Page 26 - FCW, August 2020

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Trump nominates HUD official
to be OPM director
President Donald Trump has nominated John Gibbs, a senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to serve as director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Gibbs joined HUD in 2017
as an adviser to Secretary Ben Carson and stepped into the role
of acting assistant secretary for community planning and development in March.
Gibbs has a computer science degree from Stanford University and worked as a software engineer at Symantec, Palm and Apple. In addition, he spent almost seven years in Japan with WorldVenture, a global evangelical Christian ministry.
He also rose to prominence as a conservative commentator with a penchant for conspiracy theories. A
CNN report from March 2018 detailed Gibbs’ history of controversial Twitter posts, including the claim that Hillary
Clinton’s campaign chairman took part in satanic rituals.
OPM has been without a Senate-confirmed director since mid-March, when Dale Cabaniss quit, reportedly due to friction with the White House’s
House voted 295-125 to pass its version.
OPM has been at the center of a long-running controversy during the Trump administration. Congress and the government’s lawyers took issue with a plan to merge much of the agency’s core functions into the General Services Administration and establish a separate human resources policy office inside the White House.
A recent investigation by the Project on Government Oversight revealed that Justice Department attorneys had characterized the merger as illegal if it was pushed forward without legislative approval. That opinion from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel was reportedly never shared with the congressional committees charged with oversight and funding of OPM.
Thanks to appropriations riders and legislative text in the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the OPM/GSA merger is supposed to be on hold pending a study by the National Academy of Public Administration.
— Adam Mazmanian
86-14 was the veto-proof Senate vote to approve the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.The
John Gibbs
personnel office, which has been pushing out senior officials deemed insufficiently loyal to the president.
Since then Michael Rigas, acting deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, has also been serving as acting director of OPM, where he has been involved in crafting new policies on leave and telework during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden promises to undo Trump’s workforce policies
Former Vice President Joe Biden promised that, if elected president, he would roll back many of the workforce policies that President Donald Trump instituted.
Under his plan to empower workers, Biden said he would reinstate an Obama-era executive order that penalized federal contractors for pursuing anti-union campaigns and did not pay their workers at least $15 per hour and provide other benefits.
The plan has made Biden’s support for expanding and protecting collective bargaining rights a key point of his campaign’s appeal to public-sector workers.
Biden pledged to pass the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, both of which would codify into law the right for
public employees — including police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians — to unionize and collectively bargain over issues such as wages and work schedules.
“States have decimated the rights of public-sector workers who, unlike private-sector workers, do not have federal protections ensuring their freedom to organize and collectively bargain,” Biden’s platform states.
While it has yet to formally announce which candidate it will endorse, the American Federation of Government Employees published the results of a recent poll in which 58.4% of respondents said the union should endorse Biden.
Jacqueline Simon, AFGE’s public policy director, told FCW that the current administration has adopted “scorched-earth, anti-federal worker, anti-civil service” policies, particularly
the three executive orders issued in 2018 that rolled back unions’ ability to conduct business using official time, accelerated the timeline for firing workers and restructured the grievance negotiation process.
“The Trump administration has been devastating to federal workers’ rights,” Simon said. “The executive orders narrowed our already narrow collective bargaining rights and made it harder for federal workers to get union representation even when they vote for it and pay for it.”
In his answers to an AFGE questionnaire for presidential candidates, Biden said he would support efforts that prevent rollbacks of official-time use and block efforts that prevent voluntary automatic deductions of union dues from federal workers’ paychecks.
— Lia Russell
26 August 2020 FCW.COM