Four federal employee unions have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s recently finalized rules requiring that performance ratings fit a pattern and its separate rules giving OPM authority to order—and then itself review—firings of employees on “suitability” grounds.

The suit by the AFGE, AFSCME, NFFE and IFPTE unions says that both policies “are contrary to the CSRA [Civil Service Reform Act] and exceed the authority delegated to OPM by statute. These rules also represent arbitrary and capricious reversals of long-standing procedures and policies, based on impermissible considerations and without a rational connection between the reasons given and the actions taken.”

They further will “undermine existing statutory protections for federal employees and the merit-based civil service itself, opening the door to political and personal favoritism and degrading the quality of the workforce,” says the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern California District.

With the performance appraisal change—effective with the ratings cycle closing in September—“OPM gives itself the power to require federal agencies to use a forced distribution system to evaluate employees. This Rule directly conflicts with the governing provisions of the CSRA,” which requires that employees be rated against objective criteria, while a forced distribution “judges federal employees against each other.”

Under that rule, “OPM can require agencies to appraise their employees based on a forced curve such that agencies must differentiate between employees who previously would have received the same summary level. The result is that objective criteria such as actual performance will no longer be the sole basis of evaluations and those evaluations will not be accurate.”

OPM has not specified a ratings pattern to be applied, saying that is still to come. Recently issued guidance gives as an example limits of 10 percent rated at level 5 and 20 percent rated at level 4, which would require lowering many of the ratings assigned by employees’ supervisors through “calibration” by higher-level officials.

In the suitability rule, “OPM assumes authority that Congress has never granted it by statute to make disciplinary decisions (including termination) with respect to federal civil service employees based on OPM’s assessment of conduct during employment. Moreover, those decisions will be made by an unnamed set of individuals within OPM, using an opaque process that OPM itself will then purport to ‘review.’”

“The impact of the Suitability Rule will be substantial: OPM itself estimates that half of all removal actions (previously addressed via CSRA procedures) will now become suitability actions taken by OPM . . . And, because OPM has also issued a new rule barring employees fired through suitability actions from appealing to the MSPB and thereafter seeking review in the Federal Circuit, OPM also seeks to insulate its decisions to remove and bar employees from federal employment from independent review,” it says.

OPM has said that under that rule, its adjudicators will be insulated from its officials who participated in the underlying action.

In addition to conflicting with employee protections in the Reform Act, the suit asserts, both the performance evaluation rules and the suitability rules violate the Administrative Procedure Act as beyond OPM’s authority and as arbitrary and capricious.