OPM has moved to reinstate a range of pro-management disciplinary policies it finalized as regulations late in the first Trump administration—which the Biden administration then overturned—while also newly proposing along with the MSPB to abandon decades-old standards for determining appropriate penalties on misconduct charges.
Proposed rules in the July 2 Federal Register in sum would limit employees’ rights to the minimum required by law for both conduct- and performance-based discipline and stress management’s discretion over taking actions.
The notice acknowledges the repeated reversals of direction by OPM on disciplinary practices within a handful of years.
The rules, like those of the first Trump term, are based on a set of 2018 executive orders that were delayed by court challenges before being finalized in October 2020. Biden in early 2021 overrode those orders before they gained much traction and ordered the rules removed; OPM finalized that regulatory process in late 2022. Early-2025 orders called for reinstating them, which the new notice would do, after a comment period.
Key provisions of the proposed rules include:
* Generally limiting to the minimum 30 days the period required by law for agencies to help employees improve their performance before taking disciplinary actions on those grounds. No less-formal period—such as might be set in a union contract—before that would be allowed, although agencies “would remain free to informally provide employees with...
Voting rights, voter intimidation and the politics of voting have been central themes of TPM reporting going back more than 25 years. Over a quarter century you develop a lot of institutional know...