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Another lawsuit alleges DOJ is illegally rejecting telework requests from employees with disabilities

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:40:00 -0400

A group of employees with disabilities at the Executive Office of Immigration Review alleged in a lawsuit on June 3 that agency officials are categorically denying reasonable accommodation requests for telework following President Donald Trump’s directive in January 2025 mandating that federal staffers return to in-person work.

While that order ended telework and remote work flexibility for most government workers, civil servants with qualifying disabilities are exempt from its requirements. Plus, agencies are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations (e.g. flexible schedules and accessible technology) to such employees unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship.”

But staffers with disabilities alleged these rules have been flouted by officials at EOIR, a Justice Department agency that adjudicates immigration cases.

“Since late April 2025, on information and belief, the agency has granted no telework reasonable accommodations to EOIR employees, including new requests for telework reasonable accommodations and requests to renew previously approved telework reasonable accommodations,” their attorneys wrote in the filing.

One of the named plaintiffs, Kimberly Panian, said that during a May 2025 meeting to discuss her telework reasonable accommodation request an agency official told her that EOIR had not granted any such requests under the new administration.

Panian, who has worked at the agency as an attorney-advisor since 2018, has Type I diabetes and experiences migraines with stroke-like symptoms. In March 2020, she requested a full-time telework accommodation due to fears that her diabetes could expose her to more severe COVID-19 complications. While that request was approved, all EOIR staffers shortly thereafter were directed to work from home due to the pandemic.

“Ms. Panian also noted [in a 2022 accommodation renewal request] that when she has a migraine episode, she cannot manage her blood sugar, which puts her at considerable risk due to her diabetes,” according to the lawsuit. “Her request explained that she is better able to manage her symptoms from home and emphasized the danger of having a medical emergency at work due to the court’s lack of cell service and trained individuals to help her.”

But her requests for telework have been denied since the policy change, and she was ordered to return to the office by April 20, 2026. Since that date, she has used nearly 250 hours of sick and annual leave and will run out by the middle of June.

“In addition to skyrocketing blood sugar and increased migraines, Ms. Panian has been in a constant state of increased anxiety and has experienced numerous panic attacks and other mental health symptoms. Given her precarious health, the stress and anxiety create a domino effect that worsens her ability to manage her diabetes, migraines and related symptoms,” her lawyers wrote. “The medication and medical equipment on which Ms. Panian relies are incredibly expensive, and she lives in constant fear that she will have to jeopardize her life by returning to in-person work to protect her livelihood and health insurance.”

EOIR attorney-advisor Hoi Yee Baxter, the other named plaintiff, teleworked even before the COVID-19 pandemic but requested work from home as a reasonable accommodation after being diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in September 2024. That request was approved on Jan. 13, 2025.

Ultimately, however, her accommodation was revoked about a year later, and she was directed to begin working in-person by Feb. 2, 2026. Like Panian, she has relied on leave since then and is set to run out in June.

“[Baxter] has spent the time she would be working [instead] thinking about her lung cancer, stressing about losing her job and contemplating death,” according to the filing. “EOIR’s denial of her telework reasonable accommodation request has had a compounding and negative impact on her mental health. She experiences increased headaches, stress, and anxiety.”

Democracy Forward — a national legal organization that is behind many of the lawsuits against the Trump administration, which is representing the plaintiffs along with the employment law firm Burakiewicz & DePriest — argued that EOIR’s apparent telework policy violates the Rehabilitation Act’s prohibition on disability-based discrimination in federal programs.

“The Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to engage in an individualized, good-faith process to provide reasonable accommodations — not impose blanket bans driven by politics and ideology,” said Elena Goldstein, Democracy Forward’s legal director, in a statement. “This policy of categorically denying telework accommodations is unlawful, dangerous and fundamentally inconsistent with the federal government’s obligations under disability rights law.”

In response to a request for comment, EOIR said that it “declines to comment on litigation-related matters.”

The lawsuit cites an April 2025 EOIR email that said officials would take a “closer look” at telework reasonable accommodations because the component has “slightly more than 2% of all DOJ employees” but “is responsible for approximately 11% of all full-time telework reasonable accommodations granted department-wide.”

A separate group of DOJ employees with disabilities alleged in a recent lawsuit that officials discriminated and retaliated against them “as part of a systematic, agency-wide practice of refusing to grant requests for telework as a reasonable accommodation.” And Government Executive previously reported that Terry Jackson, a former DOJ employee with disabilities, settled with the agency after alleging that he was fired for requesting telework as a reasonable accommodation.

Many EOIR immigration judges have been removed since the start of Trump’s second term in what they allege are politically motivated mass firings.

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What makes an effective intelligence chief? A former DNI official points to the answer

Gregory F. Treverton, The Conversation — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:30:57 -0400

President Donald Trump’s choice for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, has proved controversial. Pulte’s lack of background in national security matters has sparked resistance from Democrats on Capitol Hill, which is not surprising. But some Republicans, too, have expressed dismay at the president’s choice, a Trump loyalist who currently runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

“I see no evidence of any qualifications for that job,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas.

The current director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is leaving the job at the end of June 2026.

Here’s why it matters who holds the job of director of national intelligence.

Principal national security adviser

To speak of telling truth to power seems terribly old-fashioned these days, but as a veteran of White House intelligence operations, I know that is the essence of the job.

The director of national intelligence is the president’s principal adviser on intelligence, though the CIA director has remained somewhat co-equal in that role. In past administrations, the director of national intelligence has been responsible for both the President’s Daily Brief, where the most crucial and sophisticated intelligence is presented, and for the work of the National Intelligence Council.

Most of the President’s Daily Brief items are still done by the CIA, but the director of national intelligence or a deputy briefed the president, daily in most administrations but one or two times a week in the first Trump administration. Now, it is not clear the briefings take place.

The issues in those briefings lean toward the immediate and tactical: What is the situation on the ground in the wars in Iran and Ukraine? If the United States does X, how will the Iranian regime or Russian President Vladimir Putin respond?

But intelligence strives to push presidents and their colleagues to think more strategically: What are the implications of hypersonic missiles? What is the trajectory of the relationship between Russia and China? What are China’s geostrategic objectives, and what is the role of the Belt and Road Initiative in that vision? What if, far from toppling it, U.S. and Israeli attacks push the Iranian regime to become more hard line, or even produce some “rally ’round the flag” effect among previous opponents of the regime.

9/11 led to intelligence changes

I was chair of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017, providing day-to-day intelligence support to the National Security Council and its committees, as well as trying to find time to do more strategic intelligence, looking at trends and connections across issues, producing what are called National Intelligence Estimates.

The director of national intelligence, known as the DNI, sits atop the 17 agencies that make up what is called the U.S. intelligence community. The director neither runs those agencies nor has full control of their budgets.

Rather, the director of national intelligence coordinates them, which sometimes seems like the proverbial herding of cats. They assemble a combined budget for intelligence, but many of the big agencies, such as the National Security Agency, which makes and breaks codes and intercepts signals of interest, belong to the Pentagon.

The creation of the director of national intelligence position was a direct result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The report of the 9/11 Commission was vividly damning about the failures of communication between agencies in the run-up to 9/11. In meetings in New York that summer, CIA and FBI officers were literally unsure what they could tell each other: The former wondered whether the FBI people were really cleared to hear this, while the latter feared that talking might blow a case they were working on. That lack of coordination played a role in letting the plotters slip through intelligence, often in plain sight.

The result of the commission’s work was the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created the director of national intelligence position.

Before that, the director of central intelligence wore two hats, as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and loose coordinator of the broader intelligence community. Hardly surprisingly, directors of central intelligence spent most of their time running the CIA, for that was the source of their troops – and their troubles when they arose.

A score of blue-ribbon panels over 50 years had recommended breaking the director of central intelligence’s conflict of interest – coordinating agencies and their budgets while running one of them – and creating a director of national intelligence position.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence for whom I worked as chair of the National Intelligence Council, constantly emphasized “integration.” Across agencies, integration mostly means talking to each other and sharing information. This works against the natural tendency to scoop your colleagues.

Across disciplines, integration means better aligning what information intelligence agencies collect with what analysts need.

How integration works

If presidents want to know what the CIA thinks about a particular issue, they can simply ask. Usually, though, the question is what does the intelligence community think, and then the question goes to the National Intelligence Council, the director of national intelligence’s interagency group for intelligence analysis.

The National Intelligence Council is organized like the State Department, with officers for regions and functions. Once a question has been presented, the relevant national intelligence officer will convene his or her colleagues from the other agencies. They will argue about the answer to the question, a process sweetly called “coordination,” then agree on the answer. If need be, the process can be done in a few hours.

Major strategic analyses – national intelligence estimates – like one done in 2022 on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic out to 2026, may take months. In all cases, though, the analysis carefully records where there are differences of view in the intelligence community.

In my last year chairing the National Intelligence Council, of the 700 or so analyses we did, about 400 were responses to questions – called “taskings” in governmentese – from the national security adviser or one of the deputies.

National intelligence officers are national experts from inside or outside federal government, and their deputies – the heart and soul of the NIC – are all assigned from intelligence agencies. The largest number come from the CIA, but I worked with a cyber analyst from the Secret Service and a wonderful analyst from the New York Police Department.

Resolutely nonpolitical stance

What was striking then and has struck me both times I’ve had the privilege of running a U.S. intelligence agency is the dedication of the officers.

They work for the nation, not for a political party or ideology. As chair of the NIC, I had no idea of the politics of my people, save for the several closest to me. For them, telling truth to power is not a slogan. It is what they do. They are always worried about “politicizing” – producing an assessment to suit a policymaker’s preference or, worse, being pressured to do so.

The president’s daily briefers, for instance, give up a year of their lives to come to work at 4 a.m., learn their briefs and then fan out across Washington to brief senior officials. They like being “on the team” of the person they brief, but they become uncomfortable if the conversation turns political.

The director of national intelligence sets the tone for that resolutely nonpolitical stance and polices it through principles articulated in the agency’s analytic integrity and standards. As chair of the NIC, for instance, I’d receive regular assessments of both the quality of our analyses and whether we risked becoming “politicized.”

For their part, do politicians and agency leaders like it when their pet projects are assessed by intelligence as unwise or infeasible? Of course not. I’ve been on that side of the intelligence-policy divide as well. But the United States is much the better for it.

This story, originally published on Dec. 4, 2024, has been updated to reflect that Bill Pulte has been chosen by President Trump to be the acting director of national intelligence.

Gregory F. Treverton, Professor of Practice in International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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VA CIO nominee vows to create program management office

Edward Graham — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:31:08 -0400

President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as the next IT lead for the Department of Veterans Affairs told lawmakers this week that the agency’s technology operations are “a target-rich environment” for change, and he committed that organizational transformation would be among his top priorities if confirmed to the role.

During a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Gary Shatswell — the administration’s nominee to serve as VA’s next chief information officer and assistant secretary for information and technology — said VA needs “a culture of transparency and accountability, achievable through agile program management, which will also accelerate mission delivery.”

VA’s IT operations are sprawling, with the agency reporting more than 16,000 personnel working on these technology services. Many high-profile modernization efforts overseen by the Office of Information and Technology, however, have received particular scrutiny for delays and cost overruns across administrations.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Shatswell during Wednesday’s hearing that “my beef is the bipartisan failure to really modernize the VA,” and said he’s previously had discussions about establishing “a program office that includes members on this committee … seeing the progress every day, so that you've got champions here behind an IT modernization effort.”

Shatswell told him that a program management office is “a necessary piece that does not exist at the leadership level of OIT,” noting that previous attempts to create the unit failed because “there had not been the requisite tooling to ensure that the visibility and the process [were] actually managed.”

He said creating the office is “one of the first tasks that I will be going after” if confirmed to the role, adding that the unit would enhance VA employee accountability and operational transparency by ensuring “that everyone knows what’s going on and what’s the status and the priority of their piece within the work that OIT is doing.”

“I call it a program or portfolio-value office because, at the end of the day, we need to be driving the right value to the veterans, and that's the focus of everything that we should be doing,” Shatswell said.

Shatswell is Trump’s third nominee for the VA CIO role since the start of his administration, and the first to receive a hearing before lawmakers. VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence has been performing the duties of the role in the interim.

Shatswell is a current VA employee, having served as senior advisor to VA Secretary Doug Collins since December.

When asked by Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas — the panel’s chairman — whether the senior advisor role is “the administration's training ground for individuals that they may want to place within the department,” Shatswell told him, “I can tell you my experience: that was the way that it was.”

Shatswell has previously held a variety of tech leadership roles across private industry, including as Group CIO at Unilever Prestige, as CIO at Paula's Choice Skincare, as vice president of IT at Sur La Table and as CIO at Sizzling Platter.

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Trump memo pushes national security agencies to move faster on AI

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:16:17 -0400

President Donald Trump on Friday signed a national security memo aimed at speeding up government use of advanced artificial intelligence across the military and intelligence community, while also trying to harden those systems against foreign theft and manipulation.

The National Security Presidential Memorandum reflects a growing view inside the White House that U.S. security agencies are moving too slowly to adopt frontier AI tools, even as the evolving technology improves rapidly and rivals like China seek ways to craft their own versions.

It calls for agencies like the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the National Cyber Director to build “deep, proactive” relationships with AI companies so that cutting-edge models can be made available to national security personnel faster.

It also instructs officials to identify areas where AI could improve government operations, including intelligence analysis and cyber threat detection. At the same time, the memo says the tools cannot be used for unlawful surveillance of Americans, language that speaks to long-running civil liberties concerns over how agencies collect, analyze and process data.

The memo also focuses heavily on protecting U.S.-developed AI models from foreign adversaries. It directs senior officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd, to work with private-sector companies on security protocols meant to prevent advanced models from being stolen, copied or compromised.

One area of concern is model distillation, a technique in which an AI system repeatedly queries another AI system in an attempt to mimic its performance and build out a separate model. The White House in April accused China of carrying out “industrial-scale” distillation attacks on U.S. AI systems.

The memo also directs agencies to work with industry to secure the infrastructure that supports frontier AI, including the data centers that store the enormous amounts of computing power needed to run advanced models. Data centers have recently become more attractive targets during periods of geopolitical tension.

Trump recently signed an AI security executive order that leans heavily on voluntary cooperation with industry. That order encourages developers to submit powerful new models to a 30-day government review before public release.

More AI-related guidance is expected soon. Nick Andersen, CISA’s acting director, said last week that the cyber agency is preparing a binding operational directive focused on AI-enabled cyber threats.

The administration’s approach to AI has shifted in recent months as officials confront a new class of cyber-focused models, including Anthropic’s Mythos, that can rapidly identify vulnerabilities across computer networks. The model has become a major driver of government discussions over how advanced AI systems could reshape both defensive and offensive cyber operations.

Last week, Anthropic said it is expanding Project Glasswing — its controlled-access program for giving trusted organizations early access to Mythos — to about 150 additional entities. The new group spans more than 15 countries and includes organizations in water, healthcare, communications and other critical infrastructure sectors.

OpenAI’s recent release of GPT-5.5-Cyber, which also demonstrated sophisticated cyber capabilities, has further heightened concerns in Washington over how quickly these systems are advancing and how they could reshape both cyber defensive and offensive operations.

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Lawmakers aim to force the Army to detail its transformation plans

Meghann Myers — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:34:21 -0400

When the Army launched its “transformation initiative” a year ago, lawmakers immediately implored service leaders to show their work as they made plans to buy new things and get rid of old ones, including the cost tradeoffs and a timeline. They didn’t get those answers, so House lawmakers have inserted a requirement for an annual report and briefing into this year’s defense authorization bill.

On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee completed its markup on the bill, adding detailed instructions for an annual update on the Army Transformation Initiative—and also the Army’s Transformation-in-Contact/Continuous Transformation efforts, requiring specifics on new capabilities and ones that have been phased out.

The goal of the Initiative “was to position the Army for future fights, streamline force structure, and eliminate wasteful spending,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said during a May 15 hearing of the HASC, which he chairs. “Congress shares those goals, but as questions arose, it became clear that the Army hadn't done all of its homework.”

The provision in the House’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act would require the Army to provide an annual report, on or by Feb. 15, “detailing the programmatic choices made to implement.”

By March 15, the service would also have to brief the committee on:

How any changes to the National Defense Strategy, or other DOD planning document, informed the Army’s choices.
An “inventory and assessment” of all exercises related to Army transformation since 2023.
An inventory of all capabilities or capacity phased out as part of Army transformation, with a timeline and assessment of how they have affected readiness.
An inventory of planned investments with an assessment of how they will contribute to the joint force.

The service did send experts for closed-door briefings to lawmakers over the past year, a U.S. official told Defense One, in an attempt to provide details and explain the rationale for its plans.

“We initially saw a ton of support from members of Congress, until it potentially impacted a parochial interest,” said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “That's when they got all sticky about it.”

The Army’s helicopter purchases were of particular concern to House members both last year and this year, as the service’s budget request included funding to buy just one UH-60 Black Hawk and five MH-47 Chinooks. Army officials said it made sense to buy fewer older aircraft as the MV-75 Cheyenne II approaches.

In hearings, lawmakers expressed concern that reducing purchases would undermine the helicopters’ supply chains.

In May, the House’s first NDAA mark-up bumped up procurement to seven Black Hawks and 12 Chinooks.

“Nobody's saying we don't need Chinooks or Black Hawks or Apaches, we don't need to modernize, etc.,” the official said. “But we have so many more, based on the force-structure side, than we think is required to fight a conflict.”

The question went to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his May 12 testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, where he announced that the Defense Department would be taking a second look at the initiative.

“There are some very good things in the Army Transformation Initiative, and there are some things that we needed to get another look at,” Hegseth said. “And so I think you'll see a review of some of those things, and we’ll get back to you.”

The Pentagon refused to provide any details on what that review looked like or whether Hegseth had his eye on other updates. A few days later, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll testified before HASC, apparently unaware of Hegseth’s concerns.

“I don't know all the depth of what was implied, but I absolutely agree that we will take a hard look with the Office of Secretary of War and make sure that we are synced with their strategy and their plans as they look across the joint force and balance their requirements and needs of the military as a whole,” he said.

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Trump’s edict making 8,000 feds at-will employees draws swift outcry

Erich Wagner — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:57:34 -0400

Organizations representing federal workers and good government advocates were quick to decry President Trump’s move this week to formally strip around 8,000 federal workers of their civil service protections, making them at-will employees, though the exact contours of the initiative’s scope remain unclear.

Wednesday’s executive order implements Schedule Policy/Career, a new job category within the excepted service -- formerly known as Schedule F -- designed for career employees in “policy-related” positions who lack the removal protections in Title 5 of the U.S. Code and of the right to appeal adverse personnel actions. Under Office of Personnel Management regulations that took effect in March, whistleblower complaints from Schedule Policy/Career employees would no longer go to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, instead being referred internally to the employing agency’s general counsel for review.

The edict tasks agencies with reclassifying the roughly 8,000 federal workers into Schedule Policy/Career within seven days -- by June 10 -- as well as set up a separate bonus pool for those workers to recognize “outstanding work.” And OPM is expected to propose new regulations setting up a new governmentwide presidential award program for the job category.

Has the return of Schedule Policy/Career affected you or your work? Reach out to Erich Wagner at ewagner@govexec.com or ewagner.47 on Signal to share your story.

A 200-page appendix accompanying the executive order lists the various positions slated for conversion, subdivided by agency and subcomponent and accompanied by position codes used on an internal basis. As such, the veracity of administration officials’ claims regarding the precise number of impacted employees, or that 97% of them occupy GS-15 or Senior Leader pay grades, remains murky.

The State Department told employees in an email Thursday that Trump placed 100 positions into Schedule Policy/Career with Wednesday’s order but did not specify how many employees would be affected.

“Employees encumbering these crucially important positions will be notified by the Bureau of Human Resources within seven work days,” the email stated. “These changes will allow the department to reward high performance and ensure that we are well equipped to promptly and effectively address poor performance and misconduct. These roles remain career positions and will continue to be filled through merit-based hiring procedures.”

The nonprofit Protect Democracy on Thursday solicited federal employees whose jobs appear in the executive order’s appendix to provide information about their position and duties to better ascertain its scope.

A Defense Department employee, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, told Government Executive that while they were not personally set for reclassification into Schedule Policy/Career, each of their supervisors are. None of them influence policy, they said.

“First line supervisors are responsible for the oversight of their employees’ projects and the successful execution of those,” the employee said. “They hire and evaluate their direct reports annually and handle execution of disciplinary actions as needed. They have ZERO authority to establish policy. All of that is dictated down to them from their senior leadership.”

Federal employee unions have filed multiple lawsuits challenging the legality of Schedule Policy/Career, filed last year but effectively held dormant until the policy was set for implementation. In statements Thursday, their leaders vowed to block it in court.

“The administration continues to focus on trying to strip federal workers of the rights that Congress gave them instead of letting them do the jobs that the American people count on them to do,” said National Treasury Employees Union National President Doreen Greenwald. “Now that the administration has officially ordered the transfer of an untold number of employees to Schedule Policy/Career—so that they are, in the administration's view, easier to fire—the litigation surrounding this initiative will resume. NTEU looks forward to aggressively pursuing that litigation and fighting to ensure the American people have their government services delivered by federal employees who were hired based on merit and skill, not partisan affiliation.”

“The practical implications of this action are clear,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out. That is a disservice to them and to the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government every day.”

And while it appears those legal challenges are set to finally kick off, Stephanie Rapp-Tully, partner at federal employment law firm Tully Rinckey, PLLC, while some may try to challenge their reclassification before the Merit Systems Protection Board, it could take some time before individual employees can file litigation of their own.

“For an individual to bring an action, they have to have suffered a harm,” she said. “You could be reclassified as Schedule F and maintain your employment, never face an adverse action and retire as planned. That could be your trajectory—you don’t know. It’s not until they pursue an adverse action that someone has suffered a damage.”

A perhaps overlooked change for Schedule Policy/Career employees is the inability to respond to a proposed adverse personnel action before it takes effect.

“Agencies are not required to provide advanced notice or ally for a written reply on any disciplinary or adverse actions,” Rapp-Tully said. “[They’re] also not entitled to see the evidence against them, which is a huge component . . . and they couldn’t appeal agency decisions to the MSPB. It’s the true definition of at-will.”

NextGov/FCW reporter David DiMolfetta contributed to this report.

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Inspector general group announces pick to lead oversight of Iran war following senator’s questioning

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:52:05 -0400

Last week, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., requested that an oversight body for inspectors general assign one of the agency watchdogs to lead oversight of the war in Iran, pointing to a statutory requirement for such a designation with respect to a military “overseas contingency operation that exceeds 60 days.”

On Wednesday, the Defense Department OIG announced that it had been selected to spearhead oversight of Operation Epic Fury; although, officials said that the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency made the designation on May 12.

The U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran on Feb. 28.

“This lead inspector general designation not only follows the framework required in the IG Act, it also reflects the extensive experience of the [DOD] OIG with comprehensive oversight of overseas contingency operations,” DOD IG Platte Moring said in a statement. “We are collaborating closely with our colleagues to promote accountability and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”

According to the announcement, the DOD OIG’s oversight of the war in Iran will be supported by the IGs for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. While the Trump administration folded USAID into State in 2025, the USAID OIG is still active.

When selecting an IG to lead oversight of an overseas military operation, the CIGIE chair is limited to choosing the IG for DOD, State or USAID.

Moring was confirmed as the DOD IG in December 2025. He previously served as deputy general counsel at the department during Trump’s first term. Likewise, Cheryl Mason, who was elected as CIGIE chair in March, was confirmed in summer 2025 as the IG at the Veterans Affairs Department after a stint as a senior adviser to VA Secretary Doug Collins.

Government oversight advocates and congressional Democrats have criticized the president’s penchant for placing individuals, such as Moring and Mason, who have worked in his first or second administration in IG roles and questioned whether they can provide true independent oversight. Moring, though, received bipartisan support during his confirmation hearing.

As the designee, he will be responsible for developing a strategy for oversight of the war in Iran, reviewing the accuracy of associated spending information provided by federal agencies and resolving any jurisdictional crossovers. He also will be required to issue regular public reports on his office’s activities. The DOD OIG said the first quarterly report would be issued in the fall.

Duckworth celebrated Wednesday’s announcement.

“Now, as lead IG, the DOD IG must work expeditiously with his counterparts to conduct independent oversight of all programs and operations in support of President Trump’s costly, disastrous war, and — as I have requested — brief me on these matters without delay,” she said in a statement.

Relatedly, Trump on Monday nominated Carl Anderson to be State IG. The office confirmed to Government Executive that he is a former federal attorney, congressional staffer and has been a legal adviser at State since April 2025.

At the start of his second term, the president fired the former State IG as well as the watchdogs at 16 other agencies.

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GOP advances $70B immigration enforcement funding bill without new limits on ICE operations

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:58:52 -0400

The Senate approved a nearly $70 billion package early Friday, moving Republicans one step closer to funding immigration and deportation activities for the next three years without negotiating new constraints on federal agents with Democrats.

The 52-47 mostly party-line vote sends the measure to the House, where GOP lawmakers in that chamber could send it to President Donald Trump for his signature as soon as next week.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to vote no. Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet did not vote.

Majority Leader John Thune said GOP leaders were forced to draft the package after Democrats “walked away” from negotiations that could have placed restrictions on federal immigration agents.

“Republicans are going to continue to ensure that these agencies have the funding that they need to fulfill their national security responsibilities,” the South Dakota Republican said.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., argued the measure shows that Republicans are more focused on funding deportations than lowering the cost of living.

“Apparently, Republicans think we cannot afford a single penny to help Americans cover the skyrocketing costs of gasoline, of healthcare, of housing, of food, of energy, you name it,” he said. “But somehow we can afford to give another $70 billion to Trump's rogue agencies.”

Senate approval followed a marathon amendment voting session that stretched throughout Thursday and overnight as Democrats sought to challenge Republican senators on policy differences just months before the November midterm elections. No amendments were approved.

Building on “big, beautiful” law

The bill would provide a second hefty cash infusion to the agencies carrying out the president’s immigration crackdown, building on the $170 billion Republicans included in their “big, beautiful” law.

This legislation would provide:

$38.53 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement
$26.02 billion for Customs and Border Protection
$5 billion for the secretary of Homeland Security

The money would be available through Sept. 30, 2029, the end of the fiscal year. Republicans decided not to include any new guardrails on federal immigration agents.

The measure Republican senators approved was somewhat different from the original version released in early May, which included $1 billion for the Secret Service to make security upgrades associated with the president’s ballroom, dubbed the East Wing Modernization Project.

Republicans also removed $1.46 billion that would have bolstered funding for several Justice Department programs.

Additionally, GOP lawmakers bolstered ICE funding by $350 million compared to the earlier version of the bill.

Republican leaders are moving the package through the complex budget reconciliation process, avoiding the need to secure Democratic votes in the Senate that would otherwise be required to end debate on the measure.

GOP leaders opted to use the special legislative maneuver after they were unable to broker agreement with Democrats to place constraints on federal immigration officers.

Democratic lawmakers said new guardrails, including body cameras and preventing the use of masks, were necessary after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

The impasse led to a 76-day shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security that didn’t end until late April, when Congress approved the annual spending bill without funding for ICE or the Border Patrol.

June 1 deadline missed

The reconciliation process comes with several strict rules that require each section of the legislation to address federal revenue, spending or the debt limit. Proposals also cannot be deemed “merely incidental” to the federal budget.

Trump wanted Congress to approve the funding package ahead of a self-imposed June 1 deadline. But work on the measure ground to a halt after the administration announced plans to establish a $1.776 billion fund to pay people who believe they were wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department.

Floor debate on the bill resumed again this week after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before a House subcommittee Tuesday the administration was “not moving forward with the fund, period.”

Trump, however, muddied the waters a bit Wednesday when asked during an Oval Office event whether the fund was “dead or on hold.”

“I'd have to ask my lawyers. I don't know,” he said. “Are you talking about the weaponization fund? The weaponization fund, as far as I'm concerned, was a beautiful thing.”

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House panel rejects bid to keep military lawyers focused on military work

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 11:36:51 -0400

House Republicans axed a provision to the annual defense policy bill that would have ended the Trump administration’s practice of using the military’s uniformed lawyers from serving as immigration judges and special U.S. attorneys in Democrat-run cities.

Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo, proposed the amendment during the House Armed Service Committee's markup of the National Defense Authorization Act on Thursday afternoon. The provision would have amended U.S. law to clarify that the judge advocate generals corps could only be assigned to military-related duties. Republican lawmakers, including HASC Chairman Mike Rogers, ultimately batted down the provision in a 31-26 vote, according to the committee’s website. It’s not clear if a similar provision is being debated in the Senate.

“Our JAGs advise commanders in some of the most consequential decisions our military makes, from combat operations, to targeting authorities, to rules of engagement, military justice, personnel matters, and international law,” Crow said. “They are a limited and specialized resource. Their time should be focused on matters that directly affect military operations, unit cohesion, command authority, and mission effectiveness. Assigning them elsewhere takes them away from this critical military work, especially in a time as is as much conflict as we are seeing right now.”

Former uniformed attorneys told Defense One that the amendment would’ve relieved overworked military lawyers. Under the Trump administration, JAGs have been assigned to oversee immigration courts, appointed as special U.S. attorneys to investigate “fraud and abuse” in Minneapolis, and prosecuted violent crimes during domestic National Guard deployments. This year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has scrutinized the JAG corps with a series of wide-ranging reforms and has fired the military's top lawyers and trimmed the civilian legal staff.

Rogers, R-Ala., defended the administration’s unprecedented use of the military’s lawyers.

“This is a direct attack on the administration, which has used judge advocates in multiple ways to protect national security priorities for the president. Judge advocates have served as special assistants to U.S. attorneys for years,” he said. “That role has been expanded in the current administration to assist other agencies in defense of the homeland national security priority, and great experience and training for our uniformed officers. I trust that the Secretary of Defense, with the help of the Joint Staff, may deploy judge advocates across the United States and the world to ensure the rule of law is followed.”

Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, also criticized the provision, saying Hegseth “has determined that the homeland mission is essential” and that the extra lawyers are crucial to it.

“The National Security Strategy places a great deal of emphasis on homeland defense, and in order to meet these needs, an increase in attorneys has been needed to litigate in U.S. courts and aid in the administrative hearings across the Department of Justice and Homeland,” Fallon said. “Our uniformed attorneys have the ability to surge into positions when the country needs them.”

Military legal experts have previously told Defense One that there is precedent for uniformed lawyers to prosecute U.S. citizens, but the Trump administration’s wide-spread use of the JAGs has raised fears that it could violate the Posse Comitatus Act which forbids the military to be used for federal law enforcement.

Steve Lepper, a retired Air Force lawyer and a member of a group of former JAGs that has spoken out about the administration’s legal actions, said he wasn’t surprised that the amendment wasn’t passed by the committee.

“I think it's basically restoration of the limits that posse comitatus places on the military,” Lepper said. “When you come right down to it, using the military in a prosecutorial or judicial capacity for cases that have nothing to do with the military is basically a violation of posse comitatus.”

Aaron Brynildson, a University of Mississippi law professor and retired Air Force JAG, also said that uniformed lawyers should be focused on military-related missions when serving as special U.S. attorneys

“Having been previously appointed as a SAUSA while on active duty, the sole reason JAGs should be detailed to these positions is to prosecute civilians committing criminal offenses on military bases. JAGs should not be used to prosecute immigration crimes or as fill-ins for overburdened federal prosecutors.”

Brynildson and Lepper said that the wide-ranging use of the JAGs appears to be at odds with Hegseth’s complaint in March that “military lawyers are sometimes stuck doing civilian side work.”

“What Mr. Crow offered was basically a way to achieve what Hegseth said he wants, which is JAGs to do JAG jobs,” Lepper said. “In this case, I guess the majority in the House Armed Services Committee felt that JAGs should be used for things other than what they are in the military to do.”

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Electronic health record modernization needs better cyber and privacy collaboration, GAO says

Edward Graham — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:34:23 -0400

The Government Accountability Office said on Tuesday that the unit overseeing the federal government’s new electronic health record system is not collaborating enough with its partner agencies to secure the software against digital threats or ensure that patient data is sufficiently protected.

In a watchdog report, GAO said the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization office “doesn't fully follow leading practices for collaboration” when it comes to the cybersecurity and privacy of data with the new EHR system.

The office oversees the government’s effort to deploy one common, interoperable system across the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Defense Department, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. GAO said the completed system is expected to have “more than 500,000 users providing care to over 18 million servicemembers, veterans, and their families, making it one of the nation’s largest electronic health record systems.”

FEHRM was created through a joint charter signed by DOD and VA in December 2019, with the four participating agencies taking on varying levels of cyber and privacy responsibilities.

DOD is primarily responsible for managing the cybersecurity of the EHR software and the network used to access the system. GAO said VA also has “responsibility for the cybersecurity of its own network.” Each of the four agencies is also responsible for managing their own networks and following applicable privacy laws when it comes to handling users’ data.

While GAO said that FEHRM has “initiated a number of efforts to promote collaboration” with the four agencies, it added that “it has done so without well-defined common goals and outcomes.” The watchdog added this includes concerns that the office does not “monitor, assess or communicate on performance measures” to hold its partners accountable.

“Articulating clear and measurable goals would better position the FEHRM to oversee the coordinated cybersecurity of the federal EHR by providing insight into the specific resources, skills, or time needed to address shared responsibilities,” the report said. “Further, these goals would help hold the FEHRM accountable for demonstrating how its activities, such as the development of the Joint Incident Management Framework, align with the common outcomes it seeks to achieve.”

FEHRM has been working to create the framework since 2021 to streamline agency responses to EHR-directed cyber threats, with GAO saying the guidance was most recently scheduled to be released in April.

Without outlining clear goals and outcomes, the watchdog said “progress on planned efforts, such as the Joint Incident Management Framework, may be impeded or further delayed.”

GAO’s concerns about planning extended to the office’s logistical operations, with the report saying that FEHRM “has not fully articulated specific short- or long-term goals or intended outcomes related to the cybersecurity of the federal EHR or the privacy of health data within it.” This included office officials telling GAO in January 2026 that it was still developing its goals for fiscal year 2026.

The watchdog made two recommendations, including calling for both DOD and VA leaders to press FEHRM “to define common goals, outcomes, and associated performance measures, and monitor, assess, and communicate progress on collaboration efforts toward ensuring the cybersecurity and privacy of the federal enclave.”

DOD did not concur with the report as it was written. VA neither agreed nor disagreed with GAO’s takeaways, but said it initially focused on establishing a unified culture to build trust with partner agencies, which it called “the essential first step.”

While the joint EHR system has reportedly not been directly targeted by a cyberattack, previous cyber incidents have underscored the impact these types of breaches and digital assaults can have on healthcare delivery.

A February 2024 ransomware attack on Change Healthcare — a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group and the largest healthcare payment system in the U.S. — disrupted payments and prescription processing at medical facilities across the U.S. This included VA’s systems, with an agency official saying at the time that it affected just over 40,000 veterans’ medications.

That attack also affected “interface assessments” at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, Illinois, a joint DOD-VA facility that was in the process of switching over to the new federal EHR system. That rollout, which occurred in March 2024, was the Pentagon’s last site rollout of the new software.

DOD and NOAA have completed their deployments of the new software, and the Coast Guard is reportedly in the final stages of its rollout. VA, however, has faced numerous missteps in its own EHR implementation effort.

VA paused most rollouts of the EHR system in April 2023 to address a host of safety, technical and usability concerns. The agency and DOD subsequently conducted the Lovell deployment during the reset period, which was the sixth VA facility to receive the new software.

The agency recently resumed EHR software rollouts at four Michigan-based medical facilities in April and plans to deploy the system at nine more sites in 2026. VA Secretary Doug Collins told Congress last month that the new rollouts were “phenomenal,” although he said the agency needs to go back and fix issues at the first five sites that received the software.

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EPA’s research efforts are swayed by administration priorities, official says

Edward Graham — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:10:33 -0400

The Environmental Protection Agency’s reorganized research office is influenced by the Trump administration’s political appointees, the agency’s top science official confirmed to lawmakers on Thursday.

The EPA shuttered its longstanding Office of Research and Development last July and replaced it with a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions, which was placed within the agency’s Office of the Administrator. In a May 2025 press release, the EPA said it was “shifting its scientific expertise and research efforts to program offices to tackle statutory obligations and mission essential functions.”

During a House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Environment hearing, Maureen Gwinn — EPA’s deputy associate administrator for science in OASES — said the restructured office “serves as a coordinating hub that ensures consistency and collaboration across EPA’s research enterprise, advancing gold standard science and strengthening technical assistance to state and local partners.”

It is not surprising for a presidential administration to reshape federal agencies’ missions to align with its political priorities. But committee Democrats said the level of new political oversight over OASES raises concerns about the office’s independence.

President Donald Trump notably signed a May 2025 executive order on "Restoring Gold Standard Science” that some critics believe undercuts independent federal research by giving political appointees more of a say over the direction of scientific studies.

A study published on May 5 by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility found that, at the time, there had been only 61 peer-reviewed studies published by EPA scientists up to that point in 2026, compared to a total of 339 in 2024.

Rep. Gabe Amo, D-R.I., the top Democrat on the subcommittee, noted during the hearing that an EPA interim approval process memo implemented “a ‘no surprises’ policy for EPA science that requires all OASES activities — scientific activities — be, quote, ‘supported by appropriate political leadership.’” He added that “true science follows the evidence wherever it leads, even if it's surprising, and even if those discoveries are inconvenient for Trump's political agenda.”

Gwinn said she was the one who wrote the memo after discussions with senior EPA leadership about making sure the office’s scientific research "is in agreement with administration priorities.”

“That was part of being sure that the work that we would continue to do in OASES was supportive of the administration,” she added.

When pressed by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., about whether any of EPA’s research projects have been “delayed, modified or declined” because they did not align with the administration’s political priorities, Gwinn said there have been some delays in “getting a better understanding of the research, if it was related to something that in an executive order was something that was not moving forward,” although she said she would have to get back to the committee to provide examples.

Republican members said during Thursday’s hearing that the creation of OASES streamlines EPA's scientific research work by connecting it with the offices that could best operationalize that expertise.

Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas — who chairs the full House Science, Space and Technology Committee — said EPA’s restructuring “comes at a time when scientific data, advancements in artificial intelligence and public expectations for transparency continue to grow — making it essential that EPA adapts thoughtfully and effectively.”

He added that embedding researchers within the agency’s program offices that make regulatory decisions “facilitates early communication between scientists and program staff” and helps EPA “reduce duplication, improve coordination and support a regulatory environment that encourages innovation.”

When asked by Babin, however, if the agency has seen “a diminution or an enhancement of science at EPA” since the creation of OASES, Gwinn told him it is difficult to say right now.

“I know you wanted yes or no but … we're six, seven months in,” she said, adding that “during that time, we've been developing new processes and getting things up to speed, so I'm not sure that I can give a yes or no answer at this point.”

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USPS financial crisis won’t be solved until Congress defines its service mission, regulator testifies

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:49:32 -0400

The U.S. Postal Service’s regulator on Thursday argued that the agency’s financial woes will not be resolved until Congress sets up a funding system for the USPS that supports its desired service requirements, echoing calls from the agency’s leadership and other oversight entities.

“Only by first specifically defining what America needs of its postal service and what that costs will Congress then truly know how best to fix the fundamental funding structure while preserving appropriate service and delivery standards,” said Robert Taub, the vice chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations.

Postmaster General David Steiner testified to the panel in March that USPS could run out of money as soon as this fall. Because the PRC in April authorized the agency to temporarily suspend certain employer contributions to the Federal Employees Retirement System, however, Taub said that the looming financial cliff has been pushed back by several years.

“This is not a panacea nor a permanent or long-term fix to the postal service's problems, but it does allow Congress an opportunity to enact thoughtful and fundamental change as opposed to choices of desperation,” he said.

At the time, USPS officials said the FERS suspension would not cause “any immediate detrimental impact to current or future retirees,” and the PRC noted that the agency had only been making partial payments in recent years.

In March, Steiner also told the Government Reform Subcommittee that changes were needed to USPS’ self-sustaining business model and/or its service expectations: “If you want the same number of delivery days and post offices, we can do that, but someone has to pay for it. If you want to have a discussion about reducing services, we can do that.”

The Government Accountability Office also has long reported that USPS’ current business model is unsustainable.

Both Subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and ranking member Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., agreed on Thursday that lawmakers need to reach agreement on what USPS service standards will be going forward in order to shore up the postal agency’s finances.

“If we don't do that, then we've just not done anything,” Mfume said. “I mean, we've just kicked the ball down the road.”

In addition to structural reform, Steiner and the USPS Board of Governors have called on Congress to increase the postal agency’s $15 billion statutory debt limit in response to the financial shortfalls. But Sessions expressed doubts about that proposal.

“There is no reason to assume additional borrowed funds infused into this unintended business model would be anything more than throwing good money at bad results,” he said.

Also during the hearing, PRC commissioners and members of both parties criticized Delivering for America — an ongoing postal modernization plan started by former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that he predicted would enable USPS to break even by fiscal 2023 generally by slowing some delivery and increasing the prices of certain products. But the agency experienced a net loss of $2 billion in the most recent quarter.

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Trump moves to lock in Blanche at DOJ as confirmation fight takes shape

Ashley Murray, States Newsroom — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:42:46 -0400

President Trump will nominate acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer, to fill the top role at the Justice Department on a permanent basis, he said Wednesday night.

Trump revealed Blanche as his choice at an outdoor event at the White House, saying “we are going to make him permanent attorney general” and adding that he expects Blanche’s nomination process to “go very quickly.&rdquo

Blanche has been leading the department in an acting capacity since former Attorney General Pam Bondi exited the administration in early April.

Blanche, of Florida, will almost certainly have that state’s two Republican senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, supporting his nomination.

The GOP-led Senate confirmed Blanche as deputy attorney general in early March 2025 on a party-line vote.

Blanche represented Trump in 2023 and 2024 during a New York state hush money case. A jury convicted Trump two years ago on 34 first-degree felony counts of falsifying business records.

The close tie between the president and his pick for attorney general is a major reason Democrats will oppose the nomination, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday.

“Trump picked Blanche because he’s loyal to the president alone — not the Constitution, not the rule of law, and certainly not the American people, and not to the values that this country has had for 250 years,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “For years, Blanche has been Trump’s personal lawyer and attack dog, and that didn’t stop when Blanche joined the department.”

Anti-weaponization fund
Blanche has taken heat in recent weeks, including from Republicans, for the department’s settlement in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS.

Trump dropped the suit in exchange for the department establishing a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for persons Blanche described on May 18 as “victims of lawfare.” The settlement revealed that the fund would be governed by five commissioners hand-chosen by Blanche, with only one involving consultation from congressional leadership.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle quickly objected to the proposal, noting the possibility that people convicted — then pardoned by Trump — of assaulting police during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol could receive reparations from the fund.

When pressed at a May 27 Senate hearing on whether violent Jan. 6 defendants who were pardoned could reap taxpayer dollars from the fund, Blanche replied, “Anybody can apply.”

“The commission will set rules, I'm sure,” he continued. “That's not for me to set, that's for the commissioners, and whether an individual, an Oath Keeper, as you just mentioned, applies for compensation, anybody in this country can apply.”

Several lawsuits quickly challenged the legality of the fund, including one from former police officers who deployed to the Capitol on Jan. 6, and another from legal advocates who argued the fund would be illegally shielded from transparency laws.

After intense pressure, Blanche testified to a House Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday that the administration was “not moving forward with the fund, period.”

The concession cleared the way for reluctant Senate Republicans to support a roughly $70 billion immigration enforcement package. Senate Democrats plan to stall the bill on the floor Thursday with a marathon of amendments, including proposals to curtail or outright ban such funds going forward.

The administration is still facing questions from lawmakers about a provision in Trump’s IRS settlement that absolves him, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, from tax audits.

Epstein files
Blanche has also come under scrutiny for the DOJ’s handling of the release of files related to the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The botched release last year, when Bondi headed the department, initially exposed names of sexual abuse victims.

Democrats claimed Bondi told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee during a closed-door interview last week that Blanche oversaw the legally mandated release of the files and made the decision to not investigate any possible leads.

Bondi refuted the claim on social media following the interview.

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A record number of feds are retiring. Will that slow your claim?

Tammy Flanagan — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:04:20 -0400

Retirement statistics are more than monthly government reports, they offer a practical window into how long claims are taking, where delays may occur and what future retirees should expect. For federal employees planning to leave service, these numbers can help set realistic expectations, guide financial preparation and highlight why understanding the retirement process matters before you submit your application.

New claims processing - This report provides historical data detailing key performance variables, with average processing time presented in days.
Agency retirement case accuracy report - This report reflects the number of non-disability retirement application packages audited and the associated error rate for an agency that had at least 15 cases reviewed in a specified month in the current fiscal year.

Note: The Agency Retirement Case Accuracy Reports do not appear to be current. It is unclear whether the December-July period shown is from 2024-2025 or an earlier year.

How these statistics can help you prepare

Prepare for a period when you may need to rely on personal savings while your CSRS or FERS retirement is being processed.

Within about 2-4 weeks after OPM receives your application, you are usually placed in interim pay status. These temporary monthly payments are estimated and are often much lower than your final benefit.

Set aside about six months of living expenses in case your full benefit is delayed.

If possible, save annual leave and retire near the end of the year so you receive a larger lump-sum leave payout.

A TSP loan may help increase short-term cash reserves, since loans can now be repaid after separation. However, loans are only available while you are employed. They have fees, reduce potential investment growth and may create taxable income if not repaid on time.

Understand how your benefit is calculated, especially when large numbers of retirements are being processed and cases may move at different speeds.

If your case is complex, it may take longer than the average processing time.

High volume can also increase the risk of errors if cases are rushed.

If your agency uses the Online Retirement Application (ORA), your claim may move faster than a paper application.

Public data does not show how long it takes for your application to move from your agency to the payroll provider and then to OPM. Although this should take about four to six weeks after separation, in recent months it has been rumored that it is taking sometimes much longer.

If you have not received your annual leave payout or your Civil Service Active (CSA) number, your claim may not have reached OPM yet.

Key monthly retirement claim trends

Digital (Online Retirement Application) claims received each month:

October 2025 — 6,176 (30% of total claims)
November 2025 — 7,833 (33% of total claims)
December 2025 — 6,055 (45% of total claims)
January 2026 — 9,394 (49% of total claims)
February 2026 — 15,494 (49% of total claims)
March 2026 — 8,830 (59% of total claims)
April 2026 — 8,743 (73% of total claims)
May 2026 — 8,288 (73% of total claims)

Total claims received each month so far in FY 2026 (digital and paper combined), compared with the same months in FY 2016:

What the data suggests

For years, warnings about a federal “retirement tsunami” have been overstated. But with far more employees now at or near retirement age, the recent surge in claims suggests that the long-predicted wave may finally have arrived.

Compared with the same period in FY 2016[1], claim volume in FY 2026 is much higher, increasing the workload for agencies, payroll providers and OPM. The delays in processing resulted from the large numbers of separations, including many that did not result in immediate retirement benefits.

Digital applications are becoming more common, but about one in four claims still arrive on paper.

From FY 2007 to FY 2016, the three cabinet agencies with the most retirements were the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of the Army and the Department of the Navy. In FY 2025, those agencies saw sharply different workforce changes, which may affect future retirement patterns.

Once OPM receives a retirement case, the average processing time in FY 2026 is 46 days for digital ORA claims and 73 days for all claims. In May, the averages were 66 days for 8,761 digital claims and 87 days for 10,672 paper claims. That suggests many of the claims completed in May likely reached OPM three to four months earlier, around February or March. Some were likely part of the usual year-end retirements effective Dec. 31, 2025, while others may have been Sept. 30 retirements delayed by heavy workloads in agency HR and payroll offices.

Because averages include both fast and slow cases, some claims move much faster while others take much longer. If you want to know whether your case may be delayed, consider the factors OPM says can slow processing:

Court orders such as a divorce decree or property settlement. These require an additional step and are sent to the Court Order Benefits Branch for review.
Service as a law enforcement officer, firefighter, air traffic controller, Capitol Police, Supreme Court Police or nuclear materials courier, as these cases use a special annuity computation.
Past or active workers’ compensation claims.
Service as a part-time or intermittent federal employee.
Federal service at multiple federal agencies.
Missing documents and forms or incomplete or incorrect information in your retirement application.
Moving without updating your address with OPM.

The larger message in these statistics is clear: retirement processing times, claim volume and case complexity all affect how quickly benefits are finalized. Employees who understand these trends can plan more effectively, build a stronger financial cushion and avoid being caught off guard during the transition from paycheck to annuity.

OPM also publishes the total number of CSRS and FERS annuitants added to the Annuity Roll Processing System (ARPS) from FY 2000 through FY 2025. These totals include retirements processed as of Sept. 30, so most deferred resignation retirements from last year are not reflected in the 2025 figure.

So far in FY 2026, OPM has processed 119,451 retirement claims with four months still left in the fiscal year — a record pace for the past 25 years.

Historical ARPS retirement totals (FY 2000-FY 2025)

Fiscal year — total annuitants added as of Sept. 30

2025 — 112,679
2024 — 95,477
2023 — 108,387
2022 — 114,505
2021 — 96,956
2020 — 99,529
2019 — 109,991
2018 — 109,850
2017 — 96,459
2016 — 99,242
2015 — 99,710
2014 — 105,037
2013 — 138,039
2012 — 111,641
2011 — 82,837
2010 — 76,864
2009 — 87,907
2008 — 86,615
2007 — 92,349
2006 — 103,292
2005 — 94,977
2004 — 90,441
2003 — 81,128
2002 — 74,153
2001 — 77,330
2000 — 77,383

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Lawsuit claims DOJ is retaliating against employees with disabilities who request telework

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:50:52 -0400

A new lawsuit alleges that the Justice Department discriminated and retaliated against two of its employees with disabilities “as part of a systematic, agency-wide practice of refusing to grant requests for telework as a reasonable accommodation.”

Both employees teleworked for years in their roles as supervisory IT program managers in the Criminal Division’s Office of Administration without any adverse impacts to their work, according to the complaint. But President Donald Trump’s January 2025 return-to-office directive for the federal workforce upended that.

Joshua Mauldin, one of the plaintiffs, is a Marine and Air Force veteran who retired from the military in 2021 as a “100% permanent and total disabled veteran diagnosed with service-related post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety and several cardiac conditions.”

“Because Mauldin’s psychiatric and cardiac disabilities interact, tasks that might be routine for others, such as attending in-person meetings, working in high-traffic office areas and commuting, carry a significant and documented medical risk for him,” according to the lawsuit. “The limitations are permanent, and the severity can range from moderate interference with concentration to acute, disabling episodes that halt his ability to function until symptoms stabilize.”

Prior to the start of Trump’s second term, Mauldin was required to work in-person one day per week, which he was able to manage because the office was mostly empty due to other employees teleworking.

But offices became fuller after the end of remote work flexibility for most of the federal workforce. So, in February 2025, Mauldin requested a reasonable accommodation to telework, for the most part, at least nine out of every 10 workdays per pay period.

Officials are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified employees with disabilities, unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship” to the agency. Common examples include interpreters, flexible schedules and accessible technology.

Mauldin in April 2025 reached out to an Equal Employment Opportunity counselor to raise a complaint because his supervisor did not make a final determination on his reasonable accommodation request by a 30-day deadline. A day later, his supervisor issued an interim arrangement that enabled him to report in-person only one day per pay period.

And in July 2025, Mauldin’s supervisor approved another interim arrangement — rather than a final determination — for telework every work day “with in-office presence only when required by mission needs” as a result of an upcoming heart ablation procedure “due to a chronic cardiac condition that had worsened in recent months during a period of sustained job-related stress.”

But in November 2025, Mauldin was informed that he would lose his supervisory duties and that his position would be downgraded from a GS-14 to a GS-13 with a salary reduction. Agency officials said this was the result of a review of his job responsibilities, but attorneys in the filing countered that neither Mauldin or employees he supervised were interviewed.

“The prolonged uncertainty caused by the agency’s refusal to grant Mauldin’s requests for reasonable accommodations, combined with the stress and instability caused by his demotion despite his strong performance evaluations, caused a significant deterioration of Mauldin’s PTSD, anxiety and stress-sensitive cardiac conditions,” his attorneys wrote.

He began medical leave in December 2025.

The other plaintiff, Tarik Smajic, has lived with “chronic pain and progressive spinal limitations” since a drunk driver hit his car in 2017. Before 2025, he teleworked three days per week, but that was a result of DOJ’s policy at the time rather than a reasonable accommodation.

Following the return-to-office directive, however, Smajic requested a reasonable accommodation that would allow him to continue his work schedule of teleworking three days per week. His supervisor, who also oversaw Mauldin, criticized his request during a March meeting, according to the suit.

“When Smajic explained that the refusal to grant his RAs had resulted in increased pain and forced him to increase his pain medication dosage, [the supervisor] responded with words to the effect of, ‘It’s your body, you can choose not to take the pills,’” according to the lawsuit.

In July 2025, he requested telework every work day with “in-office presence only when required by mission needs” because new “MRI scans revealed a measurable deterioration of his condition…resulting in more persistent and debilitating symptoms.” Smajic’s supervisor denied it about a month later.

Shortly thereafter, the plaintiff said that he was put on an “informal performance improvement plan” and received lower performance scores.

Because he was required to work in-person three days per week, Smajic in September 2025 submitted a reasonable accommodation request that the agency provide him with equipment similar to what he had in his home office to relieve pain.

“Smajic reported to the office in person, usually in extreme pain, on Sept. 8, 9, 10, 16, 18, 23 and 29, 2025, and had to leave early on several of those days because of the unbearable pain,” his attorneys wrote. “Because of agonizing flareups, Smajic also took some ad hoc leave on days he had originally planned to come into the office.”

According to the filing, Smajic’s supervisor in November 2025 sent him a questionnaire for his doctor to fill out regarding a type of chair that Smajic previously said would not be effective in reducing his pain.

In December, his supervisor notified him that the agency would not provide any in-office accommodations and “instead intended to pursue involuntary reassignment as an ‘accommodation of last resort.’”

The lawsuit requests that: Mauldin and Smajic receive compensatory damages, adverse personnel actions be reversed, their telework requests be approved and DOJ stop its “systematic practice of refusing to issue final decisions granting telework as a reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities.”

DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Government Executive previously reported that Terry Jackson, a former DOJ employee with disabilities, settled with the agency after alleging that he was fired for requesting telework as a reasonable accommodation.

Several agencies have instituted policies more strictly scrutinizing telework and remote work reasonable accommodations, arguing that many civil servants have abused the system following Trump’s return-to-office directive. Employees with qualifying disabilities are exempt from the mandate.

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Trump signs order moving thousands of federal employees into Schedule F

Erich Wagner — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:13:06 -0400

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order formally converting nearly 10,000 career federal workers into Schedule Policy/Career, making them effectively at-will employees.

The edict marks the culmination of a years-long push to make it easier to fire federal employees in “policy-related” jobs by removing them from the federal government’s competitive service and placing them in a new job category, initially called Schedule F and now referred to as Schedule Policy/Career. Employees placed into the new schedule would no longer be able to challenge adverse personnel actions before the Merit Systems Protection Board, and whistleblower complaints filed by Schedule F employees would be investigated by their own agency, rather than the Office of Special Counsel.

A senior administration official told reporters Wednesday that, contrary to the administration’s prior estimates that 50,000 feds would be converted to the new job category, just 8,000 jobs are targeted in Wednesday’s executive order. An OPM spokesperson said Trump chose to instead focus on "the most senior level career policy officials."

The official said the vast majority -- around 97% -- of those impacted are either GS-15s or senior leaders (SL). Jobs targeted for conversion include agency office and division heads; C-suite posts like chief information officers; regional officers and their deputies and chiefs of staff; program managers; those who help write federal regulations and attorneys involved in crafting agency or internal policies, as well as advisors, senior HR officials and grantmaking posts.

Schedule F was first proposed via executive order in October 2020, but following Trump’s electoral defeat the following month, officials failed to implement the measure prior to former President Biden’s inauguration. Biden rescinded the edict, and in 2024 the Office of Personnel Management issued new regulations to make it more difficult for a future president to revive the idea.

Though early in Trump’s second term, officials suggested the president could simply “nullify” regulations, OPM ultimately followed the notice-and-comment process to propose new regulations to unwind the Biden-era protections and implement the newly-renamed Schedule Policy/Career. OPM’s final rule implementing the new job category took effect in March.

The policy remains the subject of multiple lawsuits by federal employee unions, who have accused the administration of violating the Constitution, the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. And good government groups have warned that at-will employment of public employees on the state level have produced mixed results in terms of productivity, while increasing reports of political and personal favoritism in the workplace.

Scott Kupor and another official said Wednesday that contrary to opponents’ warnings that the measure would give rise to a new spoils system in federal employment, there won’t be political litmus tests for employees in Schedule Policy/Career and the traditional hiring process for competitive service positions will be retained in the new job category. Unmentioned, however, was OPM’s decision last year to institute new politicized essay questions as part of the federal hiring process.

“In order to effect the president’s policy priorities, we need people in these senior positions willing and capable of carrying out those directives,” Kupor said. “All this does is basically say: it doesn’t matter what your political views are–and you can have any political views–but if you allow them to interfere in your willingness to carry out lawful orders and directives, this is a mechanism for you to be removed, effectively at-will . . . There are zero loyalty tests in this.”

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GSA lays out step-by-step guide for agencies to cut, streamline and automate work

Frank Konkel — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The General Services Administration published a new playbook Wednesday to provide federal agencies and executives tools, strategies and a modern blueprint to automate repetitive tasks and give employees time back to perform mission-critical work.

The Elimination, Optimization and Automation playbook, developed by GSA, builds on lessons learned from federal pilots, mature automation programs and the agency’s own extensive internal enterprise efforts to improve operations.

While a new product, the playbook is already foundational to the agency’s moonshot goal to save and automate 1 million hours of workload for its staff—a goal it’s more than halfway toward achieving, according to GSA Deputy Administrator Mike Lynch.

Yet Lynch said there’s tremendous potential value in taking what’s worked at GSA and “putting those best practices out back to the broader federal government,” with many agencies grappling with similar problems. In this way, he said GSA is serving as a force multiplier for other agencies.

“I think from what I've seen, at least working in government, is so many of the challenges [agencies] are trying to solve are incredibly consistent,” Lynch said in a recent interview with Government Executive. “So there may be unique nuances based on the mission of the agency, but everyone's trying to understand how to deploy technology and use AI and drive efficiencies within our workflows.”

“We just don't have to start from go every time,” Lynch added. “There are learnings that we can provide from our experience at GSA, where we've had a more formalized process that allows other parts of the government to go faster and better. Hopefully, the results we’ve been able to produce through these types of programs makes it compelling and something that other agencies can use as appropriate within their groups.”

An early copy of the 37-page playbook viewed by Government Executive includes best practices based on technology implementation efforts at GSA and a handful of other agencies, including NASA and the Education Department, during this administration as well as the previous Trump administration. Collectively, the handbook “is formatted to follow a typical EOA project through its lifecycle, from ideation to deployment.”

It outlines a multi-phased approach to EOA projects — opportunity assessments, solution planning and design, implementing and sustaining — as well as an EOA toolkit with tools and templates “to help accelerate your agency’s launch of an effective EOA initiative.”

The playbook lists Lynch, GSA Chief Financial Officer Nimisha Agarwal and Larry Allen, Associate Administrator of the Office of Government Policy as executive sponsors; Chris Grigsby, Executive Director of Digital Finance, Mehul Parekh, Principal Deputy Associate Administrator of OGP, Anthony Cavallo, Division Director of the Business Modernization Division, and program analysts Gabrielle Perret and Will Spelker as EOA subject matter experts; and Andy Stegmaier, President of Management Science & Innovation and Nick Surkamp, Chief Delivery Officer of Management Science & Innovation as EOA playbook authors.

“It is incredible the work the team has done to set this up and provide a top-down framework for the program,” Lynch said.

Once published, Lynch said the next step is evangelizing the playbook across government. Internally, those efforts began with a May 12 Emerging Tech Showcase held at GSA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and attended virtually by more than 2,000 people. The showcase featured several panels on the playbook featuring many of its contributors, as well as panels on GSA’s internal AI-powered chat platform, AI use cases across the agency and an industry-focused panel.

Lynch said he hopes to host a governmentwide showcase with an even larger audience sometime in July.

Other ‘force multipliers’ at GSA

Lynch said governmentwide demand for USAi has increased steadily since GSA launched the shared service to streamline AI adoption last August. Thus far, the agency has inked 24 agency agreements with USAi with 40 more in the works. Another 82 agencies have asked for demos of the technology available on USAi.

“USAi continues to be a really strong platform for us that's meant to be in very similar fashion to the EOA playbook, where we're trying to host and help provide a safe sandbox for other agencies to start to explore how they deploy AI within their workflows,” Lynch said.

Another governmentwide program, OneGov, has generated some $1.15 billion in savings through negotiated discounts on a variety of AI and software tools using the collective power of the entire federal government. More than two dozen companies, including most leading AI firms, are selling their software at a discounted price to agencies through OneGov. In total, nearly 3.4 million users across government have access to that software through OneGov.

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OPM moves one step closer to HR system overhaul for 2 million federal workers

Nick Wakeman — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

With one protest withdrawn and a second one denied, the Office of Personnel Management is now free to move forward with its plan to award a 10-year contract to modernize the government’s human resource systems.

OPM released the final solicitation in October for the Federal HR 2.0 contract to modernize systems that cover 2 million employees across the government. The agency wants a single integrated platform that will be the infrastructure for a more data-driven federal HR ecosystem, according to solicitation documents.

Bidders had to submit proposals by Oct. 31 and OPM followed a two-step process for evaluation. After step one, IBM Corp. and then Economic Systems Inc. filed their protests.

IBM filed its protest on Feb. 25 but withdrew without explanation on April 3. Meanwhile, Economic Systems filed a protest on March 2. On Monday, the Government Accountability Office posted on its public docket that it had denied Economic Systems protest.

OPM could not make an award while the protests were active, but it could continue to evaluate proposals. Now it can pick a winner with the protests out of the way.

While no dollar value has been disclosed, the undertaking is massive.

OPM wants the platform to have functions such as position management, personnel action, records processing, workforce analytics, and employee and manager self-service capabilities.

The agency will pick a winner based on four technical factors including past experience and solution readiness, a written implementation approach, systems testing, and a virtual live demonstration.

Last year, OPM awarded a sole-source contract to Workday to fast-track the modernization effort. OPM later rescinded it amid criticism and instead moved to create the current solicitation for a broader, government-wide solution.

Workday is one of several companies in the running for Federal HR 2.0. An award could come anytime this month, according to GovTribe data.

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What DOGE taught us about AI and federal workers

Kristen Cordell and Adrian Brown — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development lost 97% of its staff in a matter of weeks. An article published in The New York Times last month found the majority of these former employees were still out of work a year later — not between jobs, but out of the market entirely, with some managers who once earned six-figure salaries applying for part-time retail positions.

I watched this happen. I worked at the State Department until August 2025 and helped create a pro bono coaching network for impacted colleagues, many of whom were deeply traumatized. After thousands of hours of those conversations, one question kept surfacing: who am I now?

The cuts were political, not technological. But strip that away and what remains is the most concrete demonstration we have of what happens when a large category of federal professional work disappears faster than any system can absorb it — and why the standard policy response is not enough to cover these numbers. Over 270,000 federal employees separated from the U.S. government through layoffs, forced resignations and buyouts.

Most impacted workers did not lack skills. They lacked a place where those skills made the most sense. Federal workers who spent careers running HIV programs or managing humanitarian operations did not simply need to update their LinkedIn profiles. They lost the institutional context that made their expertise meaningful. The formal policy response was minimal. Workers relied on informal networks. The DC labor market, despite being one of the most credentialed in the country, has not absorbed their talent.

This is where the federal story becomes a story about artificial intelligence. As deferred resignation agreements were being signed in August 2025, the U.S. government licensed ChatGPT to all federal agencies for a dollar. The State Department reframed AI as the vehicle for development outcomes that USAID's human expertise previously delivered. OpenAI began offering grants to NGOs in regions where USAID once operated.

This is not a Washington anomaly. The Economist devoted its cover earlier this month to a question that was once considered alarmist: whether AI could produce the most significant disruption to working life in a generation. The answer, even among economists who were recently skeptical, is increasingly, possibly ‘yes’ — and governments should not wait to find out.

New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show AI-exposed occupations are already losing jobs, and government employees could be among the most vulnerable, given the large concentration of workers handling the analytical, administrative and policy roles where AI capabilities are advancing fastest. The official numbers are not catching up fast enough. By the time they do, the adjustment will already have failed for the workers caught in the first wave.

There are three things federal agencies and policymakers should be doing now: First, plan for the fiscal squeeze. Federal workforce costs are not just a spending question — they are a revenue question. As AI shifts work from human labor to automated systems, the income tax base that funds agencies, benefits and services erodes at exactly the moment demand for support rises. Brooking Institution modeling shows this fiscal pressure could be severe. Agencies need fiscal scenario planning now, not after the trend is visible in budget projections.

Second, design workforce transition for what people lose. The Office of Personnel Management’s current transition support is built for skills retraining. The evidence from the DOGE displacement, and from every serious study of mass professional job loss, is that the harder problem is purpose and identity, not capability. Transition programs that ignore this will produce the same frustration the DOGE coaching networks documented.

Third, ensure that AI deployment decisions in federal agencies are not made solely by the vendors supplying the technology. The informal support networks that emerged in Washington show what community-level resilience looks like when institutions fail. They deserve federal attention and funding, not just admiration. Workers, communities and agencies affected by AI deployment decisions need a meaningful voice in how those decisions are made.

The DOGE cuts were political, but what they demonstrated is not. Federal agencies are the first institutions in America to run this experiment at scale. The question is whether anyone in government is paying attention to the results.

Kristen Cordell served as Senior Advisor at the US Department of State until August 2025 and is currently Senior Director of Policy at Grand Challenges Canada. Adrian Brown is Founder and CEO of Windfall Trust, a nonprofit working with governments and policymakers on AI economic preparedness.

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OPM to set new requirements to ‘verify’ FEHBP enrollments

Erich Wagner — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:40:45 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management on Tuesday published regulations aimed at better verifying that family members of federal workers and retirees are eligible for benefits under two of the government’s employer-sponsored health insurance programs.

Last year, Congress enacted a law requiring stricter screening of participants in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and Postal Service Health Benefits Program to ensure they are eligible for coverage. That move came following a 2022 Government Accountability Office report finding that the government could be spending upwards of $1 billion per year to cover family members and former spouses of federal workers and retirees who no longer qualified as dependents.

In 2024, OPM instructed agencies to audit a sample of 10% of FEHBP enrollees—the PSHBP had not yet launched at the time—to verify their continued eligibility. But due to a combination of “high transactions” during the 2024 open season and “staffing challenges” last year, the effort never made it off the ground.

In a final rule published to the Federal Register Tuesday, OPM said beginning July 1, federal workers who enroll a child or spouse in health insurance benefits through FEHBP or PSHBP will be required to provide proof of their eligibility. Among the acceptable documentation are government-issued marriage certificates, birth certificates, paternity tests and foster child or adoption paperwork. Parents of adult dependents under 26 may submit their children’s tax returns to confirm eligibility, and in instances involving a disabled adult, a medical certification that they are incapable of “self-support” will be accepted.

Under the new process, agency employing offices or OPM can disenroll a family member of the federal worker “fails to provide adequate documentation” of their eligibility. If someone is disenrolled, they may ask for a reconsideration of that decision within 60 days, but the result of that process is “final.”

While much of the rule is aimed at improving eligibility verification when a dependent is first added to insurance coverage, OPM said it is still preparing for the FEHB Protection Act’s other major provision: an audit of existing enrollments to verify participants’ continued eligibility.

“OPM concurs that there are ineligible family members participating in the program and more can be done to identify and remove them from coverage,” the rule states. “That [GAO] report made several recommendations, many of which OPM concurred with and implemented. While this work progresses, OPM is also preparing for the family member eligibility audit required by the FPA. This audit is a critical piece of addressing ineligible family member coverage and restoring program integrity, but the economic effects of the audit are not included in this rule since it is not affected by this rule.”

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Weakening career staff while boosting political appointees at science agencies is causing ‘generational damage,’ nonprofit warns

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:03:13 -0400

The American public is in the throes of experiencing the consequences of the Trump administration’s overhauls to federal science programs, according to Max Stier, the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit. Specifically, during a press briefing on Tuesday, he criticized workforce reductions at science agencies, cuts to government-backed research and efforts to give greater influence to political appointees in the grantmaking process.

“They're all three doing the same thing, which is destroying the extraordinary success that we have been able to enjoy as a nation through scientific development and innovation,” he said. “And they’re ongoing. These are not one and done things.”

In a report published on Tuesday, the Partnership found that federal science agencies lost nearly 118,000 employees between September 2024 and February 2026, as the Trump administration sought to downsize the civil service.

Using data from the Office of Personnel Management, researchers determined that the federal workforce decreased by 12.3% during the same period. Science agencies, however, often experienced deeper reductions.

For example, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration lost 41.7% of its staffers. A coalition of scientists and research organizations recently reported that job cuts at SAMHSA and other science agencies are undermining the president’s efforts to combat addiction.

While the number of federal science employees fell in every state between September 2024 and February 2026, Alaska experienced the largest percentage reduction — 36.7%. The Partnership attributed this to staff cuts at public lands agencies, such as the Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, which oversee around 60% of land in Alaska.

A similar dynamic played out in other Western states, including Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Utah, which all lost more than a quarter of their federal science workforces during the same period.

“This is not a red state, blue state issue,” Stier said. “Many of the states that most benefit from science investments from the United States government are actually traditional red states.”

The Partnership previously reported that, between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, the federal government spent nearly a quarter less, respectively, on scientific research and development contracts and science agency project grants.

In its latest analysis, researchers noted that this led to 36 out of 50 states and about two-thirds of congressional districts receiving less funding in federal science project grants. Additionally, 32 states got less government research and development contract funding between those two fiscal years.

During his remarks, Stier also criticized a recent proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget that would overhaul the federal grantmaking process, including by requiring political appointees to approve awards to ensure they advance the president’s priorities.

“It opens the door for additional corruption is what it does,” he said. “[It leads to] choices on the allocation of public dollars on the basis of political interest — and maybe private pecuniary interest — as opposed to the best chances of generating a real return for the American taxpayer and the American public.”

In the proposed rule, OMB officials argued that the changes are necessary to “prevent wasteful spending and misuse or mismanagement of federal funds.” In particular, they criticized awards during the Biden administration for diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The National Institutes of Health in recent months has modified its grant review process to identify research that contains words associated with diversity (e.g. race or gender), which has held up some grant disbursements and forced scientists to rewrite proposals.

The Partnership recently reported that the number of political appointees in the federal government has swelled during Trump’s second term and that they’re being assigned to agencies that haven’t employed such officials in recent history.

In total, Partnership officials argued that these reforms are causing “generational damage” to U.S. science.

“We're going to start to see scientists moving abroad and not coming back. We're going to start to see the pipelines of talent into government start to dry up,” said Brandon Lardy, the Partnership’s data director, during Tuesday’s briefing. “It's not a switch that you can flip on and off. It's going to take years, if not generations, to recover from some of these losses.”

In a March poll by Nature of roughly 1,600 researchers, more than 75% reported that they were considering leaving the U.S.

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Trump appoints housing official to be acting director of national intelligence

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:41:07 -0400

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is appointing Federal Housing Finance Agency director William Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence, replacing outgoing director Tulsi Gabbard.

The choice is unusual for the nation’s top spy official, who would oversee 18 intelligence agencies like the NSA and CIA. Trump defended his selection in a Truth Social post, saying that Pulte, who led many of the administration’s mortgage fraud efforts last year, “has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America.”

Pulte would still hold his leadership positions in FHFA, as well as his chairmanship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while serving as acting director, Trump said.

While heading the housing finance body, Pulte leveraged his authority to launch investigations into the president’s political foes, including Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James. He does not have prior experience working in the intelligence community.

The announcement sparked swift condemnation from former national security leads, who expressed disbelief over the pick for a paramount U.S. intelligence post that has seen major restructuring and downsizing over the past year.

“I would think at a time when we are facing exceptional conflict in the Middle East and tensions around the world, we would want someone with deep experience in intelligence matters to serve as the acting director of the agency responsible for coordinating all of America’s spy agencies,” said a former senior national security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

“Moreover, it’s a full-time job, so I can’t see how someone could also serve in an important financial regulatory position at the same time. It makes you think this administration either doesn’t know or care — or both — about this office,” the former senior official added.

Nextgov/FCW has asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, FHFA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for comment.

Citing her husband's recent cancer diagnosis, Gabbard announced last week that she intends to step down from her position effective at the end of June.

This story is breaking and may be updated.

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Ready, fire, aim: Pentagon cut workforce with little analysis before or since, GAO finds

Meghann Myers — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Pentagon leaders cut their department’s workforce by more than 10% with little regard for the effects—and still has no plans to assess them, according to a congressional watchdog report released on Friday.

The department shed 78,000 civilian employees in 2025 through a mix of voluntary resignations, involuntary layoffs, and a hiring freeze that resulted in nearly 60,000 fewer new hires than in recent years, the report found.

“But we found that DOD didn’t consistently analyze the impacts of these reductions, either in 2025 or in prior years,” according to the report. “DOD also doesn’t have a plan to assess lessons learned from its 2025 workforce reductions.”

In their response to the report, Defense officials agreed that they should “develop and implement a plan for collecting and sharing lessons learned from the Department's implementation of workforce reduction efforts.”

The officials did not indicate whether that would happen.

Soon after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took office, the Pentagon announced it would cut 5 to 8 percent of its civilian workforce. Within a year, the number swelled to about 110,000—about 14% of DOD civilians—including laid-off probationary employees, deferred resignations, and voluntary early retirements. Some 30,000 people were hired for a short list of jobs exempted from the hiring freeze, putting the net loss at just over 10%.

Of the 28 Defense agencies, offices, and other organizations targeted for workforce cuts by the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget request, at least three did not give the required explanation to Congress about why and how the cuts would be made, GAO found.

Those were the Joint Staff, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Defense Contract Audit Agency, according to the report.

“According to component officials, DOD had not provided guidance for when and how to conduct and document this analysis,” the GAO found.

And further, the GAO found, the Pentagon didn’t plan to assess how the cuts affected productivity.

In March, the Partnership for Public Service published a survey that found morale among DOD employees has tanked during the current administration.

Only 9% of Army Department employees agreed that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s political leadership team generates high levels of motivation in the workforce,” the survey found, the most satisfied of any of the large government agencies surveyed.

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OPM's subtle shifts could redefine federal HR

Ronald Sanders — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published proposed regulations that would, among other things, give its director "delegated" authority to approve agency requests for critical pay (that is, an annual salary equivalent to the vice president's) for certain specified positions. That authority is currently vested expressly with the president, according to the Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act of 1991 (or FEPCA), which established an upper limit of some 800 such critical pay positions governmentwide, although less than a dozen of those have ever actually been approved in that regard.

But as noted, OPM's proposed rules rely on an "implied" delegation of that critical pay authority from the president to the OPM director — after all, the proposed rules in the Federal Register argue that the director is the president's statutory agent, complete with the administrative equivalent of power of attorney when it comes to such matters — and those rules further imply that absent some good and compelling reason, the OPM director will approve those requests. I guess the goal here is to make better use of that extraordinary pay authority, in large part because it has been so little used in the past. That's an understatement if there ever was one(!), and in this narrow instance, I say let's "just do it!"

My own history with critical pay

At the risk of sounding a bit self-serving, I should know what I'm talking about when it comes to critical pay. I was the IRS's first chief HR officer when the Congress gave that agency "streamlined" critical pay authority for 50 positions in the now-vintage IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, thus allowing it to hire folks at a much higher salary than a regular SES position at the time and (more importantly) without all the OPM justification and red tape involved ... to be sure, the critical pay of many of those execs was not as high as the salaries some of them were getting in their private sector jobs, but the psychic value of telling one of those executive recruits that "we'll pay you as much as Vice President Al Gore is getting" did the trick for most of them. And our ability to land them is evidence of how successful we were.

And then, when I went to OPM in 2002, I persuaded my boss, then-Director Kay Coles James, to use the "regular" FEPCA-authorized critical pay authority (one of the very few agency heads to do so) to justify paying that higher salary to OPM's vacant chief actuary position, one that actually reported to me. The person encumbering that position would determine the rates that insurance carriers could charge federal employees for their health benefits, so in our view, critical pay was imminently justified thus, it was far less than a nationally known actuary could command in the labor market. But as with IRS, it was of enormous psychic value, and Director James was successful!

Truth in advertising: I also "owned" the OPM policy and regulations on critical pay when I was associate director of that agency.

However, it was almost 10 years later, when I chaired the Federal Salary Council as a fledgling political appointee in the first Trump administration (from 2018 until I resigned in late 2020 over the then-unadulterated Schedule F), that I really got to know about FEPCA, critical pay and all of its limitations; indeed, despite much official carping to the contrary, I found that the latter authority had barely been used in the time since I had been a career OPM employee. Indeed, it's never ever covered more than a dozen positions out of the 800 authorized, and I convinced the Federal Pay Agent — the directors of OPM and OMB, as well as the secretary of Labor — to include various critical pay "reforms" in their annual report to the Congress. Those reforms would have expanded its use exponentially, albeit through legislation rather than regulatory fiat, but they went nowhere.

Those reforms have been repeated in one form or another ever since, including in various Pay Agent reports, but to no avail. FEPCA and its critical pay positions have remained intact, this despite the fact that they are both woefully obsolete, but that's another story.

And since then, as a private citizen back in 2023, I was part of small group of IRS "formers" who, on behalf of Commissioner Werfel and his team, lobbied the U.S. Congress to provide that agency with the same independent "streamlined" critical pay authority that it once had back in 1998, only to find that our principle opponent on the Hill was not OMB or the Treasury Department — both of them supported the flexibility — but rather, OPM itself (in this case, the Biden OPM) ... they were the ones that argued that IRS did not need such independent authority, as it already existed in OPM. According to them, all IRS needed to do was ask for it.

Hah, fat chance! But its miserly history notwithstanding, that was enough of an argument to prevail, at least as far as the Senate parliamentarian was concerned, and critical pay approval remained with OPM, along with its historically cheapskate attitude! Until now.

Approve the proposed critical pay rules, but narrowly

So, if it were me, I would unequivocally support the proposed OPM rules, IF they're going to be used to narrowly expand (dare I say, liberalize?) the use of critical pay in the federal government. And I would encourage agency heads and their senior career advisors to take the OPM director at his word and submit lots of critical pay requests ... all justified, of course. Hopefully, most will be approved as promised, and we'll approach the 800-position limit in FEPCA.

But I have some reservations that go beyond critical pay, especially with this notion that the OPM director can speak and act for the president under a doctrine of "implied" delegation. That's a very sharp two-edged sword, depending on who's wielding it, so while I personally trust Scott Kupor and his team to wield it as he has so stated in this instance, I'd need to see how else that implied delegation may be used or abused, depending on how it's going to be exercised.

Thus, while I would love to see greater flexibility with respect to FEPCA's (and OPM's) critical pay authority, we need to worry about the precedential price we would pay in so doing. In his recent blog, aptly entitled "Secrets of OPM," Director Kupor asks us to calm down and carry on in that regard, and I agree with him, but actions will speak louder than words, so we shall see.

For example, the other regulatory change recently proposed by OPM — the abolition of the long-standing (but also obsolete) one-year time-in-grade waiting period for promotions under the General Schedule (GS) — should also be approved right away. Indeed, in my view, it should have been abolished years ago. More on that in a subsequent commentary, but what started decades ago as a simple rule of thumb has, in typical OPM fashion, become blindingly formulaic, forcing every federal employee to wait a year before they can be promoted, even if they could demonstrably do that higher-graded work involved from the get-go.

Why? What's so magical about a year? If someone can do the job, let them do it and pay them for it. So, kill it or at least give agencies the opportunity to do so if they so choose.

A subtle shift at OPM?

That said, in a broader sense, the changes I mention here are a great example of an apparent and positive OPM shift, however subtle it may be, if I'm right, that is. For example, the liberalization of critical pay, the recent proposed elimination of the "one-year" promotion rule and even more recently, the "edict" to require some federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) — and Director Kupor's contemporaneous blog explaining it — are all potential examples of a recognition that agencies need lots of maneuvering room, that their missions are just too diverse for a "one size fits all" model. I hope OPM's latest missives acknowledge that fact.

To be sure, those headlines can be misleading, and I'm wondering how many other times we've been duped. Take the NDA edict. The headlines say that it covers all federal employees, even though it clearly does not. It is NOT a blanket order, as some have reported. Rather, the edict is at an agency head's discretion, and it is limited to those federal employees that have access to sensitive, confidential (not to mention classified) information. Of course, even in limited form, such a restriction is problematic, but it is certainly less so than the headlines would suggest.

There may be better, less litigious ways to plug leaks to the media, especially given the implications for recruiting talent to civil service ranks, a job already made difficult by the Trump administration, and I fear that many of OPM's changes have been exaggerated and hyperbolized in the same way. But as a "glass half full" person, I'll take what seems to be going on with some optimism. I hope it isn't misplaced.

Ron Sanders is a 2006 Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and served on the National Council of the American Society for Public Administration, as well as associate editor of its Public Administration Review. A career civil servant of more than 37 years (and over two decades as a member of the Senior Executive Service), he was DOD’s director of Civilian Personnel; IRS’s chief human resources officer; senior associate director of OPM; chief human capital officer for the intelligence community; and later, the presidentially appointed chairman of the Federal Salary Council. With a doctorate in public administration, he also served as director of the University of South Florida’s School of Public Affairs and as executive director of the Florida Center for Cybersecurity.

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Cyber Force? Senator pushes to create service branch under the Army

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:16:13 -0400

A new cyber-focused military service branch would sit under the Army if one senator’s proposal comes to fruition.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is spearheading a markup amendment to the Senate’s 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would create a “Cyber Force” as the next armed service branch. The senator’s office confirmed that the amendment proposes to establish the branch under the Army, just as the Space Force and Marine Corps sit under the Air Force and Navy.

Similar provisions are reportedly being floated in the House, according to two people familiar with policy discussions. Earlier this year, Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, told the Center For Strategic and International Studies that a “Cyber Force is inevitable” and “we’re going to get this done.” A Fallon spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Friday asking about a potential amendment.

“New and escalating cyber threats on the battlefield demand a change to our current approach. The status quo and years of incremental changes are not meeting the current threat and are insufficient as that threat grows,” Gillibrand told Defense One in an emailed statement. “I believe, and many experts agree, that the creation of a dedicated Cyber Force will ensure the United States is ready to fight and win on the modern battlefield and protect our national security.”

The proposed amendment marks the latest push in a years-long effort. Gillibrand and House lawmakers have backed the idea before. In the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers commissioned the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study “alternative organizational models for the cyber forces of the Armed Forces.” Those findings have not been released. Details from the amendments showing what a Cyber Force might look like are not yet public, but think tanks and national security experts have already been pitching their own force designs.

A 2024 Foundation for Defense of Democracies report concluded that a Cyber Force could sit under the Army, muster about 10,000 personnel, and need a budget of around $16.5 billion. In August 2025, the FDD and the Center for Strategic and International Studies announced a commission on Cyber Force Generation. A report from those think tanks is scheduled to be released next month.

One former military official said there would be strengths to a cyber-focused service, but putting it under the Army is a bad idea. They argued that cyber would remain a secondary priority amid the branch’s many missions.

“The Army is the largest service by far,” the former official said. “Manpower-wise, it's like half the department, and it's like, ‘we'll put it under because it'll be easy for the Army to just put in another force.’ It's already hard enough to run the Army as it is.”

Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral and an FDD senior fellow who advocates for a Cyber Force, argued that this year is an ideal time to create a new service.

“Timing-wise, you need to do this in the beginning or middle of an administration, not at the end of an administration,” Montgomery said.

The proposed amendment would need to survive multiple Senate and House edits to make the final compromise NDAA.

It’s not clear if the Trump administration would support the latest bipartisan push. Last year, the Pentagon rolled out CYBERCOM 2.0, a series of policy changes aimed at beefing up the recruiting, training, and missions of the existing U.S. Cyber Command.

Katie Sutton, the assistant defense secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, defended the Cyber Command reforms during a January Senate hearing, and said a renewed command and a new service could co-exist.

“I think this is a really important debate for us all to be having about the future of the cyber warfighting domain,” Sutton told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January. “I do think one of the most common misconceptions about Cyber Command is that it is a debate between Cyber Command 2.0 and a cyber force, and they are actually separate debates that I believe both need to be had, and we need to look closely at the pros and cons of both.”

Advocates for a separate and independent cyber-focused service branch say it aligns with the Trump administration’s calls for “offensive cyber operations against those planning to kill Americans,” the White House’s new counterterrorism strategy said. It also comes as President Donald Trump and Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, acknowledged the growing role of cyber effects in U.S. military operations in Iran and Venezuela, Defense One and sister publication NextGov/FCW have previously reported.

“The president says, ‘We've got to be more offensive’ but then you got to better generate forces to be offensive, and we don't generate enough forces to do both offensive cyber and defensive cyber operations,” Montgomery said. “A cyber force is clearly necessary.”

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