The Trump administration earlier this month issued a final rule to hold federal bureaucrats more accountable to the will of American voters, the culmination of a months-long review process after the administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) first proposed the regulatory reforms last spring.
In support of the proposed rule, Freedom Foundation submitted formal comments documenting its previous research that exposed stunning evidence of how unelected career staff at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) actively resisted President Trump’s policies during his first term in office.
Such bureaucratic subversion is exactly what the administration’s new rule is designed to prevent, and the Freedom Foundation’s comment ultimately served as one of several key examples that OPM relied upon when adopting the final regulation.
In establishing the evidentiary basis for the rule, OPM highlighted that,
“Another example comes from [the Freedom Foundation] who obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request that uncovered career employee resistance expressed to the General Counsel of the National Labor Relation Board under the first Trump administration. In one of these emails, a former longtime NLRB employee bragged about ‘the brave resistance’ of career NLRB employees to the presidentially appointed General Counsel’s priorities.”
To combat this kind of “bureaucratic resistance” and address the longstanding criticism that federal civil service laws make it inordinately difficult to hold career employees accountable, OPM’s rule establishes a new employment category for policy-influencing career positions that will now allow federal agencies to more effectively remove bureaucrats for poor performance, misconduct, or attempts to intentionally subvert an administration’s policy directives.
Having both documented and experienced firsthand how entrenched, pro-union activism pervades the permanent federal bureaucracy at agencies like the NLRB — indeed, a real example of what some might call the “deep state” — the Freedom Foundation was uniquely positioned to offer its perspective in support of these reforms by the Trump administration and, out of the more than 40,000 comments received by OPM, is pleased to have contributed to the administration’s decision to adopt the final rule.
