President-elect Biden made trust in the federal civil service a centerpiece of his campaign, but experts and union leaders said reversing President Trump’s workforce policy will require a “holistic” approach that could take months.
During the campaign, Biden vowed to rescind on his first day in office a series of executive orders aimed at reducing the influence of federal employee unions and making it easier to fire federal workers. And he is widely expected to rescind an executive order signed last month that would convert potentially tens of thousands of federal employees out of the competitive service and into a new Schedule F, making them effectively at-will employees.
But experts on federal workforce issues said Monday that rescinding those orders will only mark the start of the work required to restore federal labor relations to a pre-Trump status quo.
“By the time it comes for Biden to go to the inaugural balls, I think he’ll have writers cramp from signing so many executive orders to undo what Trump has done across the board,” said Donald Kettl, the Sid Richardson professor at the University of Texas Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “[The] first item of business on that front will be to wipe out Schedule F, but that will be a whole lot more complicated than signing a piece of paper abolishing it. One thing that’s important to remember is that it really lays out not only substantive changes, but it gives the operating agencies discretion on how to do it, so it winds up being scores of actions throughout the government.”
Andres Grajales, deputy general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, said unions are also recommending that Biden rescind an executive order that removed adminis ..
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