few. That’s what Trump’s capitalist backers want.
AFGE President Everett Kelley, who heads the largest federal workers union, flatly called the Trump regime scheme illegal. “Congress built the civil service on a simple principle: That public servants are hired, judged, and fired on merit, not on politics,” he said. Four AFGE locals, representing EPA workers and Bay Area Veterans Affairs hospital workers, plus others, joined the suit.
Kupor’s “Office of Personnel Management does not have the authority to write those protections out of the law, and no statute gives it the sweeping power it has claimed. OPM wants to fire people itself and then review its own decision. That is not accountability, and it is not what Congress wrote,” added Kelley.
No date has been set for a hearing on this lawsuit.
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