Senate Parliamentarian Kills Civil Service Cut In Continued Scrub Of 'Beautiful Bill'

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s rules referee has thrown a roadblock in front of congressional Republicans’ plan to gut job protections for federal workers through their “big, beautiful bill.”

The Senate’s parliamentarian ruled lawmakers cannot include the proposal under the fast-track procedures they’re using for President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, Democrats said late Sunday.

It’s the latest in a series of decisions by the parliamentarian dismantling key provisions of the bill, including a major change to federal food benefits and an attempt to stop courts from enforcing injunctions against the Trump administration. 

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The so-called budget reconciliation process allows Republicans to pass legislation through the Senate with a simple majority vote, which is a huge convenience, but there are rules against provisions deemed “extraneous” to the budget. It’s up to the parliamentarian to decide what counts. 

“Democrats are on the side of families and workers and are scrutinizing this bill piece by piece to ensure Republicans can’t use the reconciliation process to force their anti-worker policies on the American people,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said in a news release Sunday night. 

The heart of the legislation is a $4 trillion package of tax cuts, with their cost partly offset by about $1 trillion in spending cuts, though the parliamentarian has been whittling those.

The proposal struck Sunday essentially would have forced new federal workers to pay for traditional civil service protections by raising their retirement contributions unless they agreed to be “at-will” employees who could be terminated at any time. 

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that most new workers would give up their rights rather than pay for them.

Unions have derided the plan as “extortion.” They warned it would turn the civil service into a spoils system wherein the president could reward loyalists and fire whomever he wanted.

Democrats said the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, also blocked several other GOP provisions meant to undermine federal workers. (MacDonough’s decisions typically aren’t made public.) 

One would have created a “filing fee” for workers to challenge what they believe to be illegal terminations, while another would have forced federal unions to pay for the use of government buildings and equipment and other “agency resources.”

Senate Republicans also hoped to give the president greater leeway to pursue “reorganization” plans — that is, lay off federal workers without approval from Congress. But that provision also ran afoul of the rules, the parliamentarian said.

Another proposal MacDonough ruled out of bounds on Sunday would have given Congress more say over regulations promulgated by federal agencies. 

Republicans can overrule the parliamentarian, though doing so would be controversial, or they can try to redraft their proposals so they comply with the Byrd Rule disallowing extraneous matter in budget reconciliation. Otherwise, anything deemed ineligible would be subject to a 60-vote threshold, meaning it would have no chance of passing the Senate without help from Democrats.