New Biden rule aims to protect US federal employees if Trump is elected.

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Joe Biden’s administration issued a new rule on Thursday making it harder to fire thousands of federal employees, hoping to head off the risk that if Donald Trump wins back the White House in November he won’t be able to bully and decimate the workforce as he imposes the radical ideologies he’s been pushing on the campaign trail, escalating what he did while in office.

New regulations coming out of the government’s chief human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers – who are more easily dismissed from their jobs.

The move comes in response to so-called “Schedule F”, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2m federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections.

Biden nullified Schedule F upon taking office. But if Trump were to win the election for the Republicans and revive it during a second administration, he could dramatically increase number of federal employees – about 4,000 – who are considered political appointees and typically change with each new president.

In a statement issued Thursday, Biden called the rule a “step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people”.

The potential effects of the change are wide-reaching because the number of federal employees who might have been affected by Schedule F under Trump is unclear.

The National Treasury Employee Union used freedom of information requests to obtain documents suggesting that workers such as office managers and specialists in human resources and cybersecurity might have been among those subject to reclassification.

The Biden administration’s new rule moves to counter a future Schedule F order by spelling out procedural requirements for reclassifying federal employees and clarifying that civil service protections accrued by employees can’t be taken away, regardless of job type. It also makes clear that policymaking classifications apply to noncareer, political appointments.

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