Government Executive - Workforce

A year after sounding the alarm, NIH dissenters say political influence is entrenched at research agency

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:46:22 -0400

Last year, a group of National Institutes of Health employees compiled their objections to the workforce and research funding policy changes that the Trump administration was making at the agency into the “Bethesda Declaration,” which mirrored other civil servant-led documents that were released around the same time at the EPA and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

On Tuesday, 74 current and former NIH staffers, 39 of whom are named, published a one-year update to the “Bethesda Declaration,” arguing that the administration’s overhauls have led to increased political influence at the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

“The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026,” they wrote.

NIH has shed more than 4,400 staffers, or about one-fifth of its workforce, since the start of 2025, according to federal employee data. The declaration signers also said that directorships at 14 of NIH’s 27 institutes are unfilled.

They expressed concerns that Schedule Policy/Career, a recently implemented directive to make it easier to fire 10,000 career federal employees in “policy-related” positions, would further hurt staffing. Specifically, the signers contended that frontline NIH workers involved in “regular scientific administrative work,” rather than policymaking, are set to be converted to the new job classification.

The NIH employees also criticized certain appointments at the agency, including Kristine Blanche — an integrative medicine practitioner and the wife of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — at an NIH advisory council and Kyle Walsh — a neuroepidemiologist and friend of Vice President JD Vance — as head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

“Positions of authority and accountability at NIH are increasingly filled by people who lack the technical knowledge or integrity to make sound decisions about the future of health research in the United States,” they wrote.

Additionally, the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit recently reported that the Trump administration has installed six political appointees at NIH as of March 2026. The historical average number of such officials at the agency between 2009 and 2024 is 0.7.

While NIH has reinstated thousands of research grants that it terminated in 2025, often because of a court order, the letter signers emphasized that more than 1,000 grants have not been restored, according to a tracker website. They further argued that the sudden nature of the cancelations hurt not just the researchers but also, in many cases, the study participants.

“Terminated studies, including clinical trials, were initially allowed no time or funding to ethically close out, safely disenroll participants or follow through on commitments to participants,” they wrote. “After months of harm, NIH finally changed policy to allow terminated studies to request costs to support an orderly study closeout. However, the damage caused by abrupt trial discontinuation and disruption was entirely foreseen by NIH staff and should never have occurred.”

The NIH employees also slammed a change to the agency’s grant review process requiring a certification that funded research does not include certain words associated with diversity, which has held up some grant disbursements and forced scientists to rewrite proposals.

“NIH leadership has justified these acts by establishing the ill-defined concept of ‘Gold Standard Science’ and then claiming that any research project that doesn’t align with the administration’s political priorities does not meet the standard,” the letter signers wrote.

Other issues flagged in the new “Bethesda Declaration” include:

A proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget that would overhaul the federal grantmaking process, including by requiring political appointees to approve awards to ensure they advance the president’s priorities.
A 24% reduction in the number of NIH grants issued in fiscal 2025 compared with the average of the previous 10 years.
A policy that all purchasing orders more than $15,000 must go through a “lengthy, centralized process that takes so long it effectively functions as an arbitrary limit on essential laboratory tools and resources.”

A spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department said in a statement to Government Executive that agency Director Jay Bhattacharya has made “scientific integrity, open inquiry and academic freedom central priorities at NIH during the Trump administration” and met last year with the “Bethesda Declaration” organizers.

“Director Bhattacharya is committed to transparency, open inquiry and constructive debate and remains open to continuing direct conversations with the authors of the Bethesda Declaration to discuss their concerns firsthand,” the spokesperson said. “While disagreement is a healthy part of science, he believes the most productive path forward is through direct engagement and dialogue.”

The letter signers also noted that trust in NIH has decreased; a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that 62% of respondents in February said they have confidence in the agency compared with 75% who reported the same two years ago.

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NDA proposal for feds draws scrutiny on Capitol Hill

Erich Wagner — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:45:09 -0400

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., on Tuesday said the Trump administration’s recently unveiled plan to make federal employees sign a non-disclosure agreement “threatens” the federal workforce’s constitutional rights and creates a chilling effect on would-be whistleblowers and demanded information into how it was developed.

Last month, the Office of Personnel Management formally proposed requiring all federal employees to sign NDAs barring them from divulging “confidential” information in most cases, prompting swift outcry from civil service groups and employment lawyers. A draft copy of the document bars signatories from disclosing information related to internal agency operations, personnel and procurement matters and “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material.”

In a letter to OPM Director Scott Kupor, the Illinois Democrat criticized the proposal as “over-broad” and likely to make it more difficult for whistleblowers to divulge allegations of waste, fraud and abuse.

“Although OPM has stated the proposal does not supersede existing whistleblower protections, rights guaranteed on paper can be rendered ineffective if employees reasonably fear discipline, civil liability or criminal penalties for exercising them,” Krishnamoorthi wrote. “As drafted, the NDA will leave federal employees questioning whether communications with Congress, inspectors general, law enforcement or other authorized oversight bodies could jeopardize or seriously damage their careers . . . Federal employees should not be forced to guess which communications are permissible and which could expose them to punishment.”

Krishnamoorthi particularly questioned OPM’s citation of “confidential” information, which he said is never “clearly defined” in the document.

“OPM itself recognizes that federal employees have the right to disclose evidence of violations of law, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority and threats to public health or safety to Congress, inspectors general, and other authorized recipients,” he wrote. “Yet the proposed NDA threatens disciplinary, civil and potentially criminal consequences for violations involving an undefined category of ‘confidential’ information. When employees cannot confidently distinguish between protected disclosures and prohibited conduct, many will understandably choose silence rather than risk punishment.”

The Democrat demanded information on OPM’s legal analysis of whether the proposed NDA comports with the First Amendment and the Whistleblower Protection Act, a definition of “confidential” for the purposes of the document, as well as any potential consequences federal employees who refuse to sign the agreement would face, and whether it would apply equally to both career employees and political appointees.

“In its draft notice, OPM also cited unauthorized disclosures to the press—including reporting on OPM’s own controversial personnel proposals—as the primary justification for this rule, arguing that leaks ‘risk chilling candid interagency feedback, disrupting orderly decision-making, and weakening trust within and among federal agencies,’” Krishnamoorthi wrote. “This proposal notably does not mention the most high-profile information disclosure of this administration—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sharing of operational military strike details over a Signal group chat. That omission raises a direct question about whether this policy is designed to apply consistently across all federal employees and officials—or whether it is aimed primarily at career civil servants who speak out about wrongdoing.”

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Union renews call for lawmakers to override Trump’s anti-union EO at the Pentagon

Erich Wagner — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The nation’s largest federal employee union last week urged House lawmakers to once again bar the Defense Department from implementing President Trump’s executive order stripping two-thirds of the federal workforce of its collective bargaining rights.

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning unions at most federal agencies, citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to exempt workforces from federal sector labor law under the auspices of national security. A second order, signed last August, added a half-dozen more agencies to the initial edict.

The measure—and its implementation—have been tied up in a myriad of court cases ever since. While efforts lawsuits challenging the initiative governmentwide have been thus far unsuccessful in halting its rollout, some unions have preserved feds’ collective bargaining rights at particular agencies, including for Defense Department employees represented by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association.

Not so for the American Federation of Government Employees, whose contracts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered terminated in April. In a letter to the top Democrat and Republican on the House Armed Services Committee last week, Daniel Horowitz, AFGE’s legislative director, urged the committee to once again approve a proposal nullifying Trump’s executive order as it pertains to Defense Department workers.

Last year, the panel voted on a bipartisan basis to include the amendment, proposed by Rep. Donald Norcross, D-N.J., in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, and the bill ultimately passed the House with the measure in tact. It did not become law, as the Senate stripped the provision from its version of the bill.

In the letter, Horowitz argued that Trump’s use of the Civil Service Reform Act’s so-called national security exemption greatly exceeded congressional intent.

“The statutory exemption Congress wrote into Title 5 was deliberately narrow, reserved for agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency whose missions are uniquely incompatible with bargaining,” he wrote. “Applying it broadly across the entire Department of Defense departs significantly from that design and longstanding precedent. It is telling that President Trump never invoked [this exemption] during his first term.”

Though Trump did not cite that authority in his first term, he sought to delegate it to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper in 2020. Esper ultimately declined to use that power.

Horowitz noted that a group of 16 House Republicans urged members of the bicameral conference committee to keep Norcross’ amendment in the NDAA last year, arguing that the edict “jeopardizes” rather than strengthens national security. And the Pentagon already has safeguards to ensure collective bargaining activity does not interfere with national security concerns.

“Restoring collective bargaining is not about expanding rights or constraining management,” he wrote. “Existing agreements already contain robust management rights provisions, emergency authorities, and national security exemptions that allow commanders and program managers to act when mission requirements demand. What collective bargaining provides is a structured channel for identifying and resolving workforce problems before they become operational ones, including improving safety, retention, productivity and accountability.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NextGov/FCW reporter David DiMolfetta contributed to this report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He began medical leave in December 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump signs order moving thousands of federal employees into Schedule F

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Federal oversight faces ‘structural conflict’ as political appointees enter IG offices

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:16:27 -0400

Along with increasing the number of political appointees in the federal government, the second Trump administration is also installing such officials at agencies that haven’t employed political staffers in recent history.

According to a report published on May 28 by the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit, there are 16 agencies and subagencies that had zero non-Senate-confirmed appointees between 2009 and 2024 that had at least one as of March 2026.

Some of the agencies include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Forest Service, National Archives and the IRS, which has never before had non-Senate-confirmed political appointees.

“These trends reveal that the politicization of federal leadership is not simply intensifying — it is spreading,” wrote Partnership researcher Chris Piper. “In each case, political appointees are displacing or crowding out career officials whose expertise, continuity and institutional knowledge have been the foundation of effective agency operations and mission delivery.”

In particular, the Partnership flagged that there are two political appointees assigned respectively to the inspector general offices for the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Labor.

OIGs provide independent oversight of agency operations. Since at least 2009, according to the report, no other OIG had any non-Senate-confirmed political staffers.

“[OIG] credibility depends on operating free from the direction of the very officials they oversee,” Piper wrote. “A political appointee within an IG office, outside of the Senate-confirmed inspector general, does not merely break a historical norm — it introduces a structural conflict of interest into an institution whose effectiveness depends on independence.”

Good government groups have criticized the president for firing many IGs and replacing most of them with individuals who worked in the first or second Trump administration. The IG for the Labor Department — Anthony D’Esposito, a former GOP congressman — has also faced questions about actions he has taken while in the watchdog position seemingly to prepare for another political campaign, which could have violated ethics rules.

There also are political appointees for the first time at the Federal Labor Relations Authority and Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both are examples of independent agencies that were created to have some degree of separation from the White House, but the Trump administration has sought to exert more influence over their operations.

The Partnership also emphasized that non-Senate-confirmed appointees have been assigned in “unprecedented numbers” to management offices, such as the Veterans Affairs Department Information and Technology Office and the Federal Acquisition Service under the General Services Administration.

“[U]nlike the career officials they displace, political appointees are unlikely to serve long enough to witness the consequences of the budget decisions they make, the technology investments they oversee or the procurement contracts they negotiate,” Piper wrote. “Political appointments in management functions also raise concerns about undue influence over decisions that should be made on the merits — including the awarding of contracts and the allocation of federal resources in ways that serve political rather than programmatic ends.”

The Partnership also complained that officials generally don’t have to disclose the specific work that non-Senate-confirmed appointees are performing.

“This lack of transparency is not unique to this administration. But it is more consequential when political appointments are reaching new corners of the federal government,” Piper wrote. “This administration has expanded political appointments into agencies and offices where they have not existed in at least 15 years. As a result, appointees are performing functions for which no clear policy-directing rationale applies and where the consequences of politicization may be slow to emerge and difficult to trace.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration finalized regulations for Schedule Policy/Career, a new job classification that would remove civil service job protections for as many as 50,000 government workers in “policy-related” positions. Critics argue that it will result in political appointees replacing career staffers while administration officials have insisted that federal employees will not be removed based on their political affiliations.

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Federal employee NDAs aren’t new, but expanding them requires careful guardrails

Lindy Kyzer — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:01:10 -0400

The recent proposal from the Office of Personnel Management to expand nondisclosure agreement (NDA) requirements across the federal workforce has generated predictable controversy. Critics see it as an attempt to suppress dissent. Supporters view it as a long-overdue effort to curb damaging leaks.

But amid the political debate, one important fact is being overlooked: for hundreds of thousands of federal employees, NDAs are already a standard condition of service.

Anyone granted access to classified information signs the Standard Form 312 (SF-312), a legally binding nondisclosure agreement acknowledging their responsibility to protect national security information. Clearance holders understand that safeguarding sensitive information is part of the job. The expectation is clear, the boundaries are defined, and the consequences for violations are understood.

What makes the current proposal different is not the existence of an NDA. It is the expansion of the concept beyond classified information and into a much broader category of what the administration calls “confidential government information.”

That distinction matters, and it mirrors the already expanding government ecosystem of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), and the ongoing confusion about how to protect it.

Government agencies routinely handle information that is not classified but still sensitive. Procurement strategies, internal personnel matters, pre-decisional policy discussions, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, law enforcement operations, and draft regulations can all be compromised by unauthorized disclosures. Few federal executives would argue that every internal deliberation should immediately become public.

NDAs also certainly aren’t only the purview of the federal government. Many private-sector organizations require employees to sign confidentiality agreements covering proprietary business information. OPM Director Scott Kupor has pointed to this reality in defending the proposal, arguing that the federal government should not hold itself to a lower standard than private employers when it comes to protecting sensitive information.

From a management perspective, that argument has merit.

Federal agencies cannot effectively develop policy, negotiate contracts, conduct investigations, or plan operations if internal deliberations are routinely leaked before decisions are finalized. Public trust can be damaged not only by secrecy but also by incomplete information released without context.

Yet government is not the private sector. The federal workforce serves the public interest, not shareholders. That distinction requires a different balance between confidentiality and accountability.

The challenge is not whether federal employees should protect sensitive information. They already do. The challenge is defining exactly what information falls within the scope of protection. Confusion about that scope is where an NDA can extend beyond just protecting sensitive information and can become a weapon to unfairly penalize a federal employee, or incorrectly hide information that has no reason to be deemed protected.

Current draft language references “confidential government information,” including pre-decisional and deliberative materials that are not publicly available. Critics argue the definition is too broad and could create uncertainty for employees trying to distinguish between legitimate whistleblowing and prohibited disclosure.

Federal leaders should take those concerns seriously.

The federal government already operates under a complex framework of classification rules, privacy protections, procurement integrity requirements, and whistleblower laws. Any government-wide NDA policy should reinforce and not undermine that framework. Employees must have confidence that legally protected disclosures to inspectors general, Congress, and authorized oversight bodies remain fully protected. The proposal itself states that those rights would be preserved, but implementation details will ultimately determine whether employees trust that assurance.

The experience of the cleared workforce offers a useful lesson. Security clearance holders generally accept strict disclosure restrictions because the rules are accompanied by training, clearly defined categories of protected information, and established adjudication processes. The system is far from perfect, but employees understand where the lines are drawn.

If the administration moves forward with a broader NDA framework, it should adopt the same principles: clarity, consistency, transparency, and robust protection for lawful disclosures.

A poorly defined NDA regime could create confusion, chill legitimate reporting of misconduct, and generate unnecessary legal challenges. A carefully structured one could reinforce existing obligations and help agencies better protect sensitive information without compromising accountability.

The debate should not be framed as a choice between secrecy and transparency. Federal agencies require both. Effective government depends on candid internal deliberation, but it also depends on public trust and lawful oversight.

For federal executives, the real question is not whether nondisclosure agreements belong in government. They already do. The question is whether a government-wide expansion can be implemented in a way that protects sensitive information while preserving the accountability mechanisms that distinguish public service from private employment. That is where the conversation should be focused.

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OPM moves to allow agencies to promote workers faster

Erich Wagner — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:06:02 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management this week announced plans to remove a nearly 80-year-old rule requiring federal workers to serve for at least one year in their jobs before they may be considered for promotion.

Time-in-grade requirements, which have been in place since 1950, institute a 52-week waiting period when feds must work in their current positions before they can be promoted. The law that required such a waiting period expired in 1978.

In proposed regulations published in the Federal Register Thursday, OPM said time-in-grade requirements were an “outdated” effort to avoid rapid position inflation at federal agencies, as occurred during World War II, during the Korean War.

Officials wrote that the measure is no longer needed, in part thanks to the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act and subsequent promulgation of the merit systems principles undergirding federal employment. Previous efforts to remove time-in-grade requirements occurred during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations but were unsuccessful.

“When the Whitten Amendment [mandating the one-year waiting period] was first enacted, no effective means existed to prevent employees from advancing quickly through GS grade levels,” OPM wrote. “Today, governmentwide qualification standards, established by OPM, are in place for competitive service GS positions . . . Consistent with the federal shift toward skills-based hiring, OPM is providing agencies with greater control for determining whether an employee has the skillsets needed for promotion to the next higher grade level.”

And OPM argued that it was unfair to continue to mandate time-in-grade requirements for some federal workers but not others. While the waiting period currently applies to General Schedule employees at GS-5 level and above, it does not apply to blue-collar feds hired under the Federal Wage System or to excepted service workers.

“Eliminating TIG enables any federal competitive service GS employee (regardless of current occupation or grade), who meets the qualification standards for a particular position, to become eligible for promotion to a competitive service GS position,” the agency wrote. “Thus, promotions will have a more skills-based focus without TIG.”

In a statement Thursday, OPM Director Scott Kupor said eliminating time-in-grade requirements will enable agencies to better reward top employees and compete with private sector employers for talent.

“Federal employees should be rewarded for what they can do, not how long they have waited,” Kupor said. “This proposed rule strengthens merit, gives managers more flexibility to recognize high performers, and helps agencies move talented people into mission critical roles faster.”

Comments on OPM’s proposal are open until July 27.

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Supreme Court rejects lower court bid to review immigration judge gag order

Erich Wagner — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:15:31 -0400

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeals court’s effort to investigate whether the Trump administration has effectively neutered the law undergirding the federal civil service on procedural grounds.

Last year, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit revived a 2020 lawsuit filed by the National Association of Immigration Judges challenging a policy barring its members from speaking or writing publicly about immigration in their personal capacities.

The union alleged that the so-called “gag rule,” first issued in 2017, made more restrictive in 2020 and revised again in 2021, violated the judges’ free speech rights. But a district court judge dismissed the case in 2023, finding that they must first challenge the policy before the Merit Systems Protection Board.

But last year, the Fourth Circuit panel issued a ruling that revived the case, instructing the lower court to examine whether the Trump administration’s push to fire political leaders at independent agencies like the MSPB and U.S. Office of Special Counsel had “so undermined” the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act as to deny federal workers meaningful review of agency actions.

Both the Trump administration and the immigration judges’ union asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the case. In a ruling Tuesday, the court reversed the appellate judges’ decision and sent the case back to them for further proceedings.

In an unsigned opinion, the court found that the Fourth Circuit could not issue its decision questioning the CSRA’s continued viability because neither party raised it as an argument before the judges. There were no noted dissents.

“As [NAIJ] conceded below, our precedent establishes that Congress, through the CSRA, intended to channel covered claims to the MSPB,” the justices wrote. “The parties thus confined their arguments to the narrow question whether respondent’s claims were, in fact, covered. Unsatisfied with rejecting respondent’s arguments on that question, however, the Fourth Circuit sua sponte addressed a much broader one and remanded for further proceedings on that question.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett issued a concurring opinion stating that they would have also decided the case in favor of the Trump administration on the merits, as well.

“Neither the president’s view that he can remove federal executive officials, nor his having done so, change the meaning of the statute or the binding nature of this court’s interpretation of it,” they wrote. “’Conditions may have changed, but the statute has not.’ Courts may not ‘rewrite the statutory scheme in order to approximate what we think Congress might have wanted had it known that’ the president or courts may conclude that its removal restrictions were ‘beyond its authority.’”

In a statement Tuesday, NAIJ President Holly D’Andrea said that while her union was disappointed in the decision, it would continue to fight the Justice Department’s gag rule as the litigation moves forward.

“The case has been remanded to the Fourth Circuit, and NAIJ will continue fighting to protect the free speech rights of immigration judges, to seek meaningful review of the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s speech policies, and to ensure that immigration judges may engage in public discourse on immigration matters in their personal capacities,” she said. “Justice cannot endure when judges are intimidated into silence, nor can a nation remain free when the rule of law is subordinate to the whims of political ambition.”

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They were told they’d move on. A year later, many fired federal employees say they haven’t been able to

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:56:57 -0400

As part of its effort to downsize the federal workforce in February 2025, the Trump administration conducted a mass firing of thousands of agency employees in their probationary periods, which generally last for the first year after a worker has been hired by or promoted within the government. Such staffers have weaker civil service job protections.

In September 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the removals were unlawful. He didn’t order agencies to reinstate affected employees, however, due to an earlier Supreme Court decision and because, as he put it, “The terminated probationary employees have moved on with their lives and found new jobs.”

So, a group of former probationary employees sought to find out if their colleagues had, in fact, “moved on.” Between February and March, they conducted a survey of more than 300 individuals impacted by the firings, representing 12 federal departments as well as 43 states and one territory.

The results show that many fired probationers haven’t found new jobs, are experiencing poor mental health and remain concerned about their former agencies’ effectiveness with reduced workforces.

Unemployment

The most frequent answer to a question in the survey asking how long it took to find a new job was “still unemployed.” Relatedly, around 80 participants reported that they have submitted more than 100 job applications.

Jacob Saunders, a respondent who worked at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for five weeks before he was fired, said that he still hasn’t found a full-time job. In the meantime, he is a high school lacrosse coach, has taken on sporadic gig work and sells items on eBay.

“It does annoy me when somebody thinks that it's pretty simple. I've applied to 15 jobs in one week. I might apply for three jobs a day or two jobs a day,” he said. “I've applied to a lot of jobs.”

The president in January defended his cuts to the civil service by claiming that employees who were pushed out are now in the private sector making double or triple their government salaries.

In contrast, the probationary survey found that, among respondents who found new roles, 49% reported that their salary is "significantly lower” than what they made in the federal government with another 19% saying their salary is “lower.”

The survey data was published by 27 UNIHTED, an organization of former National Institutes of Health employees established in response to the second Trump administration.

Mental health

In the survey, 95% of participants responded that they experienced “new mental health symptoms that had negative impacts on personal wellbeing” after being terminated.

Liz Crandall, one of the respondents and a fired field ranger from the U.S. Forest Service, wasn't surprised by that result.

“I'm seeing it still from friends that were probationary employees that were fired. They're still not doing well. I would almost argue they're doing worse because it's grief mixed with embarrassment and shame that they're still not able to get through it,” she said. “A lot of people have had to go on new medications and take out loans. And our health insurance is obviously taken away since we were fired.”

Crandall had been in her position for more than one year but had not yet received full civil service job protections because she was hired under Schedule A, a mechanism for agencies to bring on workers with disabilities that has a two-year probationary period.

Many civil servants hired under Schedule A who had been in their jobs between one to two years have argued that they wouldn't have been impacted by the probationary firings if they were recruited through another pathway.

Nearly 85% of survey respondents said that their agencies were not transparent about their firings. Crandall, for example, thought she might have been spared from the removals because initially only probationary employees with less than one year in her division were terminated. But she was let go the next day.

“Nothing made sense, no one had answers, HR had no idea what was happening. No one had any idea,” she said. “It was so bizarre and unprecedented and chaotic and even my conservative [coworkers] were crying.”

Likewise, Saunders said that his supervisor didn’t know he had been fired. He was the one who informed him.

Effect on agency operations

The two most common responses to a question in the survey asking about negative impacts to the public due to the probationary firings were: “larger (sometimes unmanageable) workload for remaining employees” and “loss of institutional knowledge.”

Crandall is worried, in particular, about her former agency’s continued ability to combat wildfires. Like many other USFS employees who were fired or otherwise pushed out by the Trump administration, she held a “red card” — meaning she was certified for firefighting duties and could be deployed as needed.

Government Executive previously reported that at least 1,400 USFS employees with “red cards” left the agency, but officials asked some of them to volunteer to return for the 2025 fire season.

Beyond personnel numbers, Crandall said that she possessed localized knowledge like locations of non-designated campsites and unofficial roads.

“Instead of people having to risk their safety to go in and navigate this insane spider web of roads, they would look to people like me and say ‘Where are the sites so that we can just go in and evacuate those directly? So we don't have to wander while a fire is creeping up on us,’” she said. “That was really important. That's the mixture of institutional knowledge, on-the-ground knowledge, local/regional knowledge as well as personnel.”

Both Saunders and Crandall said that they were offered their positions back following court orders but declined due to fears that they would still lose their jobs through layoffs under reduction in force procedures, which is another method the Trump administration has used to reduce agency headcounts.

“You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube,” Saunders said. “Once I had already gotten fired, what's stopping it from happening again?”

Crandall now works for a conservation nonprofit.

The Office of Personnel Management, which Judge Alsup determined illegally required the probationary firings, did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Additional findings

The former probationers who conducted the survey noted that respondents’ participation was based on self-selection rather than a random sample.

A quarter of respondents reported that they were reinstated to their federal jobs. Another 15% said they got their positions back but were then terminated later.

While probationary periods are associated with workers who are new to government, around 45% of survey respondents said they previously worked for a federal agency as a contractor.

The Trump administration recently launched several efforts to recruit early-career workers to serve in a federal agency.

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OPM proposes requiring all feds to sign an NDA

Erich Wagner — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:56:33 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management is set to propose requiring all federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring them from divulging “confidential” information in most cases, a move that experts warn violate workers’ First Amendment rights and statutes aimed at protecting whistleblowers from retaliation.

OPM announced its plan in a filing set for publication in the Federal Register Wednesday. In justifying the requirement, officials cited reporting in Government Executive and other news outlets disclosing controversial proposals to overhaul federal layoff and performance management rules—and internal warnings against their implementation—prior to their formal publication.

“Unauthorized disclosures of confidential government information disrupt agency operations and erode public trust,” OPM wrote. “In recent months, unauthorized disclosures have included internal government materials not intended for public release such as pre-decisional documents and interagency comments exchanged during internal coordination processes . . . Such disclosures risk chilling candid interagency feedback, disrupting orderly decision-making and weakening trust within and among federal agencies.”

According to a draft copy of the proposed NDA, feds would be required to sign a document barring them from disclosing information related to internal agency operations, personnel and procurement matters and “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material” and vowing to inform their agency if they learn of others making such a disclosure.

The draft NDA includes language stating that it does not conflict with the Whistleblower Protection Act, and that whistleblowers may continue to disclose information either to Congress or their agency’s inspector general’s office. But Kevin Owen, a partner at Gilbert Employment Law, a firm that specializes in federal employment issues, described those exceptions as mere “lip service.”

“Time and time again, we see circumstances where whistleblowers try to go through internal channels—either through an IG or agencies like the Office of Special Counsel—and for one reason or another, either they’re overburdened with work, or with this administration particularly, politically captured and therefore don’t do the necessary work,” Owen said. “So a lot of those channels are ineffective. Only once wrongdoing becomes more widely known is there an appropriate remedy to the waste, fraud and abuse going on. Simply having OPM pick and choose the channels for whistleblowers is not in accordance with the Whistleblower Protection Act.”

Michael Fallings, managing partner at Tully Rinckey, another federal employment law firm, said it will be hard to gauge the NDA’s true impact until a final draft is released, likely after OPM’s 30-day comment period. As things stand now, much of the document’s language is “over-broad,” he said.

“When you’re dealing with NDAs, you have to be careful about impacting somebody’s rights to engage in protected activity,” he said. “Even in the private sector, they still have the right to disclose waste, fraud and abuse, and with government entities, you have to be careful of employees’ First Amendment rights as well. That’s the fear of a lot of the employee rights organizations and attorneys right now, especially given what has happened with this administration and the sense that it is trying to prevent employees from speaking out.”

Owen noted that federal agencies already have longstanding rules governing the unauthorized disclosure of internal government information. OPM’s proposed NDA, which the agency explicitly tied to its effort to assert governmentwide firing power through suitability determinations, could create a new class of federal firings, shielded from Merit Systems Protection Board oversight. An employee deemed unsuitable not only would lose their job but also could be barred from being rehired into government for up to five years.

“The impact of this is, coupled with other recent changes to its regulations, OPM could become the sole arbiter of whether it is abiding by these rules,” he said. “OPM is now trying to become this super personnel office that centralizes its authority over all federal employees, ostensibly at the direction of the White House. By now controlling how federal employees are even able to communicate about matters of political concern, it’s one further step toward enacting a spoils system and making the civil service a political arm of the White House.”

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, blasted the proposal as an effort to “silence” federal workers.

“This proposed NDA is another attempt by the administration to purge the civil service of nonpartisan career employees and replace them with loyalists who won’t speak out against waste, fraud and abuse,” he said. “Federal employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they accept federal employment, and the public has a right to know about this administration’s abuses.”

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Appeals court upholds order reinstating VA’s union contracts

Erich Wagner — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:54:02 -0400

A federal appeals court last weekend upheld a March ruling that restored collective bargaining rights to Veterans Affairs Department, though not a later requirement that the department “comply” with its contracts with the American Federation of Government Employees.

U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose previously found that VA Secretary Doug Collins violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act last year when he terminated the department’s collective bargaining agreements with AFGE in connection with President Trump’s executive order banning unions from most federal agencies under the auspices of national security.

The VA appealed that decision, along with a second order enforcing the initial ruling after management asserted that it could reinstate the contract but ignore all its provisions and then sought to terminate the CBA a second time to “moot out” the court case, and requested a stay from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

The three-judge panel, comprised of Biden, Obama and Trump appointees, unanimously denied VA’s request to pause enforcement of the initial injunction but found that the courts could not force management to abide by the contract “in both form and substance.” Writing for the court, Chief Judge David Barron determined the VA’s claim that its union contracts were rendered “inoperable” by Trump’s executive order was faulty, as judged by its own five-month delay in terminating the contract after the edict’s signing in March 2025.

“Indeed, we note, the record shows that the defendants chose to keep the CBA in place, seemingly as if it remained binding on them, for months after the president issued the EO, even though they were not subject during those months to any court order to do so,” Barron wrote. “It may be that there is some reason why it was more workable to keep the CBA in place as a binding agreement at that time than it is now. But, if so, the defendants do not contend that the CBA has since become any more unworkable than it was when they chose to keep it in place during that period.”

However, the panel did agree with VA officials, who argued that the April district court ruling to enforce the injunction “greatly expanded” the scope of DuBose’s initial decision, creating a mechanism “utterly foreign” to labor relations lawsuits.

“The question here concerns whether, even after the CBA has been reinstated as a binding agreement pursuant to a preliminary injunction, the district court may then modify that injunction as a means of enforcing it by ordering specific performance in each instance in which it finds that there has been a breach of one of the CBA’s terms providing for ‘grievance and arbitration’ procedures,” Barron wrote. “After all, such an individual breach would not in and of itself suffice to show that the CBA had not been reinstated as a binding agreement and need not itself result from the defendant having in that instance ‘acted outside their scope of authority.’”

As the VA fought to stay the injunction and enforcement order in this case, it separately and successfully lobbied the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a federal agency that facilitates arbitrated grievance proceedings across government, to cease processing arbitrator requests in connection with VA grievances, instead placing those cases in abeyance until the conclusion of the broader litigation.

In a statement Monday, MJ Burke, president of AFGE’s National VA Council, applauded the ruling.

“For nearly two months, the VA has tried every which way to get around complying with the preliminary injunction ordering them to restore union rights to more than 320,000 nurses, housekeepers, social workers, cemetery caretakers, claims processors, and so many others who are represented by AFGE/NVAC and show up every day to serve veterans,” she said. “Every VA public servant who cares for a veteran depends on a workplace where they can do their job without fear of retaliation for exercising their rights.”

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Nuclear waste oversight at risk as staffing vacancies mount, watchdog warns

Eric Katz — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:27:25 -0400

Updated May 20 at 9:10 a.m.

Nearly half of the positions in the federal government’s office responsible for handling and cleaning up nuclear waste are currently vacant, according to a new audit, after the Trump administration incentivized a wave of departures at the agency.

The Energy Department’s Environmental Management office lost around one-third of its employees in fiscal 2025, the Government Accountability Office found in a new report, most of whom left as part of the “deferred resignation program” that allowed employees to sit on paid leave for several months before exiting government. It already maintained a vacancy rate of 20% in 2023, GAO said. About half of the nuclear waste office’s unfilled positions were in mission-critical roles.

In a separate report in 2024, GAO found Environmental Management faced challenges in cleaning up nuclear waste due to understaffing, as it forced schedule delays, cost overruns and workplace accidents. At its 15 clean up sites, the Energy office is tasked with deactivating contaminated buildings, remediating contaminated soil and operating facilities that treat millions of gallons of liquid radioactive waste.

At its location in the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the office has a vacancy rate of 62%. The rate was among the lowest of any EM facility at its headquarters, where it was still 39%. Over the last 10 years, the office’s low point in staffing was in 2024 at 1,279, or more than 30% than its current level.

Each of EM’s six mission-critical occupation groups experienced a decrease, including nuclear engineering, general engineering and general physical science. Positions for facilities representatives, who provide the office’s “on-site presence for safety and compliance purposes” including worker health, are 44% vacant. All of the positions at the Carlsbad Field Office are vacant, while Los Alamos has just one remaining.

“This understaffing includes shortages in mission-critical occupations that are integral to carrying out EM’s mission, which includes addressing contaminated buildings, soil, and groundwater, and treating radioactive waste,” GAO said.

Energy officials told GAO the nuclear clean up office is currently reorganizing and reassessing its staffing needs. It is planning to hire 174 workers in fiscal 2026, they said, and it is not planning any changes to its responsibilities. Such hiring would still leave the office with 19% fewer employees than it had when President Trump took office last year, as well as with a 33% vacancy rate in the office according to its own previously assessed needs.

The officials suggested EM may eliminate some vacant positions and that could reduce the vacancy rate, GAO said. Some of the planned hiring, however, will come from transfers within Energy, potentially creating more vacancies elsewhere. The officials added that it will take at least a year to train many of the new hires.

"The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management remains fully equipped with the expertise necessary to carry out mission-critical projects, including with regards to addressing contaminated buildings, soil, and groundwater, and treating radioactive waste,” a spokesperson said. “Thanks to President Trump, the Energy Department’s Environmental Management Office is advancing common sense solutions that protect public health and safety, fulfill cleanup responsibilities, and deliver greater value for the American taxpayer.”

Employees within the office told GAO the vacancies are taking a toll.

“According to EM officials, leaving these positions vacant means there are fewer people to manage the workload, resulting in employees potentially burning out with heavy workloads, which gives them concern over the safety of operations,” GAO said.

The officials added that the office “was not hiring any entry-level people and was losing knowledge at a rapid rate as employees continue to retire and resign.”

This story has been updated with comment from the Energy Department.

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EEOC says government must pay damages to some employees subject to Biden's vaccine mandate

Eric Katz — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:08:22 -0400

The Biden administration unlawfully discriminated against some Interior Department employees who were denied religious exemptions to the now-defunct COVID-19 vaccine mandate, an oversight body ruled on Monday, saying the workers will be entitled to monetary compensation.

The administration’s denial of three Bureau of Indian Education employees seeking religious accommodations to get out of the mandate then-President Biden put in place for federal workers in 2021 violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said in its ruling. Interior said at the time accommodating the employees would cause undue hardship on the agency and create unsafe working conditions for their colleagues, but EEOC ruled the agency failed to prove those claims.

“No one is above the law, especially the federal government entrusted to enforce it,” said said EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, adding Monday’s decision “is a step toward justice for federal employees who suffered under the pandemic-era policies of the Biden Administration.”

Biden issued the mandate to some controversy, particularly as it allowed for agencies to discipline or fire workers who failed to comply with it. The order was eventually paused by various legal challenges and later revoked altogether, but not before 93% of the workforce got vaccinated and another 5% successfully sought a religious or medical exemption.

The Biden administration ultimately disciplined few employees for failing to comply with its mandate. Some agencies accepted anyone’s request for a religious accommodation without seeking further follow ups, though Interior, EEOC found, took a more nuanced approach.

After giving the employees a temporary pass on the mandate, religious exemption seekers went before a panel of Interior officials who sought to affirm the employees’ religious sincerity. It found the use of fetal cell lines in the initial development of the vaccine conflicted with certain employees’ religious beliefs, but said accommodating them would create intolerable risk and cost the agency up to $10,000 per unvaccinated employee per year to provide adequate masks and tests.

The employees who brought their case to EEOC still declined to get the vaccine, though they never faced any resulting disciplinary action. In its internal review of their complaint, Interior determined the employees were not entitled to any relief because they never faced any consequences. EEOC disagreed, arguing they suffered "redressable injuries" that were not alleviated by the "fortuitous intervention" but various federal courts.

The commission also noted it had to consider the case under a new precedent. The 2023 Supreme Court case Groff v. DeJoy affirmed that federal agencies — and all employers — must allow staff to practice their religion to the greatest extent possible unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on business operations. In this case, EEOC said, Interior should have implemented an alternative that allowed it to keep employees safe while still accommodating staff with religious objections to the vaccine.

“Testing and masking ostensibly effect similar safety goals as vaccination,” EEOC said.

It added the department’s complaint of the cost of masks and tests were unfounded as Congress authorized funding for explicitly that purpose.

EEOC instructed Interior to take the next four months to conduct a new review and determine what damages the impacted employees are owed, and to make those payments within the subsequent two months. The department must also train relevant management officials on the Civil Rights Act and create a new process for granting religious accommodations.

“The government clearly fell short of its obligation under the law,” said Lucas, who Trump first appointed as a commissioner in 2020 and made chair in 2025. “Under my leadership, the EEOC is committed to pursuing accountability, ensuring compliance, and securing justice for all workers, in both the private and public sector.”

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'Going to be a s***show': Parks, Interior struggle to hire temporary staff ahead of busy season

Eric Katz — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:01:50 -0400

The Interior Department is struggling to keep up with even the diminished pace of hiring for its busy season it experienced last year, according to several officials and internal documents, raising concerns about its capacity to handle the upcoming surge in both park visitors and wildfires.

Interior had around 4,200 seasonal employees on board as of early April, according to internal figures obtained by Government Executive, a 1% decrease from the same period in 2025 and down around 14% from the same period in 2024. As of late March, Interior was tracking 7% behind its 2025 seasonal hiring figures.

The department brings on temporary staff each year to handle the surge of tourists who visit National Parks, as well as federal monuments, historical sites, wildlife refuges and other federal lands, as well as to support the response to wildfire season. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last year the National Park Service alone would hire 7,700 seasonal staff—in part to offset dramatic decreases in the agency’s permanent workforce—but internal data show the agency peaked at around 5,150 temporary workers, or 33% short of its target.

Interior has shed around 11,000 permanent employees, or 17% of its workforce, since January 2025, while NPS has reduced its rolls by around 4,000 workers, or 22%. It last month offered another incentive for a large swath of its workforce to leave the department.

While seasonal hiring typically ramps up significantly in May and June, the department has already fallen behind last year’s pace and employees say it no longer has the infrastructure to execute widespread onboarding as quickly as it typically does. Interior has lost around 18% of its human resources staff, which several current and former employees said has diminished its capacity to move seasonal hires through the system. The department lost more than 100 additional HR personnel during last month’s “deferred resignation” offer, according to multiple employees.

“We don’t have the staff to hire, do backgrounds or even onboard,” one Interior HR official said.

Internal messages from Interior’s central HR office, obtained by Government Executive, made clear the capacity issues. One such email told staff to expect delays for any hire submitted less than two full pay periods before the requested start date due to processing difficulties, including with security clearances. Some hires with offers in hand are having their onboardings pushed into June, a slower turnaround than the seasonal staff typically experience.

“Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work through these backlogs,” the email read.

Another message implored staff to stop seeking updates on hired individuals as it was further slowing down the process.

“We understand that parks are eager to onboard their seasonal staff and recognize the importance of getting teams in place quickly,” the email read. “Please know that both the personnel security team and our processing team are committed to supporting this effort and are working as quickly as possible to facilitate the onboarding process.”

Multiple employees also said recruiting has dried up due to a more negative perception of working for the department and the government in general. They cited the staff reduction efforts—particularly those focused on new hires at the beginning of President Trump’s second term—budget cuts and a snafu in paying seasonal staff during last year’s shutdown as a deterrent to potential applicants.

“We are also struggling to fill the funded seasonal vacancies we do have,” an HR staffer said. “People just don’t want to work for the government after seeing everything that happened last year.”

The first official noted the new questions on most federal job applications asking potential hires to opine on their preferred Trump administration policies has also discouraged individuals from seeking the jobs.

“The political questions gross out a lot of applicants, so we aren’t even getting many,” the official said.

Despite the setbacks, Burgum told the House Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday that Interior was on schedule for its seasonal hire. He added NPS had hired “thousands and thousands” of employees and that figure would grow if Congress reauthorizes the Great American Outdoors Act Trump originally signed into law in 2020.

“We’re staffing up,” Burgum said. “And hiring is going really well this year across parks and across wildland fire.”

Interior employees took issue with that characterization, with one official simply responding “LOL.” The employees noted they expect a particularly busy summer this year as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday.

“It’s going to be a s***show,” one of the HR officials said.

In a statement, an Interior spokesperson focused only on wildland firefighting personnel and said it would meet the same level of hires — around 5,700 — this year as it brought on in 2025. It also castigated its employees for leaking information to the press instead of focusing on their other responsibilities.

"At a time when communities are preparing for wildfire season, the priority should be operational readiness and mission execution, not anonymous political sniping," the spokesperson said. "Americans expect wildland fire personnel to be focused on readiness and response, not internal political distractions."

Other employees noted the significant reductions in permanent staff have made it nearly impossible for even a robust seasonal hiring spree to fill the gaps. An employee based in a National Park in the Intermountain Region said his park is down to one permanent custodian, has no rangers to oversee trails and roads, various chief positions are vacant and half of maintenance roles are unfilled.

“[We are] quite literally fucked,” the employee said. “We were unable to hire as many seasonals as there were positions.”

Interior has shifted thousands of employees working in functions like IT, contracting and HR away from individual bureaus like NPS to instead consolidate them within Burgum’s office. It is also moving firefighters out of the bureaus and into a newly stood up U.S. Wildland Fire Service. That new agency is gearing up for peak fire season in the coming months, though a reduction in the number of seasonal hires could lead to a diminished cadre of staff with “red cards.” Those employees hold certifications for firefighting duties and deploy as needed to wildfires.

Jayson O’Neill, a spokesperson for Save Our Parks, said seasonal staff who typically help visitors staying at campground check in and assist people looking to hike backcountry areas get permits are not present to fulfill those duties. He added that rangers are being deployed to collect entrance fees, filling what would normally be a seasonal job.

“That means that ranger is not out there when they are needed,” O’Neill said. “Rangers aren’t able to protect people because they’re not there.”

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‘Sermonizing’ Easter email prompts USDA employees to sue agency

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:06:02 -0400

A group of Agriculture Department workers and the National Federation of Federal Employees union on Wednesday filed a lawsuit over an email to the agency’s workforce celebrating the Easter holiday sent by Secretary Brooke Rollins.

Specifically, the plaintiffs objected to language in the communication that assumes the recipient is Christian such as: “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.”

“We work for the federal government, not a church. I just want to go to work and make my country better — I shouldn’t have to suffer through sermons and other religious messages forced upon me by the head of a federal agency,” said plaintiff Ethan Roberts, an atheist and Agricultural Research Service employee based out of Illinois, in a press release statement. “When the secretary sends an email, I have to read it. And when those emails are telling me what to believe, they make me feel unwelcome in an agency I’ve dedicated ten years to.”

The lawsuit asks the courts to bar department officials from “continuing to send or otherwise communicate proselytizing Christian messages to USDA employees,” arguing that Rollins violated the First Amendment.

“Secretary Rollins’s practice and policy of subjecting agency employees to proselytizing messages conveys the expectation that USDA employees share in the secretary’s religious beliefs, even when doing so would betray an employee’s own beliefs,” the attorneys wrote. “It is exactly the sort of government-sponsored religious coercion, religious sermonizing and denominational preference that the Establishment Clause prohibits.”

The lawsuit notes that Rollins, at the start of her tenure, referenced God in agencywide emails in a non-denominational manner (e.g. May God continue to protect the United States of America and may His favor shine over all her land) and that the secretary has never sent any messages acknowledging non-Christian religious holidays.

Plaintiffs are represented by the Americans United for Separation of Church and State not-for-profit, Democracy Forward legal organization and Bryan Schwartz Law.

In response to the lawsuit, a USDA spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive that: “While we do not comment on pending litigation, we will keep the plaintiffs in our prayers during this process.”

The Office of Personnel Management in 2025 issued guidance reiterating that federal employees can seek to "persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” so long as they are “not harassing in nature.”

USDA is in the process of a reorganization that will relocate many employees away from the Washington, D.C., area.

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House GOP probes agency settlements with federal workers

Erich Wagner — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Monday announced they would investigate the rate at which federal agencies settle cases involving allegations of prohibited personnel practices, implying they go easy on poor performing or misbehaving federal workers.

In a letter to Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., requested data on federal employment cases heard before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates allegations of workplace discrimination, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which oversees union issues, the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower retaliation and Hatch Act allegations, and the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Comer argued that agencies’ success in defending employment actions before the MSPB is incongruous with their high acceptance of settlement agreements and suggested payouts stemming from those settlements are a waste of taxpayer money.

“In adverse action cases that are not dismissed at the MSPB, agencies opt to settle 68% of the time,” Comer wrote. “Among cases that proceed to decision, more than 80% of agency adverse action decisions are upheld, suggesting that agencies are frequently and inexplicably settling cases with taxpayer dollars that they would otherwise win. This raises the question of whether cases are being settled despite a high likelihood of government success on the merits, and, if so, whether systemic incentives are driving outcomes that prioritize short-term expediency over long-term accountability and savings for taxpayers.”

But Michael Fallings, managing partner at federal employment law firm Tully Rinckey, PLLC, said agency attorneys conduct the same analysis as private sector employers—and litigants in other court settings—when determining whether to settle a case.

“People and agencies settle for a multitude of reasons, but mainly: each side wants to prevent liability,” he said. “The government wants to avoid losing and having to perhaps pay even more money [than they would have under a settlement], and in each case it does an analysis of whether there is liability. And it’s the same for the employee: they don’t want to lose the case and be left with nothing. It’s a risk assessment, and it’s not just used in employment law.”

And if agencies were to abandon settlements and take every adverse action appeal before the MSPB or other adjudicatory body, the cost to taxpayers would increase, not decrease, he said.

“If there was an executive order or what-not preventing settlements of any MSPB appeals or similar cases, you’d see a much bigger expense utilized by the federal government in defending these claims,” Fallings said. “You’d have to pay to pull people out of their normal jobs to go to hearings, you’d have to produce all kinds of documents in a discovery process, and you have to pay the attorneys representing the agency. You’d easily expend as much, if not more, by trying to prevent a settlement from happening.”

Comer also argued that extensive use of settlements could serve to mask systemic issues of favoritism or other management malfeasance in cases where employees’ appeals were justified.

“While settlement may promote administrative efficiency, excessive reliance on it carries real costs: it forecloses the development of beneficial legal precedent, masks patterns of prohibited personnel practices, and allows agencies to manage recurring legal liability without addressing the underlying misconduct,” he wrote. “Congress cannot exercise meaningful oversight of the federal workforce when a supermajority of disputes are resolved through opaque, non-public agreements.”

But Fallings said that doesn’t reflect the reality of settlement talks, which still usually require the agency rectify any underlying misbehavior.

“Settlements don’t just involve money,” he said. “If the claim or appeal involves a prohibited personnel practice, that mostly likely will be discussed and be resolved as part of the settlement. A settlement can’t make everything go away, but in my experience, if an agency’s counsel is aware of a PPP happening, they are taking action to remedy that.”

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A USDA cow scientist won an award for helping dairy farmers produce more milk. He’s worried about the future of government research under Trump

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:17:14 -0400

Paul VanRaden grew up on a dairy farm, and his first job was to collect data about cows and send it to the federal government.

Over his 37-year career at the Agriculture Department, he analyzed data that farmers provided to researchers, just like he did as a teenager, in order to determine which of their cows had the best genetics to maximize milk production.

“My first and really only job for my entire career was analyzing the data for USDA that I had started collecting when I was 16,” VanRaden said.

The federal scientist was one of several civil servants who received this year’s Service to America medal from the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit. Winners were honored during a ceremony on Wednesday at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; although, VanRaden opted not to attend, in part, so he could reduce his carbon footprint by not flying.

He, along with two of his USDA colleagues, was recognized for making the U.S. “more prosperous.” The other categories were safer, stronger and healthier.

During his time in government, VanRaden developed a genomic prediction methodology that has enabled farmers to better identify genetically superior calves for breeding. His research contributed to an increase in milk production since the 1980s despite a decrease in the number of dairy cows.

He said that federal data on U.S. cows is sought after by other countries.

“The whole world is using this technology driven by the data that USDA created over a century,” VanRaden said. “Well, the farmers created it, but USDA collected it into one giant database.”

In 2025, VanRaden left government under a planned retirement. He lamented, however, that many of the individuals who he trained to replace him either separated from the agency due to the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the civil service or are subject to relocation orders because of USDA’s push to move employees out of the Washington, D.C., area.

The Partnership this year honored fewer civil servants than usual for the Service to America program, which celebrated its 25th anniversary. Max Stier, the president and CEO of the organization, said that was largely because government officials did not express “the typical energy to recognize and celebrate federal employees’ achievements.”

“Agencies that typically submit dozens of nominations this year submitted none,” he said in a statement to Government Executive. “We felt that even though we could not identify as many honorees as in past years, it was important to show that dedicated federal employees are still doing important and impactful work in these challenging circumstances.”

There were approximately 140 nominees this year from 39 agencies. In comparison, there were more than 350 nominations across 65 agencies for the 2025 program. The Partnership for 2026 also removed a requirement that nominees be current federal employees when they are nominated.

VanRaden, likewise, argued that the Trump administration does not value public service.

“During 36 of my 37 years [at USDA] — who was in charge, which party was in charge of the government — really had no bearing on what we did. It was math and data analysis. Everybody seemed to understand that the taxpayers, by funding research, led to big, important breakthroughs. That’s what makes this country great,” he said. “The attitude now is that the government can't do anything, and only the billionaires and the private business — that's where all the glory is. But it wasn't that way for all the previous decades. People understood that paying taxes and getting free research back was a tremendous investment. I don't understand why they gave up on that idea.

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Feds wary of skills-based hiring survey after 15 months of attacks

Erich Wagner — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:51:44 -0400

Some federal workers this week have expressed reluctance to participate in the Office of Personnel Management’s latest phase of a long-running bipartisan initiative, something experts say could mark an unintended consequence of the Trump administration’s campaign against federal workers it perceives as disloyal.

This week, OPM deployed its federal workforce competency initiative survey to roughly 550,000 employees. The questionnaire, which has previously been fielded both in 2021 and 2024, queries feds about the skillsets needed to perform their jobs, a key piece in the ongoing effort to shift away from degree- and qualification-based jobseeker evaluations and toward skills-based hiring, long a priority of both Republican and Democratic administrations.

But concern about the survey and fears of an ulterior motive quickly surfaced among feds. Multiple threads on Reddit asked what the survey was, and some wrote that they feared their responses would be used in furtherance of future reductions in force.

One Commerce Department employee told Government Executive that they received the survey invitation despite a lack of prior communication or education by their HR office. They said the administration’s co-opting of terms like “merit” and “accountability” as part of its messaging on federal layoffs and purging of diversity-related government offices has bred suspicion across the workforce.

"We all want more efficient government hiring and development, but ‘efficiency’ was cited as the justification for all of last year's senseless workforce actions,” they said. “It kind of feels like they burned the trust needed to get information from us because we don't know if it'll be a genuine attempt to improve civil service, or the first step in new automation and AI-dependent layoffs that will further degrade current capacity.”

An OPM spokesperson said Thursday that since deploying the survey this week, the agency has received 21,000 responses, a figure they expect to swell over time. The official sought to reassure feds that information collected will be used solely as part of the skills-based hiring push.

“OPM is continuing to work with agency HR offices to reinforce outreach and ensure employees understand the survey’s purpose,” they said. “This long-standing, bipartisan effort is focused solely on understanding the work federal employees perform, not evaluating individuals, and the data directly inform skills-based hiring, job design and workforce development. OPM is committed to transparency and building trust by clearly communicating how feedback I used and ensuring employees see how their input strengthens the federal workforce.”

Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy, said the incident shows the downsides of the Trump administration’s adversarial stance toward its employees.

“Once the idea of merit becomes perceived as a code word for slashing federal jobs and the idea of accountability becomes a code word for engaging in purges according to the ideology of employees, the principles that have been there in the federal government’s human capital world for 140 years are now being distorted by the mixed messages coming out of the administration,” he said. “So someone can say, ‘We’re interested in merit, in building capacity and making the workforce more accountable,’ and on one hand that sounds right and in many cases is right. But from the point of view of the employees, it just sounds like a continuation of those threats. Oftentimes, the only sensible strategy then is not to do anything, so as to avoid sticking your head up.”

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‘Highly problematic for a thousand reasons’: NIH employees criticize Trump-era requirement to scrutinize grants with words related to diversity

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:56:40 -0400

As the Trump administration continues its effort to root out federal funding for diversity initiatives, the National Institutes of Health has modified its grant review process to identify research that contains words associated with race or gender, which has held up some grant disbursements and forced scientists to rewrite proposals.

“I feel that this kind of censorship is making the path forward to support narrower and narrower research only to include, for example, white, straight, cisgender men,” said a program director at one of NIH’s institutes. “Any other population is being scrutinized, which is highly, highly, highly problematic for a thousand reasons. I don't want to be an instrument of an organization that is discriminating against people based on their demographics. That is 100% wrong, and I'm being forced to do that.”

The program director, who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation, told Government Executive that beginning this year employees at their institute have been required, as part of routine administrative reviews for grant applications and progress reports, to certify that the research documents do not contain certain words identified by a “text analysis tool.”

That certification refers to whether a grant has been populated into a spreadsheet for including a term flagged by the tool. Employees have not received a list of the words that the agency is searching for, but the program director and some colleagues have crowdsourced a list of terms that have previously caused problems including: diversity, equity and inclusion; gender; LGBT; racism; climate change; vaccine acceptance.

Along with seeking to terminate federal funding for DEI initiatives, the Trump administration has also canceled research related to climate change. And Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees NIH, is known for spreading misinformation about vaccines.

“We are now in a situation where people are finding this to just be so utterly unethical that there are terms that are flagged in the name of [agency] priorities that really aren't about identifying important areas of science to study,” the program director said. “They are identifying particular groups of people or topics not to study.”

As an example, the NIH employee said that if a grant report were detected for including the phrase “diverse perspectives,” they would either have to write a justification for why the use of the word “diverse” is acceptable in this case or the grantee would need to use a synonym, such as “various perspectives.”

“It's wasting the time of people who are highly trained scientists and science administrators to do something that is absurd,” the employee said, adding that it’s unclear who ultimately decides if a flagged word is appropriate and funding can therefore be unlocked.

While officials have been assessing NIH grants for words that may run afoul of Trump’s anti-diversity policies since the start of his second administration, the NIH program director said that the requirement to use a tool for identifying specific terms represents a more systematic attempt to scrutinize, and potentially cancel, research.

An NIH spokesperson told Government Executive in a statement that funding decisions are based on several factors including “scientific merit, public health priorities, available funding and adherence to federal requirements.”

“The agency relies on longstanding administrative and programmatic review processes to assess grant applications and progress reports,” the official said. “These reviews ensure compliance with applicable laws, regulations, agency policies and program priorities.”

The spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question about which agency official has the final say on whether funding for a grant with a flagged word can be disbursed.

Jenna Norton, an NIH employee who was put on paid leave after publicly criticizing the Trump administration’s research policies, on April 30 publicized through social media the mandate that grants be deemed “clean” by a text review before receiving funding.

"I also want to address the use of the word ‘clean,’ which implies that grants that use ‘misaligned’ words like ‘minority,’ ‘gender,’ ‘latinx,’ ‘equity,’ ‘lived experience,’ or ‘social determinants of health’ are dirty,” she wrote. “This kind of language matters. Grants that address these issues are not dirty.”

Norton was reinstated to her position on May 4.

Additionally, The New York Times recently reported that the text scan requirement for certain words has contributed to a slowdown in awarding grants.

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya wrote in a 2025 statement that the agency under the Trump administration would prioritize chronic health issues and “next-generation tools” like AI.

“A core function of NIH institutes and centers is to assess scientific merit within the context of NIH’s broader strategic goals and develop appropriate research funding plans accordingly,” he wrote. “In an environment where NIH receives more meritorious applications than it can fund, this review process is increasingly critical.”

The Partnership for Public Service nonprofit reported that there was a 24% reduction between fiscal years 2024 and 2025 in spending on science agency project grants.

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FEMA brings back employees it recently let go as it looks to 'stabilize' its workforce

Eric Katz — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:34:07 -0400

The Trump administration is rehiring disaster response staff it just let go in recent months, saying the reversals are necessary due to upcoming events and hurricane season.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is bringing back the employees as the Homeland Security Department has welcomed new leadership and is under pressure from an ongoing lawsuit challenging the dismissals. The staffers, part of the Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery, or CORE, saw FEMA decline to renew their contracts beginning late last year.

All told, around 200 employees lost their jobs and are now being asked to come back, except for those who retired or told FEMA they are no longer interested in the work. FEMA’s reversal came to light as part of a lawsuit the American Federation of Government Employees and other groups brought against the agency over the non-renewals, which they argued were illegally ordered by the Homeland Security Department and would have left FEMA incapable of delivering on its mission.

“As we approach the 2026 hurricane season and the FIFA World Cup, FEMA is taking targeted steps to stabilize our workforce and strengthen readiness,” a FEMA spokesperson said. “Under new leadership, FEMA is addressing outstanding personnel actions to ensure workforce stability and a strong, deployable surge force for upcoming national events and potential disasters.”

CORE employees, who typically serve in two-to-four year stints and generally see their contracts renewed, will, depending on performance and need, have their agreements renewed for one year if they were set to expire between Jan. 1 and May 31 of this year. Employees whose contracts are set to expire starting June 1 will be subject to an additional “functional review” before they can similarly be offered a one-year extension. After all employees go through such a review, they will become eligible for normal renewals of two-to-four years.

FEMA leadership has said as part of court depositions that DHS ordered the agency to develop plans to cut 50% of its workforce. Work on the plan to implement widespread staffing cuts was “put on hold” to implement the CORE non-renewal plan, said Karen Evans, the current FEMA head. She suggested the shedding of COREs was related only to right-sizing the workforce and not necessarily connected to the larger workforce plans.

The agency paused the mass non-renewals when winter storms hit much of the country in January. FEMA’s decision to rehire the CORE it had let go earlier this year was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lawsuit has proved a major nuisance for the administration, as more officials are deposed and more internal documents are ordered released to the court. Joseph Guy, a former deputy chief of staff at DHS, was set to be deposed on Monday. Kara Voorhies, a contractor accused of having undue influence over FEMA operations, is still awaiting scheduling for her deposition.

Evans, under court order, has turned over some screenshots of conversations she had on the secure messaging app Signal, though the judge on the case has demanded a more extensive review of her personal phone and an unredacted copy of her personal notes detailing her activities each day. While the judge ordered both of those disclosures to occur on Monday, Trump administration attorneys said Evans had gone to Idaho and it would not be possible to get access to her phone or notes until she returns.

It is not yet clear what impact the reinstatements will have on the lawsuit, and attorneys for AFGE and other plaintiffs on the case have said they are still reviewing the matter.

Cameron Hamilton, who Trump tapped to lead FEMA when he first took office but fired last year, is set to be nominated to once again lead the agency, according to several reports. Hamilton had clashed with then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who Trump has since fired. New DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pledged to quickly work through the backlog of disaster response work that has built up in the last 16 months, in part due to Noem’s policy to review all expenditures of more than $100,000.

As FEMA looks to stabilize its workforce ahead of hurricane season and to address that backlog, it has also reinstated employees who warned about the agency’s diminished capacity in a public letter last year. More than a dozen employees sat on paid administrative leave for eight months before being reinstated.

FEMA employs around 10,000 CORE employees, about 4,000 reservists who serve on a part-time basis and only activate during disasters and around 5,000 permanent, full-time staff.

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Coast Guard officer promotion advanced by Senate Republicans despite IG finding of whistleblower retaliation

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 01 May 2026 13:36:16 -0400

A group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday requested that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin urge the White House to withdraw the pending promotion of a Coast Guard officer who they say has been found to have retaliated against a whistleblower.

In their letter, the lawmakers wrote that the inspector general for the Homeland Security Department in 2018 determined that Commander Jesse Millard retaliated against a subordinate after she filed a complaint against him and other Coast Guard leaders.

Names were redacted in the IG report that the senators cited, but the document states that investigators found the “totality of evidence” showed that a lieutenant commander stationed at the Coast Guard Academy would have received higher evaluation marks if she hadn't submitted discrimination and harassment complaints against her superiors.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., one of the letter’s signers, said during a Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee meeting in March that advancing Millard’s promotion would contravene progress that lawmakers and the Coast Guard have made since the public disclosure of Operation Fouled Anchor — an internal review of mishandled sexual assault allegations at the service's Academy from the late 1980s to 2006 that officials did not inform Congress about.

“Supporting Commander Millard's promotion would be a step in the wrong direction from all the critical work that we have done since Operation Fouled Anchor,” she said. “If we intend to ensure there is accountability, then this committee cannot allow the promotion of officers into the Coast Guard's senior ranks who have substantiated claims of retaliation in their records.”

Ultimately, the panel voted to advance Millard’s promotion to become a captain in a 15-13 party-line vote. The full Senate has not yet voted on the nomination.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the chairman of the Commerce panel, said during the meeting that Millard was the “real victim.”

“The complainant in question filed repeated unsubstantiated accusations of discrimination and other charges against multiple senior officers,” he said. “At some point when the complaints are against everyone, the problem isn't the co-workers or the managers.”

While the IG substantiated the whistleblower retaliation allegation, investigators were not able to confirm some of the other related accusations. In response to the review, however, the watchdog did recommend that the Coast Guard require commanders to document in writing the reasons for their findings with respect to bullying and harassment complaints and mandate supplemental training for supervisors and managers on the service’s anti-discrimination, harassment and bullying policies.

Cruz also said the whistleblower “sought to pull strings” with Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who she worked for when he was deputy DHS secretary during the Obama administration, by discussing her complaints at the time with him.

DHS backed Millard’s promotion in a statement to Government Executive.

“The Department of Homeland Security strongly supports the nomination of Coast Guard Commander Jesse Millard, following 23 years of distinguished and honorable service,” a department spokesperson said. “These attacks are nothing more than a politicized hit job against an outstanding officer who deserves promotion.”

Along with Baldwin, Tuesday’s letter to Mullin was signed by Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the ranking member of the Commerce panel, Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., ranking member of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Coast Guard, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., co-chair of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus.

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After reductions, VA chief says facilities can 'hire where they need and what they need'

Eric Katz — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:07:35 -0400

The Veterans Affairs Department can hire any employee it wants at any time, the head of the agency told lawmakers on Thursday as he sought to address concerns about staffing declines and new restrictions that have set ceilings on workforce levels.

No VA facility is facing constraints on bringing in new personnel, Secretary Doug Collins said, who once again stressed that previous hiring efforts outpaced demand for health care through the department. He made the comments despite VA placing staffing caps on each facility that led to the elimination of tens of thousands of vacant positions and were designed to add layers of review to be surpassed.

“We will hire every need that we have in the department,” Collins said before a panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Our hospitals have the complete autonomy to hire where they need and what they need going forward.”

Collins’ comments came following his push to reduce VA’s workforce by 30,000 employees last year and the subsequent vacancy eliminations. The reductions have raised some bipartisan concerns, though Collins has maintained that his department was overbloated and VA care has not suffered. Between 2019 and 2025, he said, VA’s workforce grew by 14% while its interactions with veterans increased by just 6%.

VA has put “baselines” into place that set staffing levels for each facility, as Government Executive first reported last year. VA components cannot surpass their high-level personnel caps without approval from the department’s human resources and finance offices. Still, Collins said after the hearing the baselines would not impact any hiring effort.

“They're [full-time equivalent] accounts that are assigned to each facility,” the secretary said. “Those FTE accounts are not in a position to keep anybody from being hired.”

One VA official said it is accurate that VA facilities have "autonomy to hire what they need," but must operate within certain boundaries. They cannot simply hire as many employees as they want, the official said, though they maintain flexibility. Facility leaders have been instructed to escalate anything that has an impact on care delivery and hiring of doctors and nurses is always supported.

After years of growth, VA saw a net decrease in both doctors and nurses in 2025. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., the top Democrat on the subcommittee that held Thursday’s hearing, noted that VA’s fiscal 2027 budget would see further reductions in both categories. He added that proposed increases in the department’s budget would disproportionately go toward private sector care rather than to offerings within VA’s system.

“We see growing demand for VA care, but we're not seeing here the request for the investments in clinical staff to reflect that,” Ossoff said.

Collins noted that VA has eight pilot programs underway to get new hires onboarded more quickly, including by allowing employees to begin working before they fully go through the vetting process. The department is looking to expand those pilots by the end of the year and is hopeful it can bring average time-to-hire to between 30 and 40 days. VA has already demonstrated progress on that front, Collins said.

He also requested lawmakers provide more flexibility on the top pay levels for VA doctors. Congress previously authorized the department to exceed the existing $400,000 pay ceiling for 300 employees, which VA is currently working on implementing. That represents just 1.5% of VA’s doctors, however, and Collins said lawmakers should instead choose five specialties and wave pay caps for all doctors within them.

“My spouse, I have three kids, and at Christmas, she made sure that every kid had the same number of presents to open,” Collins said, alluding to the “inequities” created by the limited number of pay cap waivers Congress created.

Collins acknowledged that VA plans to close a handful of its contract facilities this year, though he said those medical offices were not performing up to the department’s standards and veterans would be able to receive care in other areas.

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