New rule would strip job safeguards for 50,000 federal employees and change how whistleblowers are protected
The Trump administration is seeking to finalize its overhaul of the federal government’s civil service system through a rule issued this week by the office of personnel management (OPM) to strip job protections from 50,000 civil service employees.
Under the rule, the president would have the authority to fire and hire an estimated 50,000 career federal employees.
The OPM said it was reclassifying certain career civil service roles so agencies can “quickly remove employees from critical positions who engage in misconduct, perform poorly, or obstruct the democratic process by intentionally subverting Presidential directives”.
The rule also would change how whistleblower protections, meant to protect whistleblowers from retaliation, are enforced. Instead of the independent office of special counsel handling most whistleblower disclosures from federal workers, federal agencies would be in charge of determining job protections for whistleblowers in their owndepartment.
On Trump’s first day in office on 20 January 2025, he issued an executive order to reclassify thousands of federal employees as political appointees.
“If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in April 2025 after the OPM proposed the rule to reclassify...
Key Takeaways Aetna allegedly leveraged inaccurate Medicare Advantage diagnosis coding to elevate risk adjustment payments, including morbid obesity coding inconsistent with clinical documentatio...