No one other than the most partisan of cable news talking heads can make the case that the United States is better off under the presidency of Joe Biden and his disastrous policies. Inflation is through the roof. High-interest rates have put homeownership beyond the reach of many middle-income earners. From Ukraine to the Middle East, the world is in turmoil. But never fear – the Biden Administration is showing extreme competence and dedication in protecting federal bureaucrats and making it easier for unqualified, far-left ideologues to procure lifetime federal jobs. And when bureaucrats win, ordinary Americans will surely lose – and have to foot the bill.
The United States government employs nearly three million people – more than some industries in the United States. As a comparison, the auto industry in our country employs 1.7 million people – but auto workers produce goods and services that are useful and necessary. Most federal workers produce nothing besides paper, which is probably why they are so vociferous about defending their “rights.”
Federal workers are governed under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which sets out employment policies and procedures for federal agencies. Under the guise of ensuring a “non-partisan” workforce, this law erected substantial hurdles to effective employee management, in effect making each employee immune from dismissal for poor performance (the federal government fires less than .25% of its workers each year, compared to private employers, whose involuntary termination rate is about 4.8%). Federal employees have workplace protections that private sector folks could only dream of, and those protections have paradoxically made the federal workforce more partisan, ideological, and less willing to entertain or accept ideas that go against the current narrative. And make no mistake – these unaccountable bureaucrats implement their radical policy agendas in every area of the federal government.
During the Trump administration, efforts were made to reign in some of the more egregious examples of abuse and create accountability for senior-level federal employees. The Trump proposal, referred to by insiders as “Schedule F,” would have made a new classification of senior-level jobs directly involved in policymaking and subjected them to new rules related to job status and protections. Employees in these jobs would be treated as at-will employees, subject to removal by the President or an agency head for poor performance or lack of adherence to presidential directives.
Naturally, this proposal generated fear and outrage amongst the bureaucrat class and their protectors in Washington, D.C., and they were quick to act. On his second day in office, President Biden canceled the Trump executive order on Schedule F and directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to come up with a rule that would make it more challenging to reclassify federal workers, effectively preventing efforts by future presidents to demand accountability from the federal workforce.
OPM wasted no time once it received these presidential marching orders. Just this past week, the agency – which essentially functions as the in-house government human resources department and is perhaps best known for the hack and breach of its network systems back in 2015 (which was then the largest government hacking ever) – finalized a rule that will essentially prevent any future efforts to make federal workers more accountable, more responsible, and more sensitive to the needs of ordinary Americans. Judging from the alacrity with which this new rule was proposed and implemented, it seems that the geniuses at OPM can move quickly and effectively when they so desire. If only the agency had the same urge to fix their cyber security issues. Nearly a decade has passed since its infamous data breach, and the agency has barely done anything to fix its cyber vulnerabilities.
As if that’s not enough, OPM also recently issued another rule to allow federal agencies to hire unqualified interns, recent college graduates, presidential fellows, and even those without a college degree in permanent career positions without having to “compete” under federal employment rules.
For years, OPM has been hiding its involvement in the practice of “burrowing,” which allows decisionmakers to convert political appointees – mostly far-left ideologues - into permanent government employees, and now, it’s clear that OPM is accelerating its actions on this front. The agency is essentially saying, “we will hire who we want, circumvent competition regulations, and no one can do anything about it.”
Fortunately, these radical moves have caught the attention of some serious players in Washington.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has held hearings on management failures at OPM and has hinted that a future Republican-led Congress might consider eliminating OPM, privatizing some of its functions (like benefits administration and staffing), and giving the Office of Management and Budget more insight into federal workforce policy.
Both of Chair Comer’s proposals are serious and should be thoroughly examined. But as an absolute minimum, Congress needs to take immediate steps to ensure that OPM does not turn the federal workforce into a radical left, multi-gendered socialist pipe dream at the taxpayer’s expense. However, as the two recent rules show, the bureaucracy isn’t going to give up without a fight.
Andrew Langer is the Director of the CPAC Foundation Center for Regulatory Freedom