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Washington, D.C. – Dismantling the Office of Personnel Management to give the White House control over federal workforce management would expose the professional, merit-based civil service to partisan manipulation, the president of the National Treasury Employees Union said Thursday.

“We believe that an independent, central personnel agency outside of the Executive Office of the President is important for a non-partisan civilian workforce of two million,” NTEU National President Tony Reardon wrote to Congress.

Reardon’s statement was submitted to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management. The panel held a hearing Thursday on the administration’s proposed reorganization of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the General Services Administration.

“The White House’s Office of Presidential Personnel has rightly been responsible for the selection and hiring of presidential appointees; however, OPM’s independent authority over the career civil service -- and employing agency human resources’ actions and decisions -- must be maintained for our government not to revert to the spoils system,” Reardon wrote.

The proposal would break apart OPM by moving core employee policy divisions to the White House; retirement processing and policy and the administration of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to a newly named Government Services Agency; and federal employee background investigations to the Department of Defense.

Reardon said Congress should not allow any president to take over the office responsible for making sure the merit system principles are followed, but especially “at a time when federal employees already fear reprisals from agency heads for not showing enough support for this administration’s policies.”

Reardon urged Congress to seek input from frontline federal employees.

“If this administration really wants to reform the government, dismantling the agency that can help them do that makes no sense.  Nor does it make sense to freeze out those who know how government is supposed to work,” he wrote.

NTEU represents 150,000 employees at 33 federal agencies and departments.