The Civil Service Rules are being rewritten for the first time since Eisenhower, and the rewrite arrives with no proposed rule and no report to Congress

The last person to rewrite these rules was Dwight Eisenhower.

The Office of Personnel Management filed a direct final rule on Thursday amending six parts of the Civil Service Rules, the body of regulation that governs appointments, examinations, probationary periods and certain prohibited practices across the federal government. Executive Order 10577, signed on 22 November 1954, was the last comprehensive revision. The rules themselves date from 7 May 1883, when President Arthur issued the first set months after the Pendleton Act.

OPM says the changes are obsolete-reference cleanup and have no substantive impact on agency operations. The rule is issued at the direction of section 2(g) of Executive Order 14410, which gave the agency 60 days to do it.

Direct final means the comment comes afterwards

There is no proposed rule. The document takes effect 60 days after publication unless significant adverse comments arrive within 30 days, and OPM states that it "does not expect to receive any significant adverse comments." A comment only counts as significant and adverse if it explains why the rule is inappropriate or why it would be ineffective without a change. Suggesting an addition does not qualify unless the commenter shows the rule fails without it.

Congress does not see it either. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs determined the rule fails the major-rule test, and OPM adds that a rule relating to agency management or personnel is not a rule at all for Congressional Review Act purposes, so the reporting requirement in 5 U.S.C. 801 does not apply.

What actually comes out

The provision worth naming is 5 CFR 2.3. It requires that appointments to agency headquarters offices in Washington be apportioned among the states, territories and the District of Columbia on a population basis, a rule that traces to the Pendleton Act. Congress repealed the underlying statute on 10 February 1978. The regulation has been sitting there for 48 years since.

Two postal provisions go the same way, one covering examination registers for fourth-class postmasters and one a pay carveout under a 1945 statute. Elsewhere the rule replaces "handicapped employees" with "employees with a disability" and a reference to a "mentally retarded" employee with "employee with an intellectual disability", moves publication of noncompetitive appointment reasons from an annual report abolished in 1980 to OPM's website, drops a Federal Personnel Manual reference eleven years after that manual was itself abolished, and updates two agency names.

One reference does not match itself. The preamble says the citation to the act of 24 March 1943 becomes 38 U.S.C. 3115; the amendatory instruction for 5 CFR 3.1(a)(2) puts 38 U.S.C. chapter 31 in its place.