Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the federal civil service, is among a small group of lawmakers who never stopped worrying about Schedule F, even after Biden rescinded the order. Connolly has been so alarmed that he attached an amendment to this year’s defense bill to prevent a future president from resurrecting Schedule F. The House passed Connolly’s amendment but Republicans hope to block it in the Senate.
That’s a move that people profess to hate until it becomes the only way to get something they need into law.
I’ve worked for the feds for 36 years. Few “civilians” understood or cared the essential “war” Trump’s admin waged against fed employees. The difference just 2 years later is pretty incredible - but the pendulum can always swing back. It is weird, to realize how weak are the job securities you had thought rock solid.
It was like that here in Canada, when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister. The Public Service was his designated whipping boy whenever he wanted an excuse to do something nasty. It was something watching him and his toadies just lie up a storm about us.
The real killer for me was his proposal to essentially privatize our sick leave. It was a two-pronged attack of bullshit. On the one hand, they claimed PS employees routinely abused our “generous” sick leave policies, saying we took too many fake sick days. On the other hand, since we can bank unlimited sick days, they claimed there was a huge hidden cost looming over the government, since they’d have to fund all those sick days somehow.
Now, it’s clear that those two lines of BS are in direct opposition - how did we bank so much sick leave if we’re all just gaming the system for extra days off?
And the second was particularly egregious, as we were told when we were hired to bank as much sick leave as possible, because there was a built-in delay in our disability insurance coverage. If you became sick enough to not be able to work for an extended period, you might have zero income for a few months, if you didn’t have enough sick days banked. I was told I needed at least three months leave as a buffer.
Now, historically, such accumulated sick leave would be paid off at retirement time, but that hasn’t been true since before my father retired from government service. He had over a year of sick leave saved up, and never got a dime in compensation when he left. So, in fact, that’s the equivalent of a year’s worth of salary that the government got for free.
An executive order cannot override Congressionally enacted statutes and can be challenged in court. I’m no expert in civil service law, but I assume there will be a legal challenge should Trump or a successor attempt to enact this. The only reason there wasn’t a court challenge to the original executive order is because he never actually reclassified or fired anybody before his term ended and Biden rescinded it.
That is why I have introduced the Preventing a Patronage System Act. The bipartisan legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), was passed by the House this month but has yet to be taken up by the Senate. It would secure the civil service and protect federal employees from losing statutory and constitutional job protections. Our bill would prevent any position in the competitive service — the jobs that are protected by merit-based civil service rules — from being reclassified to an excepted service schedule that was created after Sept. 30, 2020.
It would also limit federal employee reclassifications to the five excepted service schedules currently in use and would block any reclassifications of federal employees to Schedule F pursuant to the executive order signed on Oct. 21, 2020.
We federal employees have been the whipping boy of politics since the days of Reagan if not before. Republicans degenerate them non stop, and Democrats give a half hearted defense of “valuing the hard work they do” while at the same time still running as government outsiders. Large sections of the country see us as over paid lazy bums who are too incompetent to get a real job but can’t be fired and so leach of the hard work American tax payer who actually producing things.
As others in the thread have pointed out, the job protections that federal workers enjoy is one of the cornerstones of preserving our Democracy, but its also the number one target on our backs that politicians use to score points. Running on the platform of preserving these protections is not going to win a lot of votes. Its easy for Trump to claim that he just wants to drain the swamp and get rid of the dead wood, and has nothing to do with political ideology at all. That the new hires are all happen to be sycophantic ideologues who invested heavily in Trump properties is just because smartest most qualified people tend to be those who think the right thoughts and make wise investments.
Unfortunately I don’t think it would at least not on a political level. Every few years there is a government shut down which reminds people that they actually need us,. So far the Republicans tend to get blamed because its their pretty clear that its their unwillingness to fund us that’s the problem. But if we were to go on strike to protect our status, then the narrative would be that we are just entitled leaches who want to keep their protections so they don’t have to actually perform.