Regulations upending federal job performance ratings are moving forward at the White House as President Donald Trump tightens his grip on the civil service.
The Office of Personnel Management is planning to propose new rules that will change how government employees are assessed by their superiors, including top-level and scientific officials, as well as crack down further on poor performance.
The efforts are part of an administration campaign to weaken protections for the career workforce while realigning it toward the president’s policy goals.
An OPM spokesperson declined to comment when contacted for this story.
Nick Bednar, an associate law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said the rulemaking will mean more federal employees will receive lower performance ratings and fired from their positions much sooner.
“The government will likely struggle to replace those employees,” Bednar told POLITICO’s E&E News. “A more meaningful effort at reform would provide accurate measures of performance and encourage agencies to work with employees on improving performance.”
One proposal would restrict how many senior level — or SL — and scientific/professional — or ST — employees can receive top performance ratings.
Those employees typically receive the highest marks, even though there have been “documented reports of failings,” according to the rule’s abstract in the administration’s latest regulatory agenda.
“The goal of the regulation is to create a bell curve,” said Katherine Lease, senior counsel at law firm Alan Lescht & Associates. “I imagine this will certainly increase the number of performance plans and removals that we see.”
The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs completed its review of the proposal Tuesday, a Reginfo.gov notice indicated.
It would align with another regulation OPM finalized in September last year that limited top ratings for Senior Executive Service members.
“Ok I’ll say it out loud: in the real world we are not all equally successful and differences in performance from one person to the next are in fact real,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote in an accompanying blog post about that rule. “Some people simply perform better than others — whether by luck or skill.”
Bednar said, “There is no question that the current performance rating system has problems, but a forced distribution may artificially deflate performance ratings in units with employees that perform exceptionally well.”
The personnel agency will also propose to reduce requirements that allow workers to show “acceptable performance.” It plans to eliminate “progressive discipline,” which can include suspensions before termination, and stop agencies removing punishments from an employee’s personnel file, according to the rule’s abstract.
Michael Fallings, managing partner at law firm Tully Rinckey, said the proposal “aims to reduce the requirements agencies have to prove an employee is not performing well.”
“It also states it aims to eliminate the requirement for progressive discipline, which means agencies could remove employees for only a single instance of misconduct,” Fallings added.
OIRA received that proposal for review Tuesday, according to Reginfo.gov.
Since his return to the White House, Trump has embarked a wide-ranging push to reshape the federal workforce. OPM has already issued new rules to take greater control of reductions in force, create a more easily fireable employee classification and narrow safeguards for probationary workers.
Hundreds of thousands of employees have left government service. It will be difficult to bring on new hires under the coming regulations, Fallings said.
“These rules could certainly dampen recruitment because employees will not have as much civil service protections and will essentially be treated as ‘at will employees,’” he said.
Contact this reporter on Signal at KevinBogardus.89.
