WASHINGTON, D.C. (E&E News) — The Trump administration is cooking up new regulations that could dramatically reshape how federal employees are laid off.
The Office of Personnel Management is crafting a pair of rules that could change how agencies handle a reduction in force, or RIF, otherwise known as layoffs in the federal workplace. The RIF was seen as a last resort in government, pushing out staff due to sparse budgets, but it has fast become a common tool by the Trump administration to meet the president’s campaign pledge of slashing the federal payroll.
John Logan, professor and chair of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, warned political loyalty could become part of the federal layoff process under the proposals.
“Today, if performance rather than seniority were the standard, there would be no way to prove that someone was being fired for not being sufficiently loyal to the Trump administration versus not being a good worker,” Logan said.
One regulation under discussion would “prioritize performance over length of service” when determining which staff to retain or let go during a reduction in force, according to an abstract in the Trump administration’s latest rulemaking agenda. On Tuesday, that rule entered review under the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said giving greater weight to performance of federal employees who are subject to RIFs would be “a rickety foundation on which to ensure government actually performs well.”
“In the past months, the administration’s guidance has put far more emphasis on understanding ‘performance’ as ‘political responsiveness,’” Kettl said. “Without a careful and nonpartisan measure of performance, it could be dangerous to go down this road.”
The other proposal would modify rules “to streamline the RIF appeals process,” as described in the Unified Agenda. That measure was received by the White House regulatory hub on Sept. 23 for review, according to a Reginfo.gov notice.
“Streamlining the RIF appeals process is concerning,” said Michael Fallings, managing partner at law firm Tully Rinckey. “That could potentially mean shorting the due process period for employees and interfering with the adjudication process by not allowing a full substantial review of the agency’s RIF action.”
Information about the proposals on RIFs is limited.
The administration was scheduled to issue notices of proposed rulemaking for both regulations in September. But an OPM spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions for this story, including when those notices will be published.
