Preventing A Patronage System Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 302, sponsored by my friend and colleague from Virginia.

Three out of four of my grandparents were career Federal servants. I represent more Federal employees than any Member of Congress. I have a deep appreciation for the vital work our civil service does to keep our Federal Government functioning.

Our Federal employees have endured attack after attack from our former President and his allies. The most significant threat to our Federal workers came when the former President tried to use executive action to strip Federal workers of their most basic protections and replace our career civil servants with political loyalists.

This rule would have made a huge number of Federal employees fireable by any future President, overturning a century-old system put in place by Congress to prevent this politicization.

Congress passed the Pendleton Act 139 years ago, through Democrats and Republican Presidents all those years, to require civil servants to be politically independent. We insist our public servants be loyal to our country, not to our political leaders. We demand integrity, competence, and experience, not partisanship and ideology.

Should schedule F ever be enacted, any future President could unilaterally transform a whole government overnight in wildly destructive ways.

The bill we are about to vote on will prevent something like schedule F from ever becoming law. It would block any reclassifications of Federal employees to schedule F and prevent any position in the competitive service from being reclassified to an excepted service position.

This bill is essential to keep Federal employees from being used as political bargaining chips and protects the careers of thousands of civil servants and their families, along with the legitimacy of the institutions under which they serve.

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