A Sneaky Policy Buried In The GOP Tax Bill Could Blow Up The Civil Service

Yahoo

23-05-2025

President Donald Trump's long-running dream to protect loyalists in the federal bureaucracy and fire any perceived enemy got even closer to reality Thursday, when House Republicans passed a massive tax and spending bill.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed 215-214, cuts $1 trillion in federal health and food programs while adding nearly $4 trillion in tax cuts steered primarily to the wealthy. But it also includes a little-noticed provision that would force new federal employees to either give up traditional job protections or take a significant cut to their compensation.
If the measure survives in whatever package the GOP-controlled Senate passes, unions warn it could turn the federal workforce into an old-school spoils system.
'It's a huge policy change masquerading as a small budget provision,' said Daniel Horowitz, legislative director at the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing more than 800,000 workers.
'It torches the civil service.'
And it does so in a sneaky way. Federal workers receive retirement benefits through what's known as the Federal Employees Retirement System, or FERS. Retirees are paid an annuity based upon their length of service, funded through contributions from both employees and their agencies. Current workers chip in a certain percentage of their paycheck into FERS — either 0.8% or 4.4%, depending on when they were hired — and the government covers the rest.
The GOP measure would force new federal employees to pay a whopping 5% surcharge — bringing their FERS contribution to 9.4% of their pay — unless they agree to become an 'at-will' employee. That means they would waive their right to appeal their termination except in particular cases like racial discrimination.
The average salary of a new federal worker entering the FERS system is around $71,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the agency inside Congress that analyzed the GOP bill. So the typical worker would have to give up $3,500 a year just to have job protections that have long been standard.
Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, a union representing 100,000 workers, said the policy amounts to a 'bribe.'
'Another way to look at it is criminal extortion,' he said. 'They're saying, 'We will charge you more … if you choose to access the laws that are on the books.''
He suspects most workers would choose to have more money in their paychecks, even though 'you'd lose all your protections to report waste, fraud and abuse.'
Indeed, the budget office estimates that only one-quarter of new hires would sacrifice 5% of their pay in order to keep their civil service rights. And therefore the budget savings from the measure — that is, the whole reason it's supposedly in a tax bill — would end up being quite small.
CBO figures the policy would increase revenue by just $4.7 billion over 10 years. By comparison, the Republican bill cuts nearly $700 billion from Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, over the same period.
Horowitz said the meager savings betray the policy's real intent: to turn the federal government into an at-will workforce in which employees can be fired for any reason at all.
'With a small provision here they're basically undoing all of Title 5,' he said, referring to the part of U.S. code that outlines federal job protections. 'It's 150 years of civil service rules that are being thrown out here and nullified.'While it may be tucked into a tax package, the policy fits neatly into the Trump administration's broader attacks on federal workers and labor groups.
The White House has tried to unilaterally shut down federal agencies, terminate tens of thousands of probationary employees, carry out mass layoffs through 'reductions in force' and strip collective-bargaining rights from up to a million workers. It is also hoping to reclassify thousands of civil servants as 'at-will' political appointees through its Schedule F scheme.
Federal unions are an obstacle to all those goals, and the GOP tax measure could be one way to weaken them for good.
Unions in the federal sector cannot bargain directly over pay and benefits, but they can provide good job security by enabling workers to appeal what they believe are unfair terminations. If workers waive their right to such due process, there would be less reason for them to join a union in the first place. The at-will policy could therefore help with the long-sought GOP goal of shrinking the membership of federal unions.
Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said the Trump administration seems determined to 'turn the federal sector into Walmart.'
'This idea of forcing federal workers to pay or be 'at will' is illegal and outrageous,' said Biggs, whose union represents workers at NASA and other agencies.
But it's not clear the measure will make it through the Senate, where some Republicans have voiced concern about certain pieces of the House bill. Republicans hold 53 seats and have a narrow path to approving the tax overhaul. Winning over the more moderate members will be essential to getting the legislation to Trump's desk.
Lenkart hopes the provision will die in the Senate, which tends to be 'a little calmer in the skull' than the House, he said. But he was reluctant to make any predictions.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski is one of the few Republicans who've openly pushed back against Trump's attacks on federal employees. Her home state of Alaska is especially vulnerable to cuts to the federal workforce. Asked for her take on the at-will provision in the GOP bill, Murkowski said only that she'd been keeping an eye on it.
'I haven't looked to see how it actually landed,' she told HuffPost on Thursday, alluding to the last-minute changes House Republicans made to their bill. 'It is something that we were paying attention to. So I'm going to take a look at that one.'
Arthur Delaney contributed reporting to this story.