The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal civil service, just dropped a new memo that encourages federal employers to take a “generous approach” to accommodating employee schedules, including allowing telework. Oh wait. That “generous approach” only applies to religious employees. Everyone else can pound sand.
OPM’s memo is almost comical in its solicitousness of religious employees, while utterly disregarding other federal employees. In order to accommodate religious workers, federal agencies are told to consider a cavalcade of accommodations: telework, compensatory time, flexible schedules, annual leave, and time off for travel. Pretty sweet deal! Religious employees should be allowed to telework to accommodate prayer breaks during the workday, because “telework is often a low-cost solution” and “does not impose substantial operational burdens.”
That’s quite a different approach to telework for everyone else in the federal government. In contrast to the “generous approach” required for religious employees, the Trump administration’s stance has been comprehensively hateful to every other federal employee. Trump was so hyped to attack federal employees that he issued an executive order banning telework and demanding federal employees return to in-person work on his very first day in office.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was also excited to attack his own workforce, stating that the Department of Defense would terminate agreements with anyone who teleworked within 50 miles of their worksite. And just last week, the Veterans Affairs Department announced it would make it harder for workers with disabilities to work remotely, because apparently, the Americans with Disabilities Act’s requirements for reasonable accommodations for disabled workers don’t matter.
So, for those keeping score at home: letting someone telework so they can pray is no big deal, low-cost, and not disruptive to the workforce. Letting anyone else telework, even workers with disabilities, is beyond the pale and evidence of employee laziness and possibly even fraud.
Just peep OPM’s other guidance to federal workers, which is mostly telling them that they suck. Past OPM memos include bangers like “IG Report Reveals Rampant Telework Abuse Under Biden Administration,” which makes sure to remind federal employees that OPM had reinstated in-person work “to restore a culture of accountability and public service.” Or perhaps you’d like to read “OPM Proposes Rule to Hold Federal Workers Accountable for Misconduct,” which boasts of how the administration will make it easier to fire federal employees because “public service is a privilege, not a right.”
There’s always ”OPM Announces Merit Hiring Plan to Restore Accountability to the Federal Workforce,” which talks about the need to “rebuild a federal workforce rooted in merit, competence, and dedication to American values.” And then, of course, there’s the whole thing where the administration has officially fired well over 59,000 federal employees, with many more being forced out.
The religious liberty memo was the first issued under the new permanent OPM director, Scott Kupor. During Kupor’s confirmation hearing, he complained about how the federal government currently ranks too many employees as high performers. He also did some tough talk about how the federal government needs to make hard choices so it doesn’t operate at a deficit.
Buddy, do we have news for you about your boss’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Like so many Trump appointees, Kupor has no background in government but does have a background in being a conservative rich guy, so that will probably work out fine.
This is a wholly warped reading of what “religious liberty” requires, but it is one that the Supreme Court has already blessed. The right-wing majority has repeatedly held that accommodating the beliefs of conservative Christians means eradicating the separation of church and state, setting up a world where Christians have privileges no one else does.
Religious parents can block schools from letting their children read even the most innocuous LGBTQ+ books, but secular parents who want their children to receive gender-affirming care cannot. Companies run by religious people who are opposed to same-sex marriage can refuse to work with same-sex couples. The Supreme Court created a special carveout to public accommodations laws, which prohibit discrimination by businesses that hold themselves open to the public. Sure, that’s the law, but if your religion opposes same-sex marriage, it’s totally cool if you refuse to work with same-sex couples.
Just in case OPM didn’t make it scrupulously clear that they intend to give religious employees special treatment, the telework memo says religious accommodations are necessary because “it is in the interest of the Federal government to recruit and retain highly-qualified employees of faith.”
That whole separation of church and state thing means the opposite: that it is in the interest of the federal government to be neutral in its recruiting, rather than recruiting based on the religious beliefs of a candidate. There’s also the whole issue of how, exactly, the government plans to determine, during the hiring process, the religious beliefs of a candidate. Of course, in a completely lawless administration, there is no real barrier to warping the federal hiring process by openly favoring “employees of faith” over non-religious candidates.
While OPM’s memo might be a drop in the bucket in the context of everything else the administration is doing, it’s a deeply pernicious, cynical thing. It sets religious employees apart, tells them how important they are and how their needs must always be met—and met in a fashion that is prohibited for other federal employees. Sure, the administration is trying to impose Christian nationalism on us all, but you’d think they could at least be a little more subtle about it.