Government Executive - Authors - Eric Katz

VA's failure to use its new authority to boost pay for doctors draws bipartisan criticism

Eric Katz — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:29:48 -0400

Doctors at the Veterans Affairs Department have yet to receive a pay bump despite a recent law authorizing the increases, which has drawn bipartisan criticism from lawmakers.

Currently, VA doctors are capped at earning $400,000 per year, a restriction that has been in place for years. A measure with broad, bipartisan support—known as the Dole Act—that President Biden signed into law shortly before leaving office allowed VA to issue 300 waivers to that cap to recruit or retain staff in critical health care roles. It also allowed VA to retroactively pay employees who previously earned extra compensation but were unable to collect it because they had hit the statutory limit.

VA has yet to put forward guidance to implement the provisions, despite it taking effect last July. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., the top Democrats on the Senate and House Veterans Affairs Committees, respectively, spearheaded a letter this week to VA Secretary Doug Collins calling the delay in implementation "unacceptable" and requesting detailed information about physician pay, current staffing levels, recruitment efforts and where things stand with the Dole Act.

In a House hearing earlier this year, Collins requested authority to pay some doctors more than the $400,000 cap, despite the law already providing it. The lawmakers said VA has provided updates to committee staff stating the delay stemmed from internal disagreements over how to distribute the waivers.

“We would welcome the opportunity to work with you to ensure maximum utilization of the authorities provided to you in this effort,” the Democratic lawmakers said. “However, we request that you genuinely prioritize recruitment and retention of VA’s workforce by discontinuing your attacks on the VA workforce and effectively and expeditiously making use of the various tools Congress has provided.”

The department has seen a net loss of medical officers since Trump took office last January, according to data maintained by the Office of Personnel Management. Around 3,300 physicians left VA in the last 15 months, while just 2,200 have joined. Collins last year spearheaded an effort to push out a total of 30,000 VA employees, which followed longstanding efforts to grow the workforce commensurate with a growth in the number of veterans eligible for department care.

“Your continuous complaints during congressional hearings about this singular barrier to recruitment only attempt to deflect accountability for your apathy and ineptitude in implementing a solution to this issue and shift blame away from your misguided policies that have doctors and health care professionals leaving the department in droves,” the Democrats said.

Quinn Slaven, a VA spokesperson, said the department is still looking to put the Dole Act provisions into practice.

“VA is working to implement this provision of the Dole Act in a way that benefits as many Veterans as possible and will respond to the lawmakers’ letter directly,” Slaven said.

The lack of implementation has also sparked concern among Republicans. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Utah, and Rep. Max MIller, R-Ohio, wrote a similar letter to Collins in November, urging the secretary to issue regulations that would enable VA to institute the higher pay caps and unwind staffing cuts. Collins originally put forward a proposal to cut 80,000 VA employees through layoffs and various incentives, but pared back the plan after it received bipartisan pushback.

“The waivers authorized under this provision will give your department the ability to not just stem the flow of physician departures from VA medical centers, but also to reverse that flow by attracting high-quality physicians from the private sector that want to answer the call to care for America’s veterans,” the lawmakers said.

The caps previously drew bipartisan attention and Biden administration officials said lifting them was a “top priority.” President Biden signed the PACT Act into law in 2022, which enabled VA to raise pay caps for nurses which led to 10,000 workers receiving a raise.

Collins has rejected the notion that VA needs more staff, recently telling Congress that “throwing employees” at the department’s problems creates “more bureaucracy, more overhead” that leads to “slowing down and actually removes folks from actually supporting our veterans.”

After boasting of its efforts to shed 30,000 employees and installing new caps on staffing levels across the country, however, the Veterans Affairs Department said in its recently released budget that it is looking to add 9,000 employees in fiscal 2027, a growth of 2%. Most of those hires will go to medical services.

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DHS employees to begin receiving paychecks this week

Eric Katz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:46:07 -0400

Updated April 8 at 4:03 p.m.

Homeland Security Department employees are set to be paid by either the end of the week or, for some workers, by April 16, ending an impasse that has led them to go nearly two months without any compensation.

The paychecks will cover back pay dating to Feb. 14, when DHS funding lapsed. The department has operated under a shutdown ever since, with more than 100,000 employees either furloughed or working and not receiving immediate pay. Both groups of workers will soon receive paychecks after President Trump signed a memorandum ordering DHS to use previously appropriated funds to immediately pay the employees.

Trump previously ordered all Transportation Security Administration employees to receive immediate pay in an effort to address long wait times at airports that had resulted from a surge of employees calling out.

In a memo sent to all employees over the weekend, DHS said the workers would be paid between April 10 and April 16, depending on their financial institution. Trump’s order does not end the shutdown, however. Furloughed employees—only around 8% of the department—will remain on furlough. DHS also told employees not to submit their hours for their next paychecks until they receive further guidance.

One DHS employee who has been working without pay said there has been a "mad dash" for staff to complete there time cards in time. The announcement came as a relief to many workers who have been struggling to make ends meet.

“I've also been living off of my tax refund and only paying for what is absolutely necessary,” the employee said.

Many employees at DHS, such as most of those at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, have been paid on time since the shutdown’s onset because their offices are fee funded or are tapping into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In his memo, Trump said he was declaring an “emergency situation compromising the nation’s security” and directed DHS to “use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to the functions of DHS to provide each and every employee of DHS with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them” but for the shutdown. Trump had said he would sign that memo because the employees’ “families have suffered for too long.”

Lawmakers appeared to reach a deal to fund most of DHS last week, while Republicans would seek to approve spending for ICE and CBP through a separate process. The Senate passed the measure unanimously while on recess, but the House—which was expected to do the same—never brought the bill up for consideration. Congress is set to return next week. Democrats had held out on funding all of DHS as they sought reforms to ICE and CBP practices.

“We remain hopeful that Congress will fund the department and allow us to reopen soon and get everyone back to work,” DHS said in its message to staff. “For those who have continued working, with and without pay, your dedication to the department and the American people, ensuring we remain mission-ready, is truly remarkable.”

In his first email to staff, newly sworn-in DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin also expressed his gratitude to employees and said he “won’t rest” until DHS is fully funded.

“While the department remains shut down, this memorandum allows us to prioritize DHS’s most valuable national security asset,” Mullin said of the president’s action, “the men and women of this department who serve to keep this country safe.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct a typo and reflect that DHS employees went nearly two months without pay.

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Privatization, eliminations and consolidations: Major reforms from Trump's budget

Eric Katz — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:30:11 -0400

President Trump’s fiscal 2027 contains fewer cuts than most of his previous proposals, but still suggests significant overhauls to agency operations and structures.

The blueprint would provide $2.2 trillion for the year while slashing non-defense agencies by 10%. It also includes dramatic workforce reductions, agency relocations, privatization pushes, dozens of program and grant eliminations and other major reforms.

The White House previously included some of the ideas in prior proposals, only for Congress to install roadblocks or reject them entirely. Some of the changes are new and not all will require legislative action.

Trump continued his war on “woke” federal projects and programs and research focused on climate change, leading to proposals to slash billions of dollars in spending. He is looking to slightly grow the size of the civilian workforce, though most agencies would still face cuts.

Here are some of the most significant changes the president put forward:

Privatization and staffing cuts at TSA

The Transportation Security Administration said it will look to privatize airport security at more airports across the country, an initiative it has piloted to date at a handful of mostly small locations. That would lead to job cuts of around 4,500 employees. It would eliminate another nearly 5,000 jobs by reallocating resources that it said will lead to more efficiency, as well as by tasking states and localities to staff exit lanes. The administration has for the last two months decried that a lack of funding for the Homeland Security Department has forced unpaid TSA screeners to call out at record rates, leading to exceptionally long lines at airports and damaged morale within the workforce.

Reshuffling DHS

The Homeland Security Department also proposed a major reorganization, suggesting it merge its Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Office of the Secretary and Executive Management, Management Directorate and Office of Situational Awareness into a single office reporting to the DHS secretary. The department said the restructuring will “yield efficiencies and would enable better communication throughout the department and with external partners.”

Slashing grants

The Trump administration is looking to save billions of dollars by eliminating or significantly scaling back dozens of grant programs at the departments of Health and Human Services, State, Commerce, Labor, Housing and Urban Development and others. The cuts would impact programs focused on scientific and medical research, climate change, job training, housing, energy costs for low income Americans, refugees and migrants, disaster preparedness and many other areas across government. Many of the proposals were previously submitted to and rejected by Congress, such as the McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program, the Food for Peace Program and the Community Services Block Grant, which Trump has now pitched eliminating six times.

Office eliminations

Trump is hoping to close the Education Department entirely, but only proposed trimming its budget by 3%. The agency is in the midst of transferring much of its responsibilities to other agencies and proposed eliminating Adult Education within the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, and moving the rest of the office transferring it to the Labor Department.

At HHS, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, all within the National Institutes of Health, would all be shuttered. DHS Is looking to close the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. In the Interior Department, the U.S. Geological Survey would eliminate its Ecosystems Mission Area. Interior previously considered issuing layoffs to the vast majority of staff there.

The Justice Department is hoping to eliminate its Community Relations Service and the Office of Access to Justice, which the White House called “woke enterprises.” Labor would close Job Corps, a $1.6 billion program and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The Commerce Department is again looking to close the Minority Business Development Agency.

Fraud crackdown

Several agencies asked for a surge in funds to prevent individuals from misusing their programs. The Agriculture Department is looking to boost efforts at identifying fraud, such as in food assistance programs, and requested $119 million for the efforts. HUD said it requires $30 million to fight fraud in housing programs and would use the money to boost financial reporting and oversight of recipients. The DOJ also requested $30 million for the National Fraud Division, an office it stood up earlier this year, to fund prosecutors who would aim to combat “the rampant and pervasive problem.”

FEMA reforms

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would eliminate 1,000 positions that it “expected to be vacant” by the end of the current fiscal year. The agency would focus on its “core mission” of emergency response and disaster recovery, while requesting states and localities take on more financial responsibility. It would slash non-disaster and training grants by $600 million and eliminate the Shelter and Services Program, which provides temporary housing to migrants awaiting DHS processing.

USDA reorganization

The Agriculture Department noted it will follow through on its plans to shift much of its headquarters to regional hubs in North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Utah, requesting $55 million for the cost of relocating staff and preparing buildings for sale. The changes will ensure USDA employees “are closer to the farmers and ranchers they serve” while avoiding maintenance costs.

Further Cuts at HHS

After cutting nearly 20,000 employees last year, HHS is now looking to slash programs across the department as it consolidates various offices into the Administration for a Healthy America. Those would include some in the Health Resources and Services Administration, such as Healthy Start; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as Firearm Injury and Mortality Prevention; and a slew of programs within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, such as Homelessness Prevention and Mental Health Children and Family Programs. HHS briefly sought to terminate thousands of SAMHSA grants earlier this year before quickly walking it back.

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See where Trump is looking to make staffing cuts next year and where he wants to grow

Eric Katz — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:29:01 -0400

After shedding more than 300,000 federal employees in his first year in office and pushing for additional cuts this year, the Trump administration is seeking to hold the overall workforce steady in fiscal 2027.

Under plans put forward in President Trump’s new budget, agencies would actually see a net increase of around 3,000 workers next fiscal year. Many agencies are still proposing that they cut additional workers, but the extent of those reductions would be far more mild than the White House previously sought and would be made up for by gains elsewhere.

While some agencies are looking to further slash their workforces this year, others have begun the process of building back with new hiring. By the start of the next fiscal year, more plan to join those looking to grow.

The Agriculture Department would lose the most employees under Trump’s budget, at 19,000 employees, but much of those would result from the transfer of firefighting duties out of the Forest Service and into the newly stood up U.S. Wildland Fire Service within the Interior Department. USWFS would absorb 13,000 new employees in total. Still, Agriculture is set to shed thousands of employees on top of those transfers. It pushed out more than 15,000 employees last year with various incentives.

The Forest Service would still shed thousands of additional employees from forest management and research offices. The department is looking to eliminate many smaller offices focused on research, energy and tribal outreach. USDA is also in the process of relocating thousands of employees out of its Washington headquarters, as well as from regional offices around the country, which is expected to lead to widespread departures from the agency.

Interior is set to grow by 4,500 employees, but that includes more than 13,000 who would transfer into the department’s new wildfire agency. It would lose 14% of its workforce outside of those transfers.

Interior said it will create “an optimized workforce structure that aligns staffing levels with mission requirements.” The U.S. Geological Survey would cut around 2,000 employees, or 29% of its workforce; the Bureau of Land Management is looking to shed more than 2,100 employees, or around 27% of its current workforce; the Bureau of Indian Affairs would slash 760 employees or 21% of its workforce and the National Park Service is aiming to cut nearly 3,000 employees, or 18% of its workforce.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media is looking to fully eliminate all of its 800 remaining employees. The State Department would set up an International Communications Activities account to fund USAGM’s statutory duties, but the agency itself would largely cease to exist.

At NASA, the Science Directorate alone is looking to shed nearly 1,000 employees, or more than 40% of that workforce. Additional cuts would come from testing for aerosciences

The Treasury Department would lose only around 1,400 employees in total, though components would face more severe cuts. The Internal Revenue Service, which has already shed more than 20,000 employees under Trump, is looking to offload an additional 4,700.

Even some agencies that will see overall staffing boosts are proposing significant cuts within some of their components. Workforce increases at the Commerce Department would stem mostly from Census Bureau hiring and the absorption of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would see a staffing cut of around 14%.

Most of the losses at the Labor Department would result from that proposal to shift BLS to Commerce, though additional cuts would result from the elimination of various offices including one charged with oversight of federal contractors. The Education Department, which has already pushed out or laid off about half of its workforce, would shed an additional 500 employees, which cuts coming from program administration, the Office of Civil Rights and the student aid office.

The Social Security Administration is looking to grow its workforce by 2% after shedding thousands of employees over the last 15 months. The agency said it will “hire strategically across our organization,” with a particular focus on front-line staff. After boasting of its efforts to shed 30,000 employees and installing new caps on staffing levels across the country, the Veterans Affairs Department is looking to add 9,000 employees, a growth of 2%. Most of those hires will go to medical services.

The Defense Department is planning to add more than 8,000 employees to its civilian workforce after slashing tens of thousands, a growth of around 1%.

The Justice Department is also looking to go on a hiring surge: it is aiming to bring on more than 3,200 FBI employees, nearly 1,000 new staff each at the U.S. Marshals Service and Drug Enforcement Administration, 500 employees for immigration courts and 145 hires at the Bureau of Prisons.

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Civilian agencies face 10% cuts in Trump’s 2027 budget

Eric Katz — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:16:36 -0400

President Trump on Friday proposed a $2.2 trillion fiscal 2027 budget, an overall increase on current spending that would include cutting non-defense agencies by 10%, or by $73 billion.

The proposed reductions were far less severe than the 22% in non-defense spending that the White House suggested chopping in his fiscal 2026 blueprint after Congress largely ignored those suggestions, though most major agencies would still see their budgets reduced under the new submission.

As Trump previously touted, defense spending in the new plan would spike by 44% to $1.5 trillion. A handful of other agencies would also see an increase compared to current spending: The Justice Department would receive a 13% boost mostly to supplement law enforcement efforts. The Veterans Affairs Department would receive a 9% bump, including an additional $800 million for electronic health records modernization. The Transportation Department would see a 6% increase, including a $1.3 billion increase for infrastructure and an additional $481 million for the Federal Aviation Administration to support air traffic controller hiring and additional modernization efforts. A 2% bump for the Energy Department would go toward the National Nuclear Security Administration; the rest of Energy would see an 11% spending decrease.

While nearly all agencies would experience a cut, those reductions were, nearly across the board, less than Trump proposed in his first budget. The biggest cuts would be the most significant at the Small Business Administration at 67%, the National Science Foundation at 55% and the Environmental Protection Agency at 52%. The president requested cuts of more than 25% to the departments of Health and Human Services, Interior and Housing and Urban Development in his first spending proposal last year, but he is now seeking reductions of 12%-13% for those agencies.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said the fiscal 2027 budget builds on the cuts the administration secured in the fiscal 2026 appropriations bills.

“These final appropriations bills rooted out wasteful spending that the administration had identified across federal agencies,” Vought said. “The enacted bills also put us on a path to eliminate ineffective federal agencies that do not serve a useful purpose.”

The budget would eliminate 11 federal programs the administration deemed “woke,” such as the Education Department’s Teacher Quality Partnerships, HUD’s Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing and the EPA’s Environmental Justice Program. EPA, HUD and the Internal Revenue Service would face additional cuts in areas the administration said amounted to the “weaponization of the federal government.”

All told, the budget would eliminate dozens of grant and assistance programs focused on scientific and medical research, climate change, job training, housing, energy costs for low income Americans, refugees and migrants, disaster preparedness and many other areas across government.

The proposal would provide $50 million to the Agriculture Department to carry out its reorganization and mandatory relocations of thousands of employees and make investments to help HHS stand up its Administration for a Health America. Other major agency reform proposals in the budget included unifying federal firefighting into one agency, privatizing airport screenings at small airports, consolidating offices within DHS, eliminating an office focused on federal contractor oversight and slashing “layers of bureaucracy” at VA.

The White House said its budget would boost funding for federal law enforcement by 15% compared to current spending, including for more Homeland Security Department agents and additional federal prosecutors. The Drug Enforcement Administration, Secret Service and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security would all see increased funds for law enforcement hiring. The White House also highlighted a 12% increase for the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review to support more courtroom space for deportation hearings.

Vought said the federal government has entered a new era of budgeting. OMB projected the government would slash spending at non-defense agencies by 24% in the next decade.

“A historic paradigm shift in the budget process is occurring and is producing real results for the American public,” the OMB director said. “Fiscal futility is ending. Now that our fiscal ship has turned to face in the right direction, I look forward to working with you to continue moving forward.”

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Interior incentivizes more staff departures after already cutting 20% of its workforce

Eric Katz — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:47:02 -0400

After shedding around 20% of its workforce in the last 15 months, the Interior Department is once again offering employees incentives to leave the agency as part of what it is calling a new “strategic initiative" to save money and better deliver services.

Interior became the first major agency to offer a “deferred resignation program” on a widespread basis this year, which will allow nearly all of its full-time employees the chance to sit on paid leave through September before exiting government service. Interior, like all federal agencies, offered multiple rounds of DRP last year and successfully pushed out around 13,000 employees.

The department did not spell out a specific headcount reduction goal as part of the offer or say what would happen if it falls short of any such goal, and did not respond to requests for clarification. Interior has at multiple points in President Trump’s second term been on the verge of implementing sweeping layoffs across its workforce, only for various court rulings to delay those efforts at the 11th hour. The department no longer faces restrictions on such reductions in force, but the cuts—until Thursday—appeared to have been put on the back burner.

Interior will also allow eligible employees to retire early. Employees hired within the last 12 months, on a time-limited appointment or are in the midst of being fired are not eligible for the new DRP. Certain employees, such as those working in law enforcement, oil and gas permitting and on wildfire-related matters, are exempt from the offer.

“Effective stewardship requires disciplined management of the resources entrusted to us,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said. “By modernizing our operations we’re strengthening our ability to carry out Interior’s mission and deliver world-class service for the American people.”

Interior spelled out few details of what its modernization effort would entail aside from trimming staff, though Burgum mentioned moving National Park Service to more visitor-facing roles, strengthening support for tribal nations and expediting permitting by “eliminating redundant layers.” The department will focus more resources on water and power missions and "accelerate the delivery of high-quality science.” It will also reduce “administrative burdens” and improve internal operations.

The department previously consolidated its administrative functions, such as human resources, contracting and IT, away from individual bureaus and into Burgum’s office.

Employees have until April 12 to apply for the deferred resignation and must stop working by April 29.

With so many employees exiting Interior within the last year, current staff suggested most of those remaining would not be enticed by a renewed DRP offer. They added, however, that burnout and new assignments could contribute to workers opting leave.

“There is no way I’m leaving unless they force me,” said one employee, noting the dearth of opportunities in the current job market.

During a staff visit in Denver this week, Burgum told employees RIFs were no longer on the table, according to an employee briefed on the matter. Current staff took solace in Interior declining to mention layoffs in its communications on Thursday, a sharp departure from the approach it pursued during DRP offers last year.

“Everyone is already drowning from the people we lost,” one employee said. “They would be shooting themselves in the foot with a RIF.”

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Consumer watchdog agency asks court for permission to slash its workforce by two-thirds

Eric Katz — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:53:19 -0400

A consumer watchdog agency would see its workforce cut in by two-thirds from the staffing levels it employed 15 months ago under a new plan the Trump administration is seeking court approval to implement.

Under the revised layoff plan, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would retain 556 employees. That would be down from more than 1,100 employees currently and more than 1,700 when President Trump took office.

The plan “makes clear that CFPB leadership will not close the agency absent the injunction, contrary to the central factual premise on which the injunction is based,” Trump administration attorneys said in a new filing to an appeals court this week.

Instead, the agency would implement reductions in force to “streamline agency operations” while leaving it sufficiently staffed to meet its legal obligations. Cuts are necessary, the agency argued, because of funding cuts it sustained as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Trump signed into law last year. Some RIFs will be necessary by the fall, it said.

Attorneys for the administration further argued the prohibition on layoffs is overly broad given the new precedent Supreme Court created last year limiting the circumstances in which judges can grant nationwide injunctions.

The administration argued that the ongoing injunction is harming its efforts to carry out standard workforce reshaping efforts.

“A modification of the stay would alleviate ongoing harm to the executive branch’s prerogative to right-size agency operations in line with an important presidential policy,” the attorneys said.

A year ago, the U.S. District Court in Washington paused mass reduction-in-force efforts, after CFPB had tried to lay off 90% of its staff—or around 1,500 employees. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia subsequently ruled that the RIFs could proceed. The court delayed their implementation while a union sought an en banc hearing before the entire appellate panel, however, and that panel in December threw out the initial appellate decision while it prepared to hear oral arguments.

It held those arguments in February but has yet to issue a decision.

Cuts to the agency would most significantly impact the enforcement, operations and supervision divisions, which would see reductions of 80%, 61% and 85%, respectively, compared to when Trump took office. The new staffing levels would align with the Trump administration’s priorities, CFPB said in its new plan, such as reducing the number of enforcement actions.

“Going forward, exercising its discretion in how to conduct enforcement, the current leadership has green-lit certain investigations that continue to align with its priorities,” the bureau said. “But their number and scope also do not require the Enforcement Division staffing at the current levels.”

While the attorneys said the plan amounted to the “particularized assessment” a federal judge previously found the bureau failed to make and demonstrated exactly how each division would meet its statutory requirements, employees said the staffing figures seemed arbitrary.

“How those numbers were arrived at, nobody knows,” one CFPB worker said. “Many statutorily required functions appear to have no employees remaining after a possible RIF.”

Another employee said CFPB could have laid off the majority of staff by now if it had simply followed normal procedures for doing so.

“There’s no logic in anything they do,” the staffer said.

Cat Farman, president of the National Treasury Employees Union chapter that represents CFPB employees called the agency’s assertion that it can carry out all of its duties with one-third the staff “laughable” and “an insult to the intelligence of the judges.”

“This is [acting CFPB Director Russ] Vought’s latest half-baked shutdown plan in his tiresome quest to destroy the CFPB via mass layoffs,” Farman said. “Everyone knows Vought doesn’t want CFPB to exist at all.”

Employees are still working, though they said they are doing so with diminished workloads. Late last year, CFPB attempted to defund the agency and warned employees widespread furloughs would result. The original district court judge on the case prevented that action, however, and funding has since been restored.

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Forest Service to move HQ out of DC, shutter regional offices in sweeping overhaul

Eric Katz — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:56:33 -0400

The U.S. Forest Service is moving its headquarters out of Washington and closing dozens of facilities across the country in a move the agency said will streamline its work but that employees cautioned could lead to a mass exodus of staff.

The Agriculture Department agency will shift around 260 employees to its new headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, and move around a to-be-determined number of employees in soon-to-be-shuttered regional offices. The reshaping of the agency is part of a larger USDA reorganization that will see 2,600 employees shifted from the capital region into new regional hubs around the country.

USFS leadership said it was shifting from its decades-old regional-based model to one organized around states, though it will maintain only 15 state directors and many of them will oversee multiple states. The Forest Service will maintain 20 research and development stations across the country, while closing 57 others. It will close all nine of its regional offices and 130 employees will remain in Washington.

“Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment," USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said.

Employees experienced various stages of grief upon learning the news, according to those who spoke to Government Executive on the condition of anonymity.

“Reactions range from crying to anger to silence,” one midwest-based employee said after Tuesday's announcement.

Washington-based employees will receive information about timelines for relocations in “the coming days and weeks,” USFS Chief Tom Schultz told employees in an agency-wide email. The full reorganization and office closures will play out over the next year. Schultz promised “clear guidance to employees and partners” along the way.

“I know this transition raises questions about roles, locations, reporting structures, and timelines,” Schultz said. “Change of this magnitude affects people, families, and communities--not just organizational charts. We are committed to approaching this work with transparency, empathy, respect, and an understanding of the real impacts on your lives.”

Employees told Government Executive those words offered little comfort due to the remaining uncertainty and potentially life-altering impacts. Staff across the country who were in the field without access to computers missed the announcement and various town halls offering additional information.

“We have no clue how this will affect us on the ground,” said one employee based in a northwestern regional office. “I have no idea what is in store for my program.”

While USFS is eliminating all of its nine regional offices, it will maintain facilities in most existing locations and the bulk of those employees will not have to relocate. In regions six, eight and nine, however—located in Portland, Ore., Atlanta and Milwaukee, respectively—the facilities themselves will shutter and employees will have to move, according to a notice obtained by Government Executive. The exact locations for the staff there has not yet been determined, employees said, but management told staff they will be placed in Utah, Colorado or New Mexico.

Government Executive first reported plans for this reorganization were underway last April and USDA made the official announcement in June, though it told employees on Tuesday the makeup for the restructured Forest Service “is currently being developed.”

“Your position is subject to reorganization, and your duty station will change,” Schultz told regional staff set to be relocated in an internal memorandum. “You will be relocated to a new duty station to one of the locations identified above. The specific details, exactly where, when, and into what position, have not yet been determined.”

In a statement, Schultz took a less conciliatory tone.

"Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found—not just behind a desk in the capital,” Schultz said.

Rollins added the changes would enable boosted timber production, a key priority for the Trump administration.

Employees will relocate between this summer and next, with bargaining taking place with unions in the coming months. Schultz said the agency will hold informational sessions in the coming months and all employees required to relocate more than 50 miles will receive assistance to do so. One employee said they were told to expect “individual assignment letters” in May or June.

“There is a position in the restructured Forest Service for every permanent employee willing to accept reassignment,” Schultz said, though he added there may be opportunities for buyouts or early retirements. USDA shed more than 15,000 employees last year through various incentive programs.

Employees reassigned to a new location must either accept it or lose their job. Some USFS employees will be assigned jobs in Fort Collins, Colo., another of the new "hubs" USDA is establishing. The others, in addition to Salt Lake City, will be in Raleigh, N.C.; Kansas City, Mo.; and Indianapolis.

The Forest Service plans previously received particularly negative feedback during the public comment period from lawmakers, employees and local governments on the larger USDA reorganization, as well in meetings the department held with tribal governments. Tribal leaders, for example, said the elimination of USFS regional offices would diminish working relationships, lead to the loss of institutional knowledge related to treaty obligations and result in less coordination with agency leadership.

Employees expressed skepticism that most relocated staff would agree to stay with the agency. Trump in his first term relocated two USDA’s offices to Kansas City, which resulted in the loss of more than half of their staff and significant drops in productivity.

“Most I've talked to will not move, but we'll see when it's time to make their final decision,” one staffer said.

In a separate email to staff, Schultz acknowledged the value of the existing regional structure, noting it “served the agency well” for decades and “helped us form strong relationships and carry out a mission that has only grown in importance.” Growing budget constraints and demands on employees, he added, have made it more valuable for staff to move closer to the constituencies they serve and for the agency to empower local leadership to make more decisions.

The northwest-based employee, however, said it was “obvious” to employees on the ground that the plan was poorly thought out.

“It is a completely pointless exercise that is going to cause more problems than there already are,” the employee said.

Another western employee said he found the larger reorganization “incoherent,” but said the push to move employees out of the nation’s capital was prudent. Still, he called the elimination of regional structure a “radical change.”

“The regions are where the real work gets done and those reporting chains will be totally upended by the new state forester system,” the employee said.

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A federal office designed to stave off the next financial crisis is being dismantled by the Trump administration

Eric Katz — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:59:58 -0400

The Trump administration is looking to lay off staff—after already pushing out nearly half of the workforce—at a small federal office with a daunting mission: providing analysis to stave off the next financial crisis.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research began President Trump’s second term with 196 employees. It now has about 100 and is looking to get down to 70, according to a current and former employee and documents obtained by Government Executive. OFR leadership informed staff earlier this month that it would institute reductions in force in the coming weeks, after which the office will have shed about 64% of its workforce since last January.

“I think it’s scary and concerning,” said one employee still remaining at OFR. “We are already a small office but we have people who are focused on a number of different areas…that are crucial for the functioning of the U.S. economy.”

Trump previously laid off dozens of OFR staff in his first term, though staffing was slowly rebuilt under the Biden administration.

Congress initially stood up the office as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to collect data and publish analysis related to potential risks to the financial sector and the U.S. economy. It reports to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a separate entity within Treasury made up of various regulators in government.

Congressional Republicans sought to essentially eliminate OFR entirely as part of last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, saying the office was duplicative and FSOC can conduct its own research. The Senate parliamentarian ultimately ruled the provision could not be included in the bill due to the mechanism lawmakers were using to pass it.

Congress created OFR in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis to address the lack of data that precipitated it. Last June, a group of more than 50 former Federal Reserve chairs, other former government officials and academics released a letter in support of OFR, noting it fills critical research gaps and offers key insights into economic risks.

“History shows that financial crises have high socio-economic costs and that the economic recovery from such crises tends to be protracted,” they said. “Defunding or significantly downsizing the OFR and its financial data and analytics would be a mistake, particularly so given today’s elevated macro-financial uncertainties.”

Democrats in Congress similarly said the moves were ill-advised.

“As risks emerge in the financial system and cracks in credit markets spread, the Trump administration is gutting the office designed to evaluate financial risks in a giveaway to Wall Street,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, told Government Executive. “This is just the latest move by President Trump and his financial regulators to undermine financial stability and pave the way for another crash.”

OFR management first told employees of its layoff plans early last year before offering multiple rounds of “deferred resignation” that enabled employees to sit on paid leave for several months before leaving government. The RIFs were postponed on multiple occasions by various litigation, but the administration now has the green light to move forward. Most agencies appeared to have shelved layoff plans after the federal government pushed out more than 300,000 employees through attrition and separation incentives, but OFR is resuming its efforts.

Treasury officially sent notice of the upcoming RIFs to staff on March 2, saying OFR is "transitioning to [a] new organization structure" and "a significant number of positions will be abolished." Lincoln Foran, who is currently serving as OFR’s director, called a town hall meeting with staff with one hour’s notice to inform employees of the plans. Foran had recently joined OFR and his announcement was the first time he had addressed the workforce. He sought to empathize with employees by telling them it was a tough situation, but one he understood because his father worked at Bear Stearns, an investment banking firm that failed during the 2008 financial crisis.

“The line did not go over as he intended,” an employee present said.

The layoffs are expected to take effect by mid-May. Employees were provided another opportunity to take a “deferred resignation,” meaning they would sit on paid leave through September before leaving the agency.

OFR is funded by fees levied on large financial institutions, meaning cuts to the office does not contribute to deficit reduction. The agency told employees that Treasury’s decision to shrink its budget in fiscal 2026 necessitated the layoffs.

“OFR is supposed to be an early warning system for problems in the financial system, and they don’t want that early warning system,” the current employee said of the Trump administration’s motives. “They don’t want those risks being pointed out.”

Treasury did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

The office’s statutory requirement makes it difficult to eliminate entirely, but the administration has worked to limit the publication of data and written products. The data team has already seen its staff reduced to just a few people due the mass exodus that occurred last year, a current and former employee said. Other teams have been cut in half or more.

“We talk about shining light into financial areas that aren’t often exposed,” one employee said of the agency’s mission, “and that’s not seen as a plus.”

The employee stressed that their work is not redundant to that done at other agencies, but instead conducted to support their work.

“It’s going to be a loss to the financial world when we are essentially kneecapped,” they said. It’s going to be more difficult to get the work done, and I think that's the plan. That’s the desired goal.”

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Shutdown poised to continue for DHS after House, Senate take diverging paths

Eric Katz — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:16:22 -0400

The Homeland Security Department shutdown appears poised to continue after the Senate and House took diverging paths on Friday, leaving the agency unfunded as lawmakers leave Washington for a two-week recess.

The Senate early Friday morning unanimously passed a measure to fund all of DHS except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, the two agencies most central to carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE and CBP are currently operating normally and paying employees using existing appropriations and Republicans planned to separately pass a bill to fully fund the agencies.

That plan to largely end the single-agency shutdown, which began Feb. 14, was disrupted later in the day, however, when House Republicans balked at the Senate’s bill. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said the chamber will vote Friday evening on a bill to extend funding for all of DHS for 60 days. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has already declared such a bill dead on arrival and senators have left town anyway.

Johnson told reporters on Friday he was caught off guard by the Senate’s actions and he would not go along with funding DHS if ICE and CBP were not included.

The shutdown has left more than 100,000 DHS employees without immediate pay, leading to significant impacts including long lines at airports due to callouts from Transportation Security Administration employees. Trump sought to alleviate at least that concern on Friday by unilaterally opting to use funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to pay those workers. Most other furloughed and excepted DHS employees, such as those at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, civilians at the U.S. Coast Guard and others will continue to see their paychecks delayed.

Trump this week deployed ICE personnel to airports to assist TSA with security efforts.

Congressional Democrats had been holding out on funding DHS until the White House agreed to reforms at ICE and CBP. Their repeated attempts to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS had been blocked by Republicans until Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., brought up a similar measure at 2 a.m. on Friday and it passed by unanimous consent.

House lawmakers are also expected to leave Washington following their Friday evening vote on the 60-day continuing resolution with no plan for getting a DHS funding bill to Trump’s desk.

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Education Dept. HQ handed to Energy as Trump advances effort to dismantle agency

Eric Katz — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:43:18 -0400

The Education Department will leave its headquarters building this year, marking the latest step in the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency as it hands the space off to the Energy Department.

Education has already slashed about half of its workforce since President Trump took office last year and Secretary Linda McMahon told employees on Thursday its Washington headquarters, a location just south of the National Mall that the department has occupied for decades, contained far more space than the agency requires. Trump has vowed to eliminate the department entirely and offloaded some of its work to other agencies, but Congress has declined to defund it.

Energy will also move out of its headquarters, which it said would help it avoid $350 million in deferred maintenance costs. Education employees will move to another building just blocks away from its existing location into a leased space that most recently housed an annex of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“This relocation is a common sense, forward-looking step to down-size the department's federal footprint here in D.C., ensuring we are a more responsible steward of taxpayer dollars and allowing the Department of Energy to occupy the [Lyndon B. Johnson] building, which it can utilize fully,” McMahon told employees in an email obtained by Government Executive.

She said it would save Education nearly $5 million annually and would not result in any interruption to federal operations or employees’ workflow. The department would provide additional updates to staff in the coming months, she added.

“Relocating to the LBJ building will deliver significant taxpayer savings and will ensure the Energy Department continues to deliver on its mission,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said. “We look forward to working closely with the General Services Administration and the Education Department throughout this process.”

Government Executive confirmed the changes earlier in the day and reached out to both Energy and Education early Thursday for comment, but neither responded before issuing a press release that afternoon.

Education laid off around one-third of its workforce last year and shed additional employees through various incentives. Earlier this year, Interior announced interagency agreements with the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior and State to offload many of its responsibilities. Most recently, it announced it would offload federal student loan duties to the Treasury Department.

Under the agreements, however, staff reporting to the new agencies still work for and are paid by Education. In some cases, they still must use Education systems to manage their work.

A funding measure that Trump recently signed into law rejected most of the cuts the president sought to implement and raised questions about the legality of the transfers.

"No authorities exist for the Department of Education to transfer its fundamental responsibilities under numerous authorizing and appropriations laws, including through procuring services from other federal agencies, of carrying out those programs, projects, and activities to other federal agencies,” lawmakers wrote in their bipartisan statement accompanying the bill.

McMahon called the latest announcement “a significant step forward toward the final mission” of the Education Department.

“I'm proud of what we accomplished in this building, and I look forward to what we will do in the next,” McMahon said. “Thank you for your continued dedication and flexibility as we deliver on our promise to put students first, make government work better for the American people, and return education to the states.”

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After two days of training, TSA says ICE personnel are ready to help at airports

Eric Katz — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:45:04 -0400

Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel are equipped to assist airport screeners after receiving two days of training, the head of the Transportation Security Administration told lawmakers on Wednesday, who said the agents and officers are checking travelers’ identification and managing crowd control.

Ha Nguyen McNeill, the current TSA chief, repeatedly expressed her gratitude to ICE for easing the burden on her workforce during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing. The agency is facing severe shortages as employees increasingly call out due to the ongoing Homeland Security Department shutdown, which has forced staff to work without immediate pay. ICE began deploying to airports on Monday after President Trump ordered them to do so over the weekend.

Earlier in her testimony, McNeil lamented that TSA has lost more than 1,500 employees over the course of the two extended shutdowns this fiscal year. Replacing those workers before major events like the upcoming World Cup would prove difficult, she said, because TSA screeners require six months of training before they can conduct their jobs.

McNeil said her agency had trained ICE employees “for several days,” before correcting herself that the training began on Monday.

She called the manning of TSA's document reader machine and directing queueing "non-specialized functions" that ICE staff could more easily take on. When ICE oversees those types of activities, she said, TSA staff can focus on more specialized functions.

“It’s gone extremely well,” McNeil said of ICE’s airport deployment.

Democrats pounced on the divergence of training required for ICE staff assisting TSA and TSA employees themselves, suggesting the gap between the two demonstrated the deployments were not a serious effort to boost airport security.

“Today is Wednesday, you said they started Monday,” said Rep. Troy Carter, D-La., “which spells out exactly our fear: it’s nothing more than window dressing and cheap theater and political performance to bring ICE agents in.”

McNeil responded that ICE personnel are not involved in sophisticated screenings, but instead assisting with activities that require less training.

While McNeil praised ICE staff for their efforts, she said TSA is in a “very dire situation” with the upcoming World Cup and her agency would have to closely monitor the staffing situation to determine whether to make “difficult decisions” about potentially closing airports.

After seeing consistent staffing growth for the previous five years, TSA lost around 3,000 employees in 2025, or around 5% of its workforce, due to various firings and attrition measures. The agency has seen nearly 500 employees leave the agency since the current shutdown began in February, McNeil said.

Around 12% of TSA screeners called out from work on Monday, the agency said. At nine airports, call out rates exceeded 20%. ICE has deployed to more than a dozen airports across the country to address long wait times, though passengers have still waited for several hours in some locations.

TSA and more than 100,000 total Homeland Security Department employees are set to see a third at least partially missed paycheck this week. At the Coast Guard, civilian workers have missed pay but military personnel have received their normal compensation. Adm. Thomas Allan, the service’s vice commandant, told lawmakers on Wednesday the Coast Guard now faces a “grim uncertainty" of whether it can meet its next payroll for military staff.

Victoria Barton, an associate administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, warned the Disaster Relief Fund is running low and could be quickly exhausted if a major disaster strikes. Leaders throughout DHS stressed the significant toll the 40-day shutdown has taken on their workforces, with employees struggling to pay their bills and afford to get to their jobs.

Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding DHS until the White House agrees to reforms at ICE and Customs and Border Protection. They have repeatedly sought to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS, but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the Senate would hold a vote Thursday on a measure to fund all of DHS except ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, though it was not immediately clear whether enough Democrats would support it to reach the 60-vote threshold for passage. Most ICE and CBP staff are currently working and getting paid with funds provided in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

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The Trump administration paid these employees not to work for more than a year. It just called them back

Eric Katz — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:37:22 -0400

Updated March 25 at 10:34 a.m.

In February 2025, about a month after President Trump began his second term in office, the Interior Department notified a few dozen employees that it was involuntarily placing them on paid leave and they were no longer permitted to conduct any government work.

They would remain in that status for more than a year. They helped out at their kids’ schools, completed home projects and exercised more, all while collecting a paycheck, but they could not engage in official duties.

Earlier this month, those employees—who Interior targeted for their previous work on issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion—returned to their jobs. One year later, it asked those who had not left the agency to come back.

Around three-dozen Interior employees were subjected to administrative leave last year, according to documents obtained by Government Executive, with jobs ranging from equal employment specialist to program analyst to diversity and inclusion officer. The sidelining of the workers followed executive orders President Trump signed on his first two days in office prohibiting DEI work in the executive branch and subsequent guidance from the Office of Personnel Management directing agencies to identify and, eventually, lay off all employees who engaged in it.

They were recently recalled in a memorandum from Rachel Borra, Interior’s chief human capital officer, in what amounted to a management-directed reassignment as the employees will take on slightly different roles.

“This reassignment is a management-directed action and is being taken to promote the efficiency of the service,” Borra told the employees. “Your reassignment is due to necessary updates to your position and job functions in support of the department's priorities.”

Employees subject to the year of idling said they have felt a “huge array of emotions” over that last 12 months.

“It was hysteria and anger,” said one Interior employee who recently returned to work when they found out about the administrative leave. “Very raw.”

They added that they worked through Trump’s first term without seeing any significant disruption, so the aggressive actions in his second term came as a shock. The employee expected to be subject to a reduction in force, as OPM had called for in its January 2025 guidance, and decided to stay put to collect any associated severance and unemployment. All the while, they remained hopeful that they would be able to return.

“I do really like my job,” the employee said. “The mission is very important to me.”

Interior has at multiple points been on the verge of implementing sweeping RIFs across its workforce, only for various court rulings stemming from lawsuits delaying those efforts at the 11th hour. The department no longer faces restrictions on layoffs, but the reductions appear to have been put on the back burner.

An Interior spokesperson declined to say why employees were not subject to RIFs as OPM directed, nor would they say exactly how many workers have returned to the department.

“The department made the choice to bring these employees back to work to focus on other, non-DEI related tasks,” the spokesperson said. “To be good stewards of taxpayer money, it was common-sense to repurpose these employees to carry out the department's mission. We are proud to say the department will no longer push a woke agenda like DEI initiatives which were designed in the previous administration to divide America.”

In the intervening year, employees who did not seek other employment frequently felt like they were on the verge of losing theirs.

“The year has been marked with depression and anxiety,” the employee said. “We would hear rumblings that something would happen ‘soon’ but that would be said several times and nothing would happen.”

The Trump administration planned to target nearly 600 employees across government on administrative leave because they worked on DEI or environmental justice issues, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post last year. Many of those employees have since faced RIFs or accepted incentives to voluntarily leave their jobs. A group of impacted workers subject to those layoffs are currently suing the government for unlawfully targeting them, in what they say violates RIF procedures.

The DEI and environmental justice employees represent a small slice of those the Trump administration has placed on extended paid leave this year. As part of its deferred resignation program, more than 150,000 employees accepted offers to not work for six months while on administrative leave and receiving full pay and benefits. Agencies placed tens of thousands of recently hired or promoted employees on administrative leave after seeking to fire them, with court injunctions blocking the immediate terminations. Most of those employees were eventually brought back to work, with OPM Director Scott Kupor recently telling Government Executive only around 7,000 federal workers were fired as part of the probationary period purge.

When it conducted mass layoffs, the Health and Human Services Department informed some of its top career senior executives it would reassign them to remote locations in the Indian Health Service. Nearly a year later, however, those employees remain on administrative leave.

Following reports of widespread abuse of administrative leave, Congress in 2016 passed a law that placed 10-day caps on its use. OPM did not issue regulations to implement the law until 2024, however, and it only applied the cap to employees actively under investigation. Upon taking office, Trump’s OPM noted enforcement of that regulation would not take effect until September 2025 and encouraged agencies to use administrative leave as they implemented restructurings.

OPM subsequently encouraged agencies to limit the use of administrative leave for workforce realignments to 12 weeks per employees in 2026, unless it and the Office of Management and Budget jointly approve extensions.

While employees at Interior have returned to similar roles, they now have a new reporting structure: the department has consolidated its human resources and other administrative functions away from individual bureaus and into Secretary Doug Burgum’s office. Borra, Interior’s human resources chief, last week sent a memo to staff encouraging them to notify the department of any DEI activities still taking place within the agency.

The recently returned Interior employee said while they are excited to be back, they are apprehensive about rejoining the workforce after so much time away.

“I’m also feeling like I’ve had a major brain drain the past year and like I have so much to relearn,” the employee said.

This story has been updated with additional information on OPM's administrative leave policies.

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Mullin confirmed to lead DHS as shutdown drags on and 100,000 employees remain unpaid

Eric Katz — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:45:14 -0400

The Homeland Security Department will have a new secretary after the Senate confirmed Markwayne Mullin in a 54-45 vote to the role Monday evening, paving the way for a new chapter in the tumultuous period for the agency that has spearheaded President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Mullin, who will soon resign his seat as a Republican senator from Oklahoma, will replace Kristi Noem at DHS, who drew bipartisan condemnation for her handling of Trump’s mass deportation effort and appeared to lose the president’s trust when she recently told Congress he was aware of a controversial ad campaign touting the department’s efforts. Mullin will inherit a department that is currently shut down after its funding lapsed last month, though more than 90% of its employees are still working. More than 100,000 of those are doing so without immediate pay.

Mullin said during his confirmation hearing he would seek to rebuild staffing areas that previously implemented cuts, though he lamented that the shutdown is exacerbating staffing losses. The new secretary, who began serving in the House in 2013 and in the Senate in 2023, highlighted to lawmakers during his confirmation hearing last week several additional areas in which he would differentiate himself from his predecessor.

He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be restructured but not eliminated, as Noem called for last year. He also vowed to end the controversial policy Noem instituted that required secretarial approval for any spending of more than $100,000. Detractors of the policy noted it bogged down critical funding efforts, including during disaster response.

“I'm not a micro manager,” Mullin said. “We put people in, we empower them to make decisions.”

Noem has faced criticism for allegedly interfering with ongoing investigations by the DHS inspector general. Mullin vowed not to stand in the way of the IG’s work and said he would not seek retribution against employees who have publicly criticized the department. He also apologized for calling Alex Pretti a “deranged individual” after DHS personnel fatally shot him in January.

Mullin won approval along largely partisan lines, though Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against his former colleague while Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., voted for him.

While Mullin has vowed to institute some changes at DHS, he did not make any promises to alleviate Democrats' concerns regarding the practices of its law enforcement personnel.

Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding DHS until the White House agrees to reforms at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. They have repeatedly sought to fund the Transportation Security Administration and other non-immigration components of DHS—including on Saturday in a rare weekend session—but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.

Trump has since deployed ICE personnel into airports to help reduce the long lines that have resulted from TSA employees calling out during the shutdown, though their impact is expected to be minimal.

Lawmakers have met with Tom Homan, the White House border czar, in recent days in hopes of reaching an agreement on reforms that Democrats would accept in exchange for funding all of DHS, but they have yet to strike such a deal.

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‘No practical use': TSA experts say Trump’s ICE deployments won’t help with airport security

Eric Katz — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:28:00 -0400

President Trump will beginning Monday shift Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel to airports to provide security there in a move he said will alleviate long lines created by shutdown-induced callouts but which experienced TSA officials said would have minimal impact.

The unusual approach comes as Trump administration officials have repeatedly lamented that Transportation Security Administration employees are calling out and quitting the agency due to the shutdown’s impact on paychecks, lengthening wait times at many airports around the country. Details of the assignments were not clear as of Sunday, despite Trump declaring that the airport deployments would occur on Monday. Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, told CNN on Sunday that he was “working on the plan” and would come up with one soon.

Several current and former TSA officials told Government Executive that ICE personnel will be limited in what they can accomplish at airports, as they will not have the requisite training to check identification, examine luggage x-rays or provide other key security services. TSA employees go through classroom and on-the-job training before they can staff those roles, the officials said.

“It serves no practical use,” said one former official with decades of federal experience who declined to be named out of fear of professional reprisal. “It's a political, publicity action, not a practical solution.”

Homan suggested ICE employees could staff the areas where travelers exit their terminals, though former officials noted many airports already use non-TSA personnel for those areas.

A second former senior TSA official added there are almost no functions ICE staff would be capable of offering.

“They can basically provide little help,” the former senior employee said.

In some airports, such as in Houston, call outs during the shutdown have reached 50%, forcing TSA to close lanes and leaving travelers waiting for hours to get through security. Employees have now missed at least one full paycheck after receiving a partial paycheck last month during the shutdown that began Feb. 14. Staff are guaranteed full back pay for their hours worked once the government reopens.

After seeing consistent staffing growth for the previous five years, TSA lost around 3,000 employees in 2025, or around 5% of its workforce, due to various firings and attrition measures. The agency has seen more than 400 employees leave the agency since the shutdown began, the White House said on Sunday.

Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding the Homeland Security Department until the White House agrees to reforms for law enforcement personnel carrying out President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown. They have repeatedly sought to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS—including on Saturday in a rare weekend session—but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.

“If the Democrats do not allow for just and proper security at our airports, and elsewhere throughout our country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before,” Trump said on Sunday, making the announcement just one day before he said the deployments would begin.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA staff, said those workers spend months learning specific skills that enable them to detect explosives, weapons and individuals looking to evade security. They are recertified on an ongoing basis after receiving extensive instruction and seeking to replace them with ICE personnel would only exacerbate the problem.

“You cannot improvise that,” Kelley said. “Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one.”

Lawmakers have met with Homan in recent days in hopes of reaching an agreement on reforms that Democrats would accept in exchange for funding all of DHS, but they have yet to strike such a deal.

Kelley added that turning to ICE could prove dangerous, given that the allegations of excessive force that they have faced.

“Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe,” Kelley said. “They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.”

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Tribal leaders bash USDA's plan to relocate thousands of staff and shutter offices

Eric Katz — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:56:05 -0400

Tribal governments largely panned the Agriculture Department’s plan to relocate thousands of employees around the country and shutter some regional offices, saying during recent consultations the reforms would degrade long-established relationships and result in staffing shortages that negatively affect services.

Native populations will suffer the consequences if USDA’s efforts to relocate staff out of Washington and into five new “hubs” around the country leads to a brain drain at the department, the tribal officials said. It will also make meeting and communicating with USDA staff more difficult, they added, as they often travel from Indian Country to Washington anyway to meet with other government personnel.

USDA Undersecretary Stephen Vaden held the consultations in October as part of the department’s final steps before it implements its reorganization, which will see 2,600 Washington-based employees relocated to offices in in Raleigh, N.C.; Kansas City, Mo.; Indianapolis; Fort Collins, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Vaden sought to assuage the tribal concerns by extolling the benefits of USDA’s plans, according to a summary of the meetings the department released this week, but declined to accept any of their proposed changes.

“Their concerns included the diminishment or elimination of gains from good working relationships, the loss of institutional knowledge specific to tribal issues and treaty obligations, losing coordination with leadership, and the effect on the management of local treaty resources,” USDA said in a summary of the tribes’ comments.

As part of its reorganization department is looking to slash regional offices across the country, offload several of its buildings including one of its Washington headquarters facilities and trim layers of management. It has yet to announce which employees will be forced to move and where they each will go, though Vaden has said he wants the relocations to occur by the end of the summer. As he has since USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins first announced the reorganization last year, Vaden pitched the plan as necessary to rein in out-of-control staffing growth and place employees closer to the constituencies they serve. Currently, just 10% of USDA staff are located in Washington.

The concerns from tribal leaders echo many of those USDA received during its public comment period, during which just 5% of the more than 14,000 unique responses sent by employees, lawmakers and local governments were positive.

In their conversations with Vaden and USDA officials, tribal leaders voiced their consternation that they were not consulted until after the release of the reorganization plan. They repeatedly said the relocations would likely lead to a loss of staff among those who decline to move, which could “lead to a loss of expertise as well as previously fostered relationships.” Additionally, they said, staffing shortages “coupled with remoteness” could lead to disruptions in service.

USDA shed more than 16,000 employees last year as it offered various incentives for employees to leave government. Tribal leaders requested that key vacancies be filled before USDA moves forward with its plan, and some officials said the plan should be paused altogether until the department can more fully assess its impacts on Native communities.

Vaden agreed that the USDA relationships with tribes must remain strong, though he said more staff does not lead to that outcome. He suggested previous issues those governments had with USDA were a reflection of an overbloated bureaucracy.

“Closer proximity will promote the formation of stronger ties, foster collaboration to ensure more effective and efficient service delivery, and make USDA far more accessible to Indian Country than it currently is,” Vaden said.

The tribal leaders disagreed with the decision to move staff from Washington into the new hubs. They already must travel to the capital frequently, they said, and it is more convenient to have all the government officials with whom they need to meet colocated in one city. They reiterated that the moves will lead to staff attrition, which will in turn degrade their relationships with USDA.

“Mass relocations will destroy irreplaceable knowledge about treaty rights, forest conditions, and working relationships built over decades, and new staff unfamiliar with the land will make mistakes,” one tribal leader said.

Vaden countered that political staff and “key career employees” who work closely with those appointees will remain in Washington. He acknowledged, however, that senior-level staff will move to the hubs as that is where “decisions affecting people closest to them” should be made. Vaden said his hope is for the hubs to be a permanent fixture, not something that is eliminated by the next administration.

Staffing losses could be felt particularly acutely at the U.S. Forest Service, the tribal officials said, as shortfalls could negatively impact wildfire response. The tribal leaders also expressed distress over USDA’s plan to eliminate the Forest Service’s regional offices. Vaden said forest-specific employees would remain and USDA was only eliminating middle-management positions.

Multiple tribes expressed concern that USDA was using cost savings to justify the changes, as they said that should not be a consideration when it comes to the U.S. government’s treaty obligations. They asked for a detailed list of all positions being relocated or eliminated and an assessment on the impact to tribes of each change to programs and staffing levels. They also requested a recruitment timeline for all tribal-serving positions.

USDA has not yet informed employees of the specifics of their plans, but such announcements are expected in the coming weeks or months.

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Interior renews campaign for employees to snitch on ‘DEI discrimination’ in the department

Eric Katz — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:12:06 -0400

The Trump administration is once again looking for employees to sound the alarm on diversity initiatives happening within their agencies, continuing a year-long crackdown on policies and practices it said interfere with the civil service’s merit system.

The Interior Department issued a memorandum to staff on Wednesday reminding employees that they should report any suspected diversity, equity and inclusion activities, providing multiple channels for doing so and informing the workforce that such reporting represented protected whistleblower activity.

Rachel Borra, Interior’s chief human capital officer, highlighted several examples of “DEI-related discrimination,” noting there is “no reverse discrimination exception” to civil rights laws. Any department activities that require “diverse slates” or “racial/sex balancing” are prohibited and should be reported, Borra said, as well as any trainings, leadership programs or projects that prefer or exclude candidates based on protected characteristics.

Any employee resource group based on race, gender, religion or other characteristics is banned, as are any diversity metrics. Trainings themselves must also meet certain parameters.

“DEI trainings or materials that stereotype or demean employees based on race, sex, or other protected traits (creating a hostile work environment)” should be flagged, Borra said in the memo obtained by Government Executive.

Reporting any of those activities, or even opposing them at all, amounted to a protected whistleblower activity that comes with requisite guardrails against retaliation, the Interior official said. She instructed staff to take their complaints to the Office of Special Counsel, the independent agency tasked with implementing whistleblower law, or to report them directly to the Interior Department’s Office of Civil Rights through an email address or phone number she provided.

“The Office of Civil Rights will review, coordinate any required investigation [sic], and ensure compliance with merit-system and anti-discrimination laws,” Borra said. “Internal reports are encouraged and fully protected.”

She reminded employees they can report DEI activities or refuse to participate in them without fear of retaliation and told them to report any pushback they might face.

President Trump signed two executive orders on his first two days in office to root out DEI initiatives at federal agencies, which led to mass layoffs of employees working in those areas. The Office of Personnel Management followed up with specific instructions to eradicate such efforts from agencies and to warn employees against taking any steps to "disguise" the programs. OPM required agencies to report on their efforts and to send employees an email asking them to flag any ongoing DEI initiatives to DEIAtruth@OPM.gov.

Interior employees told Government Executive they had not received any further communication instructing them to report on their colleagues engaging in DEI efforts until Wednesday’s email. The department has, however, gone to significant lengths to crack down on public-facing signage and displays that the administration has deemed out of step with Trump’s orders and its priorities. The National Park Service tasked employees and the public with identifying any language that negatively discussed America’s past or present. NPS has begun removing such language, including displays outside Independence Hall that documented the role that slaves played in maintaining the original executive mansion in Philadelphia that a federal court has since ordered restored. Litigation is currently pending regarding additional displays and signs that NPS has removed.

Employees seemed to not take the latest request seriously.

“We have all agreed it’s just a chest-beating and posturing gimmick,” said one NPS staffer.

Another Interior employee said their colleagues were contemplating “malicious compliance,” meaning they would report “every little thing” so as to overwhelm the department.

“Most people are not willing to create the culture of fear” that Interior and the Trump administration were aiming to instill, the employee said.

In her memo, Borra told employees their complaints would be handled “promptly, fairly and confidentially” and voiced optimism that employees would follow the department’s requests.

“Thank you for your service and for helping maintain a lawful, merit-based federal workplace,” she said.

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Trump's new DHS nominee promises some changes, adequate staffing amid shutdown-induced departures

Eric Katz — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:10:25 -0400

The Homeland Security Department is set to introduce some significant shifts to its operations, President Trump’s nominee to lead the agency said on Wednesday, including by renewing efforts to boost staffing in places it had previously implemented cuts.

Such hiring efforts will be delayed by the current DHS shutdown, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., said at his confirmation hearing to replace Kristi Noem as the department’s secretary. Mullin expressed concern that DHS employees are exiting the department as they seek new jobs that are not subject to withheld pay during funding lapses, but suggested he would backfill those as soon as he is able.

Mullin’s testimony got off to a rocky start as Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., repeatedly chastised Mullin for comments the secretary-designate had made seeming to condone an attack on Paul that left the senator severely injured. Paul questioned the example Mullin was setting for DHS employees, particularly law enforcement personnel who are already facing widespread allegations of excessive force, but Mullin refused to apologize or retract his remarks.

“We just don't get along,” Mullin said. “However, sir, that doesn't keep me at all from doing my job. I can have different opinions with everybody in this room, but as secretary of homeland, I'll be protecting everybody.”

Paul indicated that he would not support Mullin’s nomination, but no other Republican raised an objection to his candidacy. If Paul votes against Mullin, he would need the support of at least one Democrat to advance out of committee. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., expressed an openness to doing so during Wednesday’s hearing.

Mullin highlighted several ways he would depart from the approach Noem has taken in her embattled tenure as DHS leader. He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be restructured but not eliminated, as Noem called for last year. He also vowed to end the controversial policy Noem instituted that required secretarial approval for any spending of more than $100,000. Detractors of the policy noted it bogged down critical funding efforts, including during disaster response.

“I'm not a micro manager,” Mullin said. “We put people in, we empower them to make decisions.”

Noem has faced criticism for allegedly interfering with ongoing investigations by the DHS inspector general. Mullin vowed not to stand in the way of the IG’s work. He also said any retaliation against employees who signed onto a letter disclosing allegations that changes and cuts at FEMA would prevent the agency from carrying out its mission would be illegal whistleblower retaliation. DHS placed many of those employees on leave following the letter’s publication.

Mullin was among the lawmakers who echoed Trump administration officials—including Noem—in disparaging Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs Department nurse, after DHS personnel fatally shot him in January. On Wednesday, Mullin said he “retracted” his comments calling Pretti a “deranged individual.”

“Sometimes I’m going to make a mistake, and I own it,” Mullin said. “That one, I went out there too fast. I was responding immediately without the facts. That's my fault. That won't happen as secretary.”

As the single-agency shutdown at DHS has entered its second month, Mullin sought to sound the alarm on the impacts it is having on the agency he is looking to lead. Democrats are still seeking reforms to Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown—and have pushed for immediate funding for DHS’ non-immigration components as negotiations continue—and Mullin said the fallout of the funding lapse is compounding as employees head for the exits. He declined to spell out any changes he would implement to DHS policies to meet Democratic demands.

“We're losing institutional knowledge,” Mullin said. “We're losing people we've already trained.”

DHS did not respond to an inquiry seeking details on the losses. While he pledged to backfill those roles, Mullin noted it would take four months to get employees onboarded and trained. With the upcoming World Cup and other events on the horizon, Mullin said, the department is running short on time.

“Sometimes when you have to rush like this—especially trying to get people on the job, because we just quit funding them for the third time in less than a year and we expect these people to keep working—it puts the mission at risk,” Mullin said.

Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., asked Mullin if the 2,400 workforce cuts that FEMA has sustained under Trump so far would also impact the agency’s mission. The secretary-designate said only that he would ensure FEMA is properly staffed once DHS recovers from the shutdown.

“I can't answer that,” Mullin said. “When I get there, we’ll be adequately staffed to respond to our nation's disasters. It’ll take some time to get there because, like I said, people are quitting today because they're not getting paid for the third time in a year.”

Paul said he would likely schedule a committee vote for Mullin on Thursday. Mullin said his goal is to empower DHS employees to do their job without placing the department in headlines as often as it has over the last 14 months.

“I want to bring confidence back to the agency,” Mullin said. “I'm not going to be the smartest guy in any room I walk into, but I know how to get talent, and I know how to bring those people together.”

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Inside DOGE’s early days of pressure campaigns, rule breaking and ‘chaos’

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:37:24 -0400

In the span of 77 minutes on a late-March Monday in 2025, an associate of the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency sent Michael McDonald, the acting head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, three emails asking for his cellphone number.

“Mike - Call me when you get the chance. We need a game plan for effectuating [reductions in force], final grant terminations and contract cancellations by tomorrow AM. We will carry these plans out before the end of the week,” wrote that associate, Justin Fox, in the last one.

“We're getting pressure from the top on this and we'd prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you're no longer interested,” the email read.

It had been a few weeks since Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, also an employee inside DOGE, had first met with McDonald. They’d been sent into the agency by Steve Davis, the operational head of DOGE at the time and key ally of billionaire Elon Musk, to make cuts after President Donald Trump fired the former head of the agency.

In the coming days, NEH, which primarily funds research and preservation projects at universities and museums, would issue termination letters for about 1,400 grants and send layoff notices to 116 of its employees—two-thirds of its workforce.

A coalition of humanities organizations has since sued NEH over the grant cuts. Clips from depositions done in the course of the lawsuit have gone viral for what many see as Cavanaugh and Fox’s disdain for NEH work, and for their inability or unwillingness to define diversity, equity and inclusion, given that DOGE cancelled many grants under the banner of ridding the government of DEI.

At one point, Fox said that a grant for a documentary about the Colfax Massacre, believed to be the deadliest incident of racial violence during Reconstruction, represented DEI because it “focused on a singular race,” meaning that “it’s not for the benefit of humankind.” He later said that wasn’t what he meant after being read back his testimony, noting that it’s “very subjective.”

McDonald, a long-tenured career employee who Trump tapped to lead NEH on a temporary basis, made clear in his own deposition that his “political views align with those of the administration.”

He sought to work hand in glove with DOGE, but even he expressed reservations about its sweeping approach and disregard for agency rules. In the more than 20 years he had worked at NEH, the agency had canceled fewer than six grants, he said.

A Manhattan judge ordered that the videos be taken down on Friday after the government said that Fox had been harassed and gotten death threats because of them.

Government Executive had already reviewed all of them, more than 23 hours in total. They offer rare insight into how DOGE operated last year as it fanned out across government agencies, including details on its disjointed reporting structure, its chaotic decision making process and its zealous pressure campaign against career civil servants and Trump administration appointees alike.

Previous reporting from Government Executive and other media outlets demonstrated these tactics employed at NEH were similar to those DOGE deployed throughout government, though the depositions provide an unprecedented look at an entity that had gone to great lengths to conceal its operations.

‘A rather stressful period’

At NEH, Fox’s emails were a “time-pressure tactic,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition, admitting that he and Fox weren’t themselves getting any pressure from “the top.”

“Mike’s perception of where DOGE sat within the federal government was we had a direct line of communication with the White House,” he said of the acting chair. “We would tell Mike that we were getting pressure from basically the White House to effectuate these contract and grant terminations that were aligned with the [executive order], so it was a time-pressure tactic.”

The DOGE team went so far as to tell NEH leadership to disregard its internal rules and not question the legality of its actions.

“What I told them was that these are the procedures in place that we normally follow,” McDonald said of his conversations with DOGE at the time. “They said that there was no need to follow the procedures, and if there was litigation, which has since occurred, this would be addressed in the litigation.”

The acting chair made clear that the tactics DOGE deployed were effective.

"It was a rather stressful period and we were all under a lot of pressure,” McDonald said, adding Fox had insisted on an arbitrary deadline in March to issue the grant terminations. “So yeah, there was frustration over the overall process, the time constraints that were put upon us, or me in particular.”

Fox and Cavanaugh were at NEH as part of their work on the “small agencies team” at DOGE, of which Cavanaugh was the “informal” lead. Cavanaugh led the first meeting with McDonald, and Fox subsequently took the lead role in reviewing the agency’s books for cuts.

The goal was to identify wasteful spending within the “useless” small agencies in the federal government or effectively eliminate them altogether, said Cavanaugh. In doing so, he and Fox were “comfortable applying pressure to the extent we needed to,” he said.

“We wanted to try and get the agency heads to act quickly on their proposed plans,” he said. “I’ve done the same thing at other agencies.”

Cavanaugh, Fox and the others on their team worked out of the General Services Administration with other DOGE employees.

The team’s structure was loose—Cavanaugh said in the deposition that he reported to Davis, who he says wasn’t intimately involved in his day-to-day work. Fox, meanwhile, viewed GSA’s then-acting administrator Stephen Ehikian as his boss.

“DOGE felt more like a club of folks with a different mission than traditional folks that were career employees,” said Fox, who was being paid a $150,000 salary at GSA.

Other DOGE employees were based at different executive offices, although they often detailed out to additional agencies from those home offices, making it difficult to know who was from where, said Cavanaugh.

At the top of DOGE, Cavanaugh said he viewed Davis as the leader, despite the Trump administration repeatedly labeling Amy Gleason as the acting administrator of the cost-cutting enterprise. Cavanaugh noted during his deposition that he didn’t know how Gleason’s role related to Davis’ job, or even what her role was. She never led any of the weekly or biweekly DOGE meetings while he was in government.

The depositions also offer a glimpse into the ad hoc nature of the DOGE recruiting process.

A 2020 graduate of the University of Virginia who worked in private equity, Fox got involved in DOGE through a friend whose father, Anthony Armstrong, was a “mentor.” Currently the chief financial officer at Musk’s xAI, Armstrong himself worked at the Office of Personnel Management as part of DOGE.

Asked if he formally interviewed for his government job, Fox initially said that he “didn’t remember,” before saying that he talked to several then-leaders at GSA over the secure messaging app Signal before joining.

Cavanaugh joined DOGE after starting a series of tech companies. Before that, he attended Indiana University for one year. Venture capital fund manager Baris Akis, who he called an “informal” recruiter for DOGE, introduced him to Davis. Cavanaugh had no government or political experience and hadn’t taken any government-focused classes.

He joined DOGE after three conversations with Baris and Davis, went through a day or two of standard onboarding for GSA and got to work. He didn’t receive any specific training, he said. NEH officials testified that the DOGE duo possessed no expertise in NEH’s typical work.

Flouting rules

In January, government employees began combing through open grants at NEH to rate how they fared in terms of DEI, “gender ideology,” and environmental justice—all concepts Trump had tasked agencies with rooting out in a day-one executive order.

Fox conducted additional reviews once he and Cavanaugh landed at the agency, especially concentrating on the grants that NEH staff had marked as “NA” for DEI and, after that, all the grants awarded during the Biden administration.

He used ChatGPT to screen grant descriptions for DEI involvement, asking for responses under 120 characters.

This tactic was apparently not known to the head of the small agencies DOGE team at the time, as Cavanaugh said during his deposition that Fox didn’t use AI to come up with the DEI decisions, adding that it was “well understood” that “how we reviewed grants at DOGE for DEI is by reading them.”

The pair also cancelled grants under the mandate to rid the government of “waste” and reduce the deficit, said Cavanaugh.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Government Executive that “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government” when asked to comment.

“In just a year, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” he said.

One of Cavanaugh’s first assignments at DOGE was to re-interview engineering, product management and design employees at GSA. Those conducting the meetings sometimes refused to identify themselves, Government Executive previously reported. DOGE also re-interviewed existing employees elsewhere.

“I believe my inputs on the interviews with employees were then provided to the head of GSA when eventual RIF plans were conducted at GSA,” said Cavanaugh during his deposition.

DOGE’s approach to assessing career employees appeared to flout federal statute and procedure. At NEH, Cavanaugh said that DOGE team members gained system administrator access that allowed them to view details about how employees were using their emails. It also enabled them to make changes without input from the agency’s head of technology.

Such email access was used “mostly in the context of conducting RIF plans,” he said, adding that he and his colleagues were monitoring employees’ email usage and levels of engagement.

Under federal law, agencies can use four factors for determining who gets laid off: the tenure of the employee — e.g. whether the individual is a permanent staffer or a temporary one — their veteran status, their length of service and their performance rating. The latter evaluation is determined through a set process involving the employee's supervisor. RIF statute does not provide for a process that would require employees to interview to justify their jobs, nor does it allow for the monitoring of employee account activity.

NEH ultimately laid off two-thirds of its staff, while GSA sent RIF notices to large portions of its human resources, IT and public buildings teams.

DOGE pushed for high-level access to systems at other agencies, too, another move outside of typical government procedure.

The approach was “part of our operating procedure” for DOGE, “discussed openly during all-hands meetings,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition. It “allowed us to operate as if we were an administrator within the agency for provisioning email accounts, access to critical systems, etc.”

This push for administrative access circumvents many of the cybersecurity policies followed by government agencies, where employees typically only have access to the systems they need to perform their work.

Having more employees with direct access to normally walled-off systems can increase the risk of data breaches, widen the attack surface for hackers and create insider threat risks. Whistleblowers have accused DOGE employees of exfiltrating sensitive data using secretive methods, planning to take sensitive government data with them to private employers and more at other government agencies.

DOGE makes its move

At NEH, more than 1,000 grantees received emails on April 2 from a Microsoft email account—not an NEH email—set up by DOGE, cancelling their grants. It was a “day of chaos,” one person familiar with DOGE’s time at NEH told Government Executive, as staff didn’t know what grants were being cancelled, or even that they were being cancelled that day at all.

NEH employees found out about grant cancellations when they began receiving emails from confused grantees wanting to know if the email was legitimate, they said. Some thought it was a phishing email. Employees themselves could not initially confirm the authenticity of the cancellations, as the notices had been sent by DOGE outside of official channels.

The next day, the agency put most of its staff on administrative leave. As with grantees, they also received this news from an external email address, “NEH_HR@nehemail.onmicrosoft.com.” A week after that, staff began receiving reduction-in-force notices.

NEH staffing has gone from 215 employees in 2024 to 57 as of January—about 75%—according to government data, and it has reorganized from seven divisions down to four.

The largest staffing cuts were to the program officers at NEH, humanities experts with advanced degrees hired to run peer review panels, read application drafts for potential grantees and more, according to the person familiar.

Adam Wolfson, a top NEH official who previously served as its acting director, said in his own deposition that DOGE called the shots on the layoffs.

“I believe they were the ones who said ‘you need to reduce by a certain amount,’” Wolfson said.

Since last spring, NEH has awarded handpicked projects that promote traditionalism and Western civilization, the New York Times has reported. Typically, the agency awards grants through a competitive process, though it now maintains a fraction of its previous capacity to do so.

‘Make decisions and act quickly’

In his testimony, McDonald said he made the final call on which grants to cancel, though he conceded he was following DOGE’s lead.

McDonald said Cavanaugh and Fox “instructed” him to cancel certain grants on a specific timeframe, and he did not feel like he could “disobey.”

“Either way, as you've made clear, it's your decision on whether to discontinue funding on any of the projects on this list,” McDonald said in an email about grants cancellations to the pair at the time.

Cavanaugh said that “the general pacing of DOGE was to try and make decisions and act quickly to avoid government employees dragging their feet on cancellations.”

McDonald noted that Fox directed him to identify a “core” team of employees who would not stand in DOGE’s way as it was executing its plans. The DOGE officials entered NEH with significant skepticism toward the career workforce, McDonald said, despite there being “no factual basis for [them] to believe that.”

That is why DOGE employees insisted on sending out the grant cancellation notices themselves, despite NEH maintaining its own process for doing so.

“The DOGE team was concerned about the degree of cooperation that they would get from the NEH staff,” McDonald said. “Therefore, they preferred to do it, to use their own process for doing it, to avoid the possibility that staff that was opposed to what we were doing would seek in some way to impede it.”

Wolfson agreed with McDonald that there was no cause for DOGE's paranoia.

“I'm a civil servant,” Wolfson said in his own deposition. “I try to be neutral and to assist the leadership of the agency in accomplishing what they want to accomplish.”

Asked whether he could have pushed back on DOGE’s aggressive tactics, McDonald—who is now under consideration to be the permanent nominee to lead NEH—demurred, noting the question was no longer relevant.

“We're going down a hypothetical road about what would have ensued if I had done that,” he said, “which we'll never know.”

Although troves of relevant emails have been made public as part of the lawsuit, some of the records of DOGE’s work at the agency won’t ever be available. Cavanaugh and Fox both said that they used the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal and its autodelete feature extensively to communicate during their time in DOGE.

Fox said that Armstrong told him to download the app when he first approached him about DOGE.

“I remember him being very focused on switching to Signal to talk about anything,” said Fox.

DOGE adopted a records retention policy in late March telling staffers to preserve messages on Signal and on personal devices in compliance with the Presidential Records Act—and to turn off the app’s auto-delete feature—in the wake of the Signal scandal at the Pentagon.

But Cavanaugh appears to have continued using Signal, and he switched between his personal and government devices interchangeably for official agency work. He said that he sent Davis a spreadsheet of cancelled grants and contracts weekly via Signal, at Davis’ request.

Asked who else he communicated with at DOGE via Signal, Cavanaugh said, “it’d be a pretty long list.”

He and Fox left DOGE in August and September, respectively, and have been working at a company they co-founded.

Both testified during their depositions that they joined DOGE because they were eager to decrease the federal deficit, although Fox admitted it wasn’t an interest of his until Armstrong reached out to him.

“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” a lawyer asked Cavanaugh.

“No, we didn’t,” he replied.

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EPA says it will slash workload after IG flags slashed workforce as overburdened

Eric Katz — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:50:22 -0400

Updated at 1:56 p.m. EST on March 14

The Environmental Protection Agency has shed too many employees to manage its large portfolio of grants, its inspector general found in a new report released on Thursday, and it has not taken steps to plan for the new workload it took on under President Biden.

The Trump administration pushed back on the finding, saying instead that it was slashing grants and the workload would therefore decrease commensurate with staffing cuts. The inspector general did not accept that rationale, noting employees are handling more grants than the agency itself has recommended.

About half of EPA’s budget each year goes to states, localities and other entities in the form of grants. EPA saw a sudden surge in funding for grants under the Biden administration, after he signed into law a major infrastructure bill in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The extra funding led to a 56% increase in EPA’s grants between 2018 and 2025. The value of those grants skyrocketed by 338% over that period.

EPA employs both grant specialists and project officers to oversee that work, who respectively manage the administrative and technical aspects of the agreements. The agency lost 113 grant specialists and project officers since May 2025, the IG found.

While EPA has conducted “high-level” workforce planning over those years, the auditors said it did not do so specifically for its grants workforce in general or in light of its newfound funding streams. That is despite the Office of Management and Budget directing agencies to engage in workforce planning in support of carrying out the two supplemental funding bills.

EPA has found that its grants specialists should oversee no more than 60 grants each. In 2022, however, those employees in its Region 10 office were overseeing 173 grants each on average. By spring of 2025, that had decreased 102 grants per specialist, though in September—after EPA had gone through various efforts to decrease the size of its overall workforce—it had once again spiked to 180 grants for each employee.

The agency seeks to limit its project officers to overseeing between three and 19 grants. At EPA’s Region nine, after workforce cuts took effect, those employees were overseeing 90 grants each.

“Until the EPA improves its grants workforce planning, the agency may not be able to adapt to workload needs related to supplemental appropriations, to award or administer grants in a timely manner, and to mitigate the risks of improperly managed grants,” the IG said.

EPA pushed back on the assertion that it needs to address its workforce planning or that there are any shortfalls in its staffing. Instead, said Michael Molina, the principal deputy assistant administrator in EPA's Office of Mission Support, the agency is planning to reduce its grant spending so significantly that its employee headcount will no longer be an issue.

“Grant funding for EPA is anticipated to contract dramatically,” Molina said, adding the agency would therefore not focus on its shrinking workforce and instead find ways to improve post-award monitoring. She said EPA would reassess its needs in six-to-nine months after the impacts of the various efforts to shed employees is more fully known.

Congress has already rescinded EPA’s IRA funding as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and is fighting in court to claw back additional grants it previously issued. The IG noted EPA’s workload from the 2021 infrastructure bill remains a significant burden, however, and due to staffing losses, the agency should develop a grants workforce planning document. It also highlighted that Congress largely ignored President Trump’s budget request to slash EPA funding, instead cutting it by just 4% in its fiscal 2026 appropriation and largely leaving annual grant funding intact.

The IG said a comprehensive plan for EPA’s grants workforce would “reduce the risks of improperly managed grants.” The auditor also recommended EPA update its benchmarks for how many grants each employee should oversee and better assess its overall grants workload.

Molina reiterated that EPA would not “focus efforts on a shrinking grants workload and workforce.”

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the principal deputy assistant administrator in EPA's Office of Mission Support as Monica Molina. His name is Michael Molina.

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White House, Democrats trade blame for missed paychecks and airport delays

Eric Katz — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:19:33 -0400

As some airports around the country are starting to see increased wait times due to federal screeners calling out, congressional Democrats and the White House remain far divided in reaching a solution to the current single-agency shutdown and are instead pointing the finger at each other for its consequences.

The Homeland Security Department has been shut down for nearly a month and the impacts are starting to be felt on a wider basis. Several airports, including Houston and New Orleans, reported hours-long wait times over the weekend and on Monday, as Transportation Security Administration officers recently received partial paychecks—further reduced because full deductions were still withheld—and are slated to miss their entire next paychecks. The call outs leading to increased wait times are likely to jump once the zeroed-out checks hit accounts in the coming days.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., accused Democrats of refusing to negotiate over a path forward. Democratic leaders are seeking reforms to President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown and while the two sides have traded proposals and Trump recently announced he would fire DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the two sides have not gotten closer to an agreement. Thune said on Tuesday he would once again bring up a funding vehicle for DHS for a Senate vote this week, though absent a breakthrough it will not get the 60 votes required for passage.

“This is kind of a new low, really. There are certain things the American people, I think, expect of their elected officials,” Thune said. “One of which is to continue the basic functioning of the government.”

Trump said on Monday he would not sign any bills into law until Congress passed a measure creating new hurdles for Americans to vote in federal elections, though the White House later clarified he would make an exception for any DHS funding legislation.

Democrats last week sought to pass a bill that would have paid TSA, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Coast Guard and other non-immigration staff on time while negotiations continued over reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, but Republicans blocked the measure from proceeding. Most ICE and CBP employees are receiving their normal pay due to previously allocated funding.

“President Trump wants the Department of Homeland Security, he wants TSA, he wants FEMA, he wants the brave men and women of our United States Coast Guard to receive their paychecks and he wants this department to be fully funded and fully reopened,” White House Press Secretary Karolien Leavitt said on Tuesday.

She lamented that more than 100,000 DHS employees are facing delayed paychecks, including a small percentage of staff who are home on furlough. Leavitt encouraged any American frustrated with wait times at airports to call Democratic lawmaker offices and encourage them to support DHS funding.

Acting TSA Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill told Congress last month that her agency saw a 25% increase in attrition during the record-setting shutdown last fall compared to the same six-week period the year before the lapse. TSA can ill-afford a similar employee drain now, she added, as the agency is preparing for increased traffic during spring break and the upcoming World Cup.

“It’s affecting recruiting as we speak,” she said of the lingering uncertainty.

Democratic appropriators said Republicans are intentionally holding up funding for some DHS components to gain leverage.

“I encourage them to stop their partisan games, and pass my bill to fund TSA, along with FEMA, the Coast Guard, Secret Service, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the law-abiding components of Homeland Security while negotiations continue on ICE and CBP,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Sen. Patty Murray, DeLauro’s counterpart in the Senate, said she has pushed for “basic accountability measures” for ICE and CBP for months. Democrats had agreed to a bipartisan DHS funding bill that included some reforms for those agencies, but the lawmakers announced new demands after DHS law enforcement personnel fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minnesota in January.

“We are talking about standards local police already follow across the country,” Murray said. “But Republicans have decided they would rather shut down DHS than work with us to rein in these rogue agencies.”

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Hegseth ramps up pressure on Defense civilians to deploy for immigration enforcement

Eric Katz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:01:00 -0400

The Defense Department is reupping its request for civilian employees to deploy to the southwest border to assist with immigration enforcement operations, with supervisors now facing a stronger push to solicit their staff to sign up for the details.

The Pentagon first requested its civilian workers consider voluntarily accepting assignments to the Homeland Security Department last year to assist in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doubled down on that request in a message delivered to employees on Monday, adding new urgency to the appeal.

“I expect every supervisor to encourage their civilian employees to volunteer,” Hegseth said. “Leadership must continue to promote this detail program and educate their civilian employees on its importance.”

Detailed Defense employees are supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection for up to 180 days, according to existing postings on the federal jobs board website. Duties include data entry, developing operational plans for raids and patrols, providing logistics support for moving officers and agents and their equipment and managing the flow of detained migrants. The Defense employees do not carry out law enforcement responsibilities.

DHS is currently shut down after its funding lapsed last month, though its law enforcement functions and employees remain largely unaffected. Neither it nor the Pentagon immediately responded to inquiries on the new directive.

One Army civilian said several supervisors sent Hegseth’s memorandum on Monday, without providing any additional context. A command-wide email did offer some additional information.

“DHS has a vital mission to safeguard and secure the homeland,” an Army official wrote in the email. “With the potential for increased numbers of migrants in the interior of the United States territory and across the southwest border, DHS needs volunteers to assist in its commitment to ensuring a safe and orderly immigration system.”

It was not immediately clear why the number of migrants entering the country could potentially increase—the Trump administration has consistently boasted that it has slashed the number of individuals illegally entering the country to record-low levels—though military operations in Venezuela could create disruptions there and President Trump has recently ramped up his threats to oust the current government of Cuba. Migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border from those countries spiked in recent years, prior to Trump’s crackdown.

Hegseth encouraged “all who are interested” to volunteer for the detail, calling the work “vital to the national security of the United States.” All supervisors will approve the volunteer requests unless a deployment would conflict with mission-essential functions. Any disapproval must be signed off by a flag officer or Senior Executive Service employee, the secretary said.

The same Army civilian said there has not been any discussion of the detail opportunities since Hegseth first announced them last summer and the employee did not know of anyone who accepted such a role.

“We all think it’s absurd,” the civilian said. The timing of the new push seemed to be a “bad look,” the person added, given the war the U.S. is currently waging against Iran.

The memo is dated Feb. 19, more than a week before the U.S. and Israel began the war in Iran, though it was delivered to employees on Monday.

The detailing out of staff could create additional hardships for the department, which recently shed more than 60,000 employees, or 8% of its civilian workforce. In a January memo, Army Undersecretary David Fitzgerald said the service is still looking for ways to shed employees and is maintaining significant hiring restrictions so as to not “sacrifice this generational opportunity to fix ourselves and remove the bottlenecks that plague our daily operations.”

The Army has not yet “received meaningful optimization,” Fitzgerald said, despite many commands having realized “significant personnel reductions through [the deferred resignation program] and otherwise.”

Meghann Myers contributed to this report.

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Travel industry rallies support for TSA staff working without pay amid concern of delays during shutdown

Eric Katz — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:56:00 -0500

The travel industry is imploring lawmakers to ensure on-time pay for Transportation Security Administration employees, launching a campaign on Thursday to pressure Congress into passing legislation to that effect while the partial government shutdown remains in effect.

As TSA employees have already received a partial paycheck and are preparing to miss their next one entirely, private sector operators who depend on smoothly running airports are speaking out in favor of the agency’s workforce. The Homeland Security Department shutdown is finishing its third week as congressional Democrats and the White House remain divided on the agency’s funding and how to reform its immigration enforcement crackdown.

Travel industry officials created the “Pay Federal Aviation Workers” campaign to rally support to end the shutdown and, absent that, pass various pieces of legislation that would ensure air traffic controllers and TSA staff receive on-time paychecks during funding lapses. The Federal Aviation Administration, like all agencies outside DHS, is fully funded for fiscal 2026 and air traffic controllers are therefore not impacted by the current impasse.

They also called for Customs and Border Protection officers to receive on-time pay, though most CBP employees are being paid on a normal schedule thanks to funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Geoff Freeman, president of the U.S. Travel Association, said the “stakes are too high” to continue making TSA employees sacrifice.

“TSA officers screen nearly a billion passengers a year,” Freeman said. “With an average salary of around $35,000, these are workers who simply cannot afford to miss a paycheck. Right now, Congress is allowing them to do that work without one.”

Missed pay for TSA workers often serves as a flash point in shutdowns, as it typically causes a spike in unscheduled absences that in turn leads to longer security lines. Those delays tend to increase pressure on lawmakers to find a resolution to their standoffs.

“It’s affecting recruiting as we speak,” she said of the lingering uncertainty.

Chris Sununu, a former Republican governor from New Hampshire and current president of Airlines for America, said his clients have met demand by adding capacity, but the government is failing to hold up its end of the bargain.

“Congress must get to the table and act with urgency to get a deal done that ensures frontline agencies can fully operate and employees can get the paychecks they earn for the important work they do to keep our skies secure,” Sununu said.

The groups estimated that TSA would screen an average of 2.8 million passengers per day in March and April, an all-time high. The 2025 shutdown caused 9,000 flights to be delayed or canceled, they said, which took a $6 billion toll on the travel industry.

DHS employees have told Government Executive they are still paying off loans they took out during the last shutdown and are rotating taking unpaid days off to save on commuting costs.

“For the third time in five months, TSA screeners are being asked to perform their jobs without pay because Washington can’t find a way to do its job,” said Todd Hauptli, president of the American Association of Airport Executives. “That’s wrong, and dedicated screeners shouldn’t have to pay the price for continued Washington dysfunction.”

The House on Thursday once again advanced a spending bill for DHS, though it was approved largely along party lines and did not contain the new checks on DHS law enforcement personnel that Democrats are seeking. The measure is not expected to pass the Senate in its current form. Democratic leadership and the White House have traded legislative reform proposals back and forth—and President Trump announced on Thursday he would fire DHS Secretary Kristi Noem—but the two sides have yet to reach an agreement that would reopen the department.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., made clear on Thursday that Noem's removal would not lead to a change in Democrats' strategy in holding up DHS funding.

"This is a problem of policy, not personnel," Schumer said. "The rot is deep. No one person can straighten this up until the president changes the whole agency, stops the violence and reins in [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]."

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Noem fired from DHS amid agency shutdown, Trump taps Mullin as successor

Eric Katz — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:48:00 -0500

Updated March 5 at 3:21 p.m.

Kristi Noem will step down as Homeland Security Department secretary at the end of the month, President Trump announced on Thursday, marking a new chapter in a tumultuous period for the agency that has overseen the administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Trump will nominate Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., to replace her, he said. He suggested the change would take effect March 31, though the DHS secretary requires Senate confirmation and the timing for such a vote is not yet clear. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. Noem will be the first cabinet secretary to leave their position in Trump's second term.

DHS is currently shut down after its funding lapsed last month, though more than 90% of its employees are still working. Many of those are doing so without immediate pay.

Noem’s firing came after she testified in Congress on back-to-back days this week, where she faced pointed questions from members of both parties on the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by DHS employees, the aggressive tactics used in immigration enforcement and the spending on a contract for advertising in which the secretary was featured prominently. Noem said Trump personally signed off on that spending, which Trump on Thursday denied to Reuters.

Noem also presided over a rapid hiring surge at the department, focused primarily on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. ICE more than doubled its workforce in 2025, when it brought on more than 10,000 employees. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed into law last year provided $165 billion for DHS, including $16 billion for staffing.

Mullin began serving in the House in 2013 and in the Senate in 2023. Trump called him a “MAGA warrior” and said the senator “knows the wisdom and courage required to advance our America first agenda.”

“Markwayne will work tirelessly to keep our border secure, stop migrant crime, murders and other criminals for illegally entering our country, end the scourge of illegal drugs and make America safe again,” Trump said. “Markwayne will make a spectacular secretary of Homeland Security.”

Mullin told reporters his selection was "a little bit of a surprise," but that he was "excited about this opportunity."

"There's a lot of work we need to do and I'm excited about it," Mullin said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Noem's removal would not lead to a change in Democrats' strategy in holding up DHS funding.

"This is a problem of policy, not personnel," Schumer said. "The rot is deep. No one person can straigthen this up until the president changes the whole agency, stops the violence and reins in ICE."

Trump said Noem will become special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, an upcoming conference on western hemisphere security. The secretary said on Thursday she looked forward to her new role and celebrated her accomplishments at DHS, including overseeing mass deportations, providing disaster relief and cutting costs at the department.

"We have made historic accomplishments at the Department of Homeland Security to make America safe again," Noem said.

This story has been updated with additional detail.

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Continuing to shed federal workers remains ‘priority number one,’ White House official says

Eric Katz — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:44:07 -0500

The Trump administration will continue working to shrink the size of the federal workforce after already shedding more than 300,000 employees, a White House official said on Thursday, who suggested a leaner civil service will be more effective as a result of its reduced stability.

Continuing to reduce the size of the federal government and its workforce remains “priority number one,” Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said at a government efficiency conference in Washington, adding it would contribute to the goal of tackling waste, fraud and abuse. He pledged that individual agencies would ensure consistent and transparent communication on their plans, so employees would at least have a clear roadmap of what is to come even if they disagree with the destination.

“At the end of the day, if they walk away, even if they disagree with that goal, even if they disagree with that reorganization, even if they disagree with the potentiality that there may no longer be an opportunity for them to serve inside the federal government,” Ueland said, “that we have been very clear and we have communicated responsibly and expansively with them, so that they at least appreciate and understand where it is that we're going and what it is we're trying to do.”

Scott Kupor, the Office of Personnel Management Director who also spoke at the panel, said his agency is not giving agencies any specific targets for workforce reduction.

“Certainly the goal that we have given to agencies is not ‘you must hit X percent headcount reduction over this period of time,’” Kupor said.

He added the needs of government will continue to grow, but agencies must find ways to add to their portfolios without adding staff.

“We also have been very clear to people that, look, it can't be the case that every time we do something, the answer is we've got to come back to Congress and ask for additional appropriations,” Kupor said. “We ought to be able to do more with at least the resources we have.”

He later added: “We've got to get out of this idea that we just add people and that's the magic solution to every problem.”

He and other administration officials at the event extolled the possibilities of using artificial intelligence to reduce headcount without impacting government services. Ueland also noted the administration is hard at work on slashing the number of procurement, human resources and other systems to simplify agency operations.

Ueland acknowledged the disruption federal workers will continue to face going forward through ongoing agency reorganizations and initiatives such as Schedule Policy/Career, which will convert tens of thousands of civil servants into at-will employees who serve at an administration’s whims.

“The liberty to step forward on your own behalf, to assess the responsibilities placed upon you, to figure out and work in partnership under the direction of your leadership, to effectuate goals and bring about change can be significantly enhanced in an at-will organization,” Ueland said.

He implored federal workers to take advantage of the situation in which they now find themselves.

“It’s a real empowerment,” the OMB official said. “Think about what you can really do when you are liberated from some of the stultifying rules and difficult processes that previously have held you back.”

Kupor suggested there are areas of need within government to add staff, particularly those just starting their careers. Prior to Kupor’s confirmation, OPM attempted to push out tens of thousands of early-career employees by ordering federal agencies to fire staff still in their probationary periods. After various court injunctions, agencies ultimately shed around 7,000 of them.

“We're doing a horrible job of bringing new people into the system,” Kupor said. “So along with that comes new skills. And so one of the things we're doing is we've got to have programs that help us get better at early career recruitment.”

The OPM director added that while he “can't guarantee people permanent employment,” he would attempt to sell the government as an attractive employer going forward.

“I want people to come here because they feel like they can actually do something different, and the government can help them build their career,” Kupor said. “That's the story that we got to go talk to people about and we got to deliver on that.”

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