As part of ongoing efforts to drain the swamp, the Trump administration finalized the “Schedule Policy/Career” rule, which would reclassify an estimated 50,000 career federal employees in policy-influencing roles to at-will status, similar to political appointees.
This move would strip many bureaucrats of civil service protections, including appeals of adverse actions and external whistleblower routes to the Office of Special Counsel, directing complaints internally instead. The new rule aims to enhance accountability for performance and alignment with the administration and hamper “Deep State” resistance.
Breaking down the situation, Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), explained, “This is not about people’s views or ideas. This is about whether they are refusing to actually affect their duties on behalf of the American people consistent with the objectives of this administration.”
Likewise, Kupor noted, “The only impact Policy/Career has is if their disagreement leads them to then try to actively thwart or undermine the execution of those priorities, then that [is] behavior that we want to declare to people is not acceptable.”
The same official asserted, “We are filling the gap by requiring that agencies create processes at their agencies to investigate these, including by somebody who wasn’t immediately involved in the action, which is really the best we can do.”
Freaking out in response, Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), whined, “This rule is a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day.”
Doubling down, the irritating poltical hack, alleged, “When people see turmoil and controversy in Washington, they don’t ask for more politics in government, they ask for competence and professionalism. OPM is doing the opposite,” adding, “They’re rebranding career public servants as ‘policy’ employees, silencing whistleblowers, and replacing competent professionals with political flunkies without any neutral, independent protections against politicization and arbitrary abuse of power.”
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Similarly, Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, claimed, “This is a deliberate attempt to do through regulation what the law does not allow—strip public servants of their rights and make it easier to fire them for political reasons and harm the American people through doing so.”
“We have successfully fought this kind of power grab before, and we will fight this again. We will return to court to stop this unlawful rule and will use every legal tool available to hold this administration accountable to the people,” Perryman continued.
Offering a more reasonable view, an unnamed OPM official said, “We have a boatload of empirical data that supports the idea that there is misconduct and policy resistance among the career civil servants. We have numerous examples of that — career civil servants in policy-making roles.”
“Just in the formulation of this rule, we had this rule — a confidential draft of it — was leaked to the media, so we know that that happens. We are inundated every day in the federal government, unfortunately, with misconduct and poor performance by civil servants. It’s a crisis,” the source revealed.
Watch DOGE comment on the massive waste and fraud Swamp bureaucrats were engaging in: