House Republicans are holding the federal workforce hostage

While the latest with former President Trump’s ongoing legal battles and Pentagon leaks have taken up a large share of the oxygen in Washington, under the surface, a long-abandoned legislative tool is threatening to put a target on the back of every civil servant amid debt ceiling negotiations. 

The Freedom Caucus is making its second attempt in recent history to resurrect the Holman Rule from its legislative grave, and, as in most zombie stories, this political monstrosity should remain buried.

The return of the Holman Rule was among the many concessions that House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made to the House Freedom Caucus to secure the Speakership. It gives individual representatives the power to reduce or eliminate federal employee salaries, or even funding to entire offices, by attaching a rider to critical appropriations legislation. This means House Republicans have quietly gained the power to defund whole agencies as political retribution. 

These riders can be attached to must-pass legislation, like any debt ceiling legislation or the defense budget. Coupled with a House Republican leadership that has already shown it will bend to the demands of their caucus’s hard right, members now have a historic opportunity to undermine the merit systems that have come to define our civil service and cripple our government’s accountability mechanisms. In the past, Republicans have openly called for using the rule to defund the FBI, the latest agency targeted for its investigations into Trump.

This type of overt political control over the federal workforce was the norm following the Civil War. Government employees openly provided kickbacks of their salaries to politicians (notably U.S. representatives) as a quid pro quo to receiving an appointment to their positions. In 1876, Rep. William Holman (D-Ind.) introduced a reform that would permit Congress to identify federal employees by name or by a group to be subject to a reduction in pay as an amendment to an appropriations bill ostensibly to root out political influence in the civil service.

This utility of the new “Holman Rule” was overtaken in 1881, when a disgruntled office seeker who believed he was owed a civil service appointment assassinated President James Garfield. Garfield’s assassination spurred the passage in 1883 of the Pendleton Act, which implemented sweeping civil service reforms to establish merit system principles as the basis for federal employment, not political patronage.

The Pendleton Act served as the basis for over 100 years of government reforms geared toward insulating the federal workforce from political influence — including the Hatch Act, which restricted political activity by federal employees. Watergate ushered in a second wave of government reform legislation, including a significant overhaul of the Pendleton Act. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 established government employee oversight agencies, including the Office of Special Counsel, Office of Personnel Management and the United States Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). With these reforms in place, then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) abolished the Holman Rule in 1983.

Federal employees maintain critical functions, including defending national security and caring for our veterans. The federal workforce system isn’t perfect, but there’s no question that the civil service’s insulation from political whims is a principle that has allowed our country to excel by putting the most capable people in these jobs. A small minority of Congress firing workers for political disagreements without any oversight would be a disastrous setback for effective governance.

This rule opens the door for members of Congress to not only hobble specific programs that they may disagree with but also act upon personal vendettas. Representatives could utilize the Holman Rule to eliminate the pay of individual FBI agents or U.S. attorneys investigating public corruption. Our country’s checks against abuses of power are strong but not infallible, as we’ve learned in recent years. We cannot risk allowing another route to circumvent them.

A weaponized Holman rule allows for more than just partisan uses. One can imagine the benefits to the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists to have a House member target the Food and Drug Administration commissioners, who may be poised to reject approval of a profitable but potentially hazardous drug. Oil and gas interest groups could target scientists and managers at the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency to force approval of drilling permits or avoid fines for oil spills. The potential harmful applications are dizzying. 

As this Congress navigates a range of crises in the upcoming months, we must not lose sight of the principles that undergird our government’s stability. Congress must safeguard our robust merit systems, preserve checks and balances and shield the civil service from partisan politics by stopping the Holman Rule from being put into use.

Kevin Owen is a partner and chair of the Adverse Action and MSPB Practice Group at Gilbert Employment Law.