Here’s how Trump’s planned regulations could impact federal employees
A preview of rules that the Trump administration intends to implement published Thursday shows how officials are seeking to change federal employee removal and disciplinary procedures as well as modify other systems for civil servants.
The Office of Personnel Management disclosed that in September it will issue a notice of proposed rulemaking to amend reduction in force regulations “to prioritize performance over length of service when determining which employees will be retained in a RIF” as well as “streamline the RIF process.”
Agencies publish an NPRM to kickstart a process for members of the public to comment on the proposal. Officials are then required to consider such feedback before issuing a final rule. The Trump administration has relied on RIFs as part of its goal to reduce the size of the federal workforce.
Trump proposed a similar rule at the end of his first term, but President Joe Biden reversed it shortly after taking office.
OPM also shared that in October officials will release an NPRM regarding employee accountability.
“The proposed rule would reduce the requirements placed on agencies when providing employees with an opportunity to demonstrate acceptable performance; eliminate the requirement that agencies must use progressive discipline for adverse actions and otherwise limit interference with the appropriate penalty determination; and restrict agencies from agreeing to remove performance-based and adverse actions from an employee’s official personnel folder and other records as a condition of settlement,” according to the entry.
The American Federation of Government Employees and National Treasury Employees Union didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
This information comes from the unified regulatory agenda, which is a semiannual compilation of information about agency regulations that are under development. The Trump administration was late for the first agenda of his second term, as it was supposed to be published in the spring.
Additionally, according to the unified agenda:
Experts said that Trump’s first unified agenda of his second term exhibits a relatively high amount of rulemaking activity, but that’s largely because agencies generally have to issue a new regulation to repeal an existing one.
“At least in terms of what we think of as conventional regulations, the unified agenda reflects added rules, but paradoxically, a lot of them are ‘unrules’ that the administration is working through across the various agencies to roll things back,” said Wayne Crews, the Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Sarah Hay, a policy analyst at George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, agreed that the agenda reflected the administration’s push to reduce federal rules.
“There were a lot of first-time published active actions, which I thought was really interesting. And as I’ve been looking through a lot of those first-time published actions, a lot of them are these deregulatory actions and seem to be for the administration’s priorities,” she said.
Trump is pursuing a deregulatory agenda and has sought to expedite the process.
Public Citizen, a progressive consumer advocacy nonprofit, condemned the unified agenda.
“This agenda is packed to the brim with hundreds of regulatory rollbacks, including further limits on who is eligible for student loan forgiveness, rollbacks of energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances, rollbacks of greenhouse gas regulations and emissions standards for vehicles and repeals of workers’ rights to safe and fair workplaces,” said Elizabeth Skerry, a regulatory policy associate for Public Citizen, in a statement. “It’s yet another manifestation of the worst corporate favoritism since the Gilded Age.”