Press Releases

Chairwoman Maloney issued this statement:

“I thank President Biden for taking bold action on behalf of the federal employees who work tirelessly to serve the American people – despite the global pandemic.  This executive order goes a long way in repairing the damage done to the federal workforce by the Trump Administration over the last four years.  Rep. Connolly and I have been working to protect our dedicated federal workers from these harmful actions.  We look forward to partnering with the new Administration to ensure that collective bargaining, whistleblower protection and merit principles remain a foundation of the federal civil service.” 

Rep. Connolly issued this statement: 

“President Biden is absolutely right to shelve Trump’s reckless Schedule F proposal. Our federal workforce should be filled with career experts, not political cronies. Now Congress must pass our Preventing a Patronage System Act to ensure no President can unilaterally attack our merit based civil service system.”

President Biden’s action overturns President Trump’s Executive Orders 13836, 13837, and 13839, which undermined collective bargaining rights and whistleblower protections by cutting off whistleblowers from receiving union representation by union volunteers, physically expelling unions from the workplace by denying employees the use of office space in federal facilities, allowing managers to dictate contract terms without independent review, and imposing arbitrary deadlines for the collective bargaining process, without regard to the size or complexity of the bargaining unit.  President Biden also overturns Executive Order 13957, which sought to gut expertise in our civil service and strip federal employees of statutory protections and due process rights by creating a new excepted service Schedule F.

Background:

Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Committee on Oversight and Reform have consistently stood up for worker protections in the federal workplace.

On June 14, 2018, the entire House leadership sent a letter to President Trump urging him to rescind his anti-union, anti-whistleblower executive orders.

On July 2, 2018, former Chairman Elijah E. Cummings filed a bipartisan amicus brief in federal litigation aimed at enjoining the anti-union, anti-whistleblower executive orders.

On April 2, 2020, Rep. Connolly asked the FLRA to withdraw a proposed rule that jeopardized the financial stability of unions, breaking with decades of labor-management relations precedent, and endangered protections for federal employees across the country.

On November 30, 2020, Rep. Connolly wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), urging the reversal of decisions that diverged from decades-long precedent and severely hampered the unions’ ability to engage in meaningful collective bargaining by changing requirements for the duty to bargain, limiting midterm bargaining, and redefining provisions governing continuance provisions.  

Last week, Connolly and Maloney introduced the Preventing a Patronage System Act (H.R. 302) and the Saving the Civil Service Act (H.R. 326) – two crucial pieces of legislation to prevent the implementation of the Trump Administration executive order seeking to gut merit system principles of the federal civil service.