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.