CNN
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President Donald Trump wasted no time signing an executive order Monday aimed at giving him more control over the federal workforce — which he has long vilified as the “deep state.”
The order, in a highly unusual step, seeks to erase a rule put in place by former President Joe Biden last year and is expected to face multiple legal challenges.
The new executive order reinstates an executive order signed by Trump shortly before the 2020 election that created a category for federal employees involved in politics — known as Schedule F — that would make it easier to fire these workers. Biden quickly reversed that order, then finalized a new rule last year that further strengthened protections for career federal workers.
However, Trump’s latest executive order directs the Office of Personnel Management to rescind any rule changes that would prevent or affect the implementation of the 2020 Trump directive. Trump also revoked his predecessor’s 2021 executive order that overturned the original Annex F decree, a more conventional decision.
Like the 2020 executive order, Trump’s new directive should quickly end up in court. Traditionally, rescinding or revising a rule requires a new rule, a process that can take months and cannot be done by executive order, experts said.
Trump’s The 2020 order left many federal employees fearing for their jobs. That would have given him and his agency’s appointees more leeway to hire and fire federal officials deemed disloyal, a move that critics say politicizes the civil service and could lead to the exclusion of civil servants from career for political reasons and their replacement by those attached to the president. .
That would have stripped federal workers of their due process protections and eliminated their ability to appeal to other independent agencies, said Joe Spielberger, senior policy adviser at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. According to an initial estimate, this would have affected around 50,000 workers, although experts estimate that it could have affected many more.
“President Trump’s order is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by taking away employees’ rights to due process so they can be fired for political reasons,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 750,000 workers. of the new order. “It will eliminate hundreds of thousands of federal jobs in professional, nonpartisan public service and make them accountable to the will of one man.”
Meanwhile, the National Treasury Employees Union has vowed to “fight” Trump’s efforts to reform the civil service.
“The American people deserve to have government services delivered by qualified, nonpartisan professionals who do their jobs regardless of which party occupies the White House, and the NTEU will fight to preserve that tradition,” said the National President of the NTEU. union, Doreen Greenwald, in a press release. .
Trump’s renewed efforts to reshape the federal government and its workforce aim to ensure loyalty to him and his policies to avoid obstacles that he said were blocking his ability to get key initiatives across the finish line. during his first term.
In Monday’s executive order, he wrote: “Accountability is essential for all federal employees. »
“Any power they have is delegated by the president, and they must be accountable to the president, who is the sole member of the executive branch…In recent years, however, there have been numerous well-documented cases of federal employees career who have resisted. and undermine the policies and directives of their executive leadership,” the order states.
Critics, however, say it would take the country back 140 years, to a time when elected officials hired political supporters for government positions.
Any effort to undermine apolitical, merit-based public service is a “mistake” that undermines the federal government’s ability to deliver good results for the American public, Max Stier, CEO of Partnership for Public Service, told CNN.
Even if it doesn’t result in a wave of layoffs, the executive order will cause some federal employees to reconsider challenging any directives they might view as illegal, unethical or contrary to their professional standards, Spielberger said.
“The goal is just to create this massive chilling effect within the federal government, where people are afraid and sort of obey in advance, so to speak,” he said.
