The Trump administration on Monday proposed stripping the power of an independent board to review challenges from fired federal workers while barring employees from taking the matter to court.
The new proposed rule would impact federal workers fired through a Reduction in Force (RIF), the process used at 22 different agencies last year as the Trump administration conducted widespread layoffs.
If finalized, any federal worker fired in a future RIF would not be able to plead their case before the quasi-judicial Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which last year found that some agencies had “engaged in a prohibited personnel practice” in firing the workers.
Instead, any challenges would be reviewed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which last year alongside the Office of Management and Budget instructed agencies to begin RIFs.
“Eliminating independent review of federal RIF actions would not only make it harder for employees to challenge their proposed terminations, but would essentially give the administration free rein to terminate huge swaths of the federal workforce without meaningful independent oversight,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union, said in a statement.
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