The second Trump administration is expected to revert to prior policies on employee discipline, and the role of unions. Image: Andrii Yalanskyi/Shutterstock.com
The incoming second Trump administration in January is expected act quickly to reinstate federal workplace policies of its first term that the Biden administration overturned when it took office in early 2021, and to additionally wipe out several initiatives that the current administration undertook.
Prominent among policies from the first Trump administration set for a return is the excepted service Schedule F (see related story) but that was just one of a series of its workplace initiatives since canceled that are considered likely to return.
Many of those were contained in a set of 2018 executive orders whose implementation was delayed by a court challenge, with rules not finalized until late 2020—rules that the Biden administration suspended, then revoked. Those orders in general were directed at strengthening management’s hand with individual employees and with the unions that represent many of them.
In the former category was ordering agencies to provide only the minimum protections guaranteed in law when taking disciplinary actions, in either performance- or conduct-related cases. These included: limiting the period for an employee to respond to a notice of proposed discipline to the 30 days required by law and generally requiring agencies to issue a final decision within 15 days of that. Agencies also were told they: need to meet only the minimum requirements to help employees improve before they are subject to disciplinary action on performance grounds; need not follow “progressive discipline” practices; and should consider an employee’s total disciplinary record, including prior misconduct, when taking a disciplinary action on conduct grounds.
In the latter category were orders that agencies were not to agree in bargaining to protections going beyond those limits and were generally not to agree to make disciplinary actions subject to grievance procedures. Other provisions aimed to weaken the role of unions in other ways, such as by invoking impasse procedures and imposing management proposals if negotiations were not concluded within certain time frames; limiting in several ways “official time” for employees to perform certain allowable union-related roles on the clock; and ending the practice of providing unions with free office space and related services on agency property.
After canceling those policies—and telling agencies to renegotiate any contracts reflecting them—the Biden administration moved in the opposite direction regarding unions. It instructed agencies to bargain and take actions within the limits of the law to encourage worker organizing through steps such as including eligibility for union membership, if pertinent, on job vacancy announcements; allowing unions to participate in new employee orientation sessions; requiring agencies to review whether any positions had been incorrectly excluded from union eligibility; and reinstating labor-management cooperative forums giving unions a role in agency operations outside the bargaining setting.
The second Trump administration is expected to revoke all of those policies.
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