The Biden administration is taking steps to reinforce job protections for bureaucrats as Trump pledges to gut the administrative state if he is reelected in November.
The plan from the Biden administration, which Politico reported is almost finished as of Thursday, would make it harder for presidents to remove civil service protections from federal bureaucrats, thus making them more difficult to fire.
Biden’s new policy appears to be a response to former President Trump’s plan to gut the administrative state if he is reelected, in part by reimplementing Schedule F, an executive order that would strip civil service protections from some bureaucrats. Biden’s plan to strengthen job protections for bureaucrats comes as the Democrat president has embedded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as well as far-Left gender ideology throughout the federal government.
Under the new plan, implemented by the Office of Personnel Management, bureaucrats whose jobs have civil service protections would not lose those protections upon their roles being reclassified, though those who believed their protections could be at risk would be able to submit an appeal with the independent Merit Systems Protection Board. A future president would also have to clear a number of procedural barriers in order to reclassify existing personnel roles into categories that do not enjoy civil service protections.
Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Jason Miller celebrated the new rule, calling bureaucrats “the backbone of our federal government” in a statement. “President Biden has made strengthening and empowering the federal workforce a top priority from his very first day in office,” Miller remarked. “He knows that career civil servants are the backbone of our federal government, providing the expertise and experience necessary for our democracy to function.”
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But the Biden administration has leveraged the federal workforce in the service of ideological ends, issuing executive orders directing the bureaucracy to embrace the DEI agenda and embed it throughout its practices. The National Security Agency, for example, produced a DEI glossary, exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, that included terms like “white fragility,” “queer theory,” “settler colonialism,” and the gender-neutral pronouns “ze” and “zir.”
Even the United States’ top intelligence authority, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), has been captured by far-Left ideologues. A newsletter sent by ODNI to the entire Intelligence Community, including intelligence components within each branch of the military, as well as the FBI, CIA, and NSA, urged agents to avoid using “hurtful” language when discussing Islamic terrorism. It even included an article from an anonymous intelligence official who claimed that crossdressing makes him a better intelligence agent.
As Biden strengthens civil service protections, former President Donald Trump and his allies are preparing to gut the federal bureaucracy, a plan that will likely be made more difficult by Biden’s new rule. “We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the President of the United States,” Trump said at a rally, touting the plan. “The deep state must be brought to heel.”
Others are preparing to fill in the gap left by outgoing officials, assembling a personnel database of those who might serve in the next administration through the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, an initiative from the Heritage Foundation that seeks to “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”