The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has issued a new rule that has some in Washington aghast. The rule says that executive branch federal workers must be answerable to the White House.
That’s the gist of OPM’s creation of “Schedule Policy/Career,” a new category of federal workers that can be removed at-will by the White House if they refuse to carry out the administration’s policies. The Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote in favor of creating this new category.
The rule will improve federal regulatory agencies by making them more responsive to the executive branch and, through that, responsive to the broader American public. Too many federal agencies exist outside the oversight of the executive, legislative, or judicial branches, allowing them to wield power autonomously. This allows them to create policies with little to no oversight, a process known as “regulatory dark matter.”
Federal government unions aren’t happy with the rule. The American Federation of Government Employees called it, “a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day.”
This ignores that the new category is limited to employees with higher-level “policy-determining or policy-making” functions. That is, the people inside the agencies calling the shots and who therefore should be answerable to the executive branch. It is estimated that the new category will apply to only 50,000 of the nearly three...
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