Comment from Amanda Petersen

RE: Joint Proposed Rule on Promoting Employee Accountability – Opposition to the Removal of the Douglas Factors Framework As a citizen who deeply cares about an efficient, effective government, and as someone with professional management experience, I know firsthand that operational success relies entirely on stability and psychological safety. Effective management requires clear, predictable rules. When workers must fear that a new boss coming in every four years can arbitrarily rewrite the standards and fire long-time experts without reviewing their historical performance, productivity plummets. Fear paralyzes an organization. I am submitting this comment because the removal of the Douglas factors replaces a proven, stable management framework with a chaotic system that will actively prevent public servants from doing their vital jobs. The removal of the Douglas factors creates severe systemic risks that the proposed rule fails to adequately address or justify: 1. Increased Risk of Pretextual and Retaliatory Firings The 12 Douglas factors require managers to objectively weigh mitigating evidence, such as an employee’s long-term unblemished service record, past performance evaluations, and potential provocations or medical conditions. Stripping this mandatory checklist away allows a hostile supervisor to weaponize a subjective "totality of the circumstances" standard to conceal retaliatory motives, such as targeting whistleblowers or employees who push back against unlawful directives. 2. Arbitrary and Disparate Enforcement Across Agencies Without a standardized, legally binding checklist, individual supervisors will have unchecked discretion to penalize employees. This will inevitably lead to disparate treatment, where two employees committing the identical minor infraction receive vastly different punishments based entirely on a manager's personal bias. This directly violates the Merit System Principles mandated by Congress under the Civil Service Reform Act. Enacted in 1978, the Civil Service Reform Act was specifically designed to prevent this exact type of partisan overreach and weaponization of personnel in the wake of the Watergate scandal. 3. Severe Operational Hardship and Loss of Institutional Knowledge This proposed rule fails to account for the catastrophic operational reality of purging experienced personnel. Federal employees responsible for critical infrastructure, public safety, and health inspections often possess 20 or more years of specialized experience that they use daily to ensure boring but necessary public protections continue uninterrupted. When these veteran experts can be summarily dismissed over trivial issues or minor technical infractions, the safety net fails. We see the real-world consequences of this in crises like sudden contamination or disease outbreaks: a slow, ineffective response and rapidly spreading contamination occur simply because the highly trained person who actually knows how to contain the crisis has been pushed out, and no one is left to do the job safely. 4. Administrative and Legal Instability The proposed rule claims this change will streamline removals, but it will achieve the exact opposite. Erasing 45 years of established legal precedent will trigger a massive wave of litigation. Agencies will face an influx of costly, prolonged appeals before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and federal courts as judges struggle to interpret an entirely unregulated "totality" standard, ballooning administrative backlogs and wasting taxpayer dollars. Proposed Alternative: Instead of completely dismantling the Douglas factors, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the MSPB should maintain the mandatory 12-factor framework while issuing updated guidance to help managers document their evaluations more efficiently. I urge the agencies to withdraw this portion of the proposed rule and preserve the objective safeguards that keep the federal civil service professional, merit-based, and free from arbitrary overreach.