Biden moves to protect tens of thousands of civil service workers against ... trends now
President Joe Biden's administration on Thursday issued a new rule making it harder to fire government employees in the hopes of heading off Donald Trump 's promises to radically remake the federal workforce if he wins the White House in November.
The new rule will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers, which would make them easier to fire.
Biden, in a statement, said he was offering 'protections for 2.2 million career civil servants from political interference, to guarantee that they can carry out their responsibilities in the best interest of the American people.'
He added that the rule is '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.'
President Joe Biden is moving to protect federal workers from Donald Trump's wrath
The rule is aimed at preventing a return of Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that was aimed at reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers into at-will status, thereby making them easier to fire and making them more akin to political appointees.
President Biden nullified Schedule F when he took office.
But Trump often rails against a 'deep state' of government that he believed was working against him and has vowed to return to Schedule F if he wins a second term.
'Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,' the former president said in March of last year.
'First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.'
It's unclear how many of the 2.2 million federal employees would be affected by a return to Schedule
