Axios: Trump Plotting Massive Purge Of Federal Workers

[BumRushDaShow]

21. This process was underway in November/December 2020 right through to the inauguration with OPM

Thankfully someone (I expect the various senior personnel specialists who have been there done that) were "thoroughly investigating" (slow-walking) this, otherwise it had been estimated that upwards of 80% of OPM's own personnel would have been reclassified.

Schedule F is gone, but the debate continues in Congress


Nicole Ogrysko@nogryskoWFED
February 24, 2021 5:42 pm


The House Oversight and Reform Committee is decidedly split on an agenda for the federal workforce.For Democrats, the last four years prove the civil service is vulnerable and needs more protection than ever after former President Donald Trump’s federal workforce policies. “Damage remains,” Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations, said Tuesday at a hearing on “revitalizing the federal workforce. “Clearly we have a lot of work ahead of us to rebuild our civil service.” Connolly said he’s interested in preserving collective bargaining, strengthening whistleblower protections and finding ways to improve diversity and inclusion in federal hiring.

“We will use what we learn here today to better understand weaknesses in the federal laws that are meant to enshrine merit system principles in perpetuity,” he said. Most of former President Donald Trump’s federal workforce policies were rescinded in the early days of the Biden administration. But that didn’t stop the vast majority of the subcommittee’s Republican members from asking about them. They were especially interested in Schedule F, which Trump established during the last few months of his presidency via executive order. “This was not an attempt to recreate a patronage system or politicize the civil service,” Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), the subcommittee’s ranking member, said of Schedule F.

“This was a reflection of this reality — that feds in policymaking positions wield tremendous power to implement or hinder the administration’s agenda, whatever administration that might be.” The order allowed agency heads to reclassify certain policy-making positions into a new schedule of quasi-political appointees known as Schedule F. Career federal employees would have lost their civil service protections in the process, meaning their agency heads could have fired them — and hired new replacements — at will. Biden rescinded Schedule F on his third day in office, and there are no indications that agencies found time to reclassify career feds into the new excepted service category. One agency, the Office of Management and Budget, came close.

“It had to be done immediately,” Janice Lachance, former OPM director during the Clinton administration, said of the actions Biden took to repeal Schedule F. “We had to send a signal right away, that this sort of cherry-picking, of deciding who stays and who goes had to end, and it had to end immediately. However, I do think that the Congress should take a very, very careful look of whether those decisions should be the purview of a single president of either party or of any party.” For Connolly and some committee Democrats, the Schedule F debate shed light on the vulnerability of the civil service, and they believe Congress should do more to protect and preserve it.

(snip)

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2021/02/schedule-f-is-gone-but-the-debate-continues-in-congress/

There should be "no debate". They need to ditch this idea or if they go with it, keep it extremely limited and amend the last Civil Service Act so that the Executive Branch is restricted from making up shit using a perceived loophole, to essentially throw out the whole Civil Service system.