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Treasury missed security controls in giving DOGE system access, GAO finds

Natalie Alms — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:41:16 -0400

Congress’ watchdog reported on Tuesday that the Treasury Department gave a Department of Government Efficiency associate access to the government’s payment systems last year without fully following all of its own security controls — and the DOGE team didn’t always hew to Treasury’s protocols, either.

The findings are among the first reports the Government Accountability Office has released about DOGE’s work, and GAO is working on more audits focused on DOGE access to government systems, a spokesperson confirmed with Nextgov/FCW on Tuesday.

The new report on Treasury zeroes in on atypical access to the government’s payment systems given to DOGE associates.

DOGE access to sensitive government data and systems across agencies has been a flashpoint since the early days of Trump’s second term. DOGE associates said in court testimony earlier this year that pushing for high-level access to government systems was “operating procedure” for the group.

At Treasury, soon after Trump took office last year, individuals on billionaire Elon Musk’s team reportedly began pressing for officials to hand over system access to DOGE employee Tom Krause so that the department could freeze foreign aid payments. A top Treasury official was eventually pushed out of his job after refusing to provide access to the systems.

GAO found that Treasury handed over access to view, copy and print data from the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s three payment systems to an unnamed DOGE associate, who could also see the systems’ source code.

But that member of Musk’s team never completed required security training while working at the department or signed Treasury’s “rules of behavior” policy for IT security while working there.

GAO doesn’t name this DOGE employee in its report, but other details provided by the watchdog match with public reporting on Marko Elez, like the day he resigned, Feb. 6, 2025, following reporting about his racist social media posts. He later went on to work for DOGE at other agencies.

At one point, Treasury accidentally briefly gave that same DOGE employee the ability to make changes in one of those systems, something GAO said was due in part to the agency’s lax procedures and the fact that the access being requested was changed several times before it was approved. The DOGE employee didn’t use the system during this time, GAO says. According to reporting on court records, this was also Elez.

GAO also found that Treasury’s data loss prevention tools didn’t track or block Elez from improperly sending unencrypted information on foreign aid to two DOGE associates at the General Services Administration. Elez did this without getting agency approval for sharing the information on U.S. Agency for International Development payments.

Treasury didn’t discover that incident until it conducted a forensic review of the laptop after Elez had left the department. The department didn’t find the incident sooner in part because its tools aren’t set up to look for information being sent to other government agencies, the report says.

GAO included several recommendations regarding the department’s IT security processes in the audit, only some of which Treasury formally agreed with.

The top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement that “GAO has confirmed our worst fears,” and called on the Treasury to implement all of GAO’s recommendations.

Among those the department didn’t formally agree or disagree with is one urging it to conduct exit interviews and get signatures on post-employment documentation from those with access to sensitive payment systems who leave the department without doing so — including the DOGE employee discussed in the report with access to systems.

The watchdog will be issuing additional reports on DOGE access to Treasury payment systems, it says in the report. The topic has also been working its way through the courts. A district court judge granted a preliminary injunction limiting DOGE access to Treasury systems with sensitive information last year, although that was later modified to allow some access to systems.

GAO also released another report Tuesday on DOGE’s access to systems at the NLRB. Just over a year ago, a whistleblower in the agency said that DOGE had extracted troves of data from the agency using secretive methods during March 2025.

The NLRB’s inspector general has an ongoing investigation into the whistleblower’s declaration, the office confirmed to Nextgov/FCW.

GAO’s new report, however, focuses only on the period after DOGE was detailed into the agency in mid-April, so “to not overlap with the NLRB Inspector General’s Investigation.”

Whistleblower Aid, which is representing the NLRB whistleblower, noted the significance of GAO beginning its review period after their client’s disclosed events took place.

“Because the GAO did not investigate any matters that fell within the timeframe disclosed by our client — in fact scoping it out of their investigation — the report cannot address our client's detailed accounts,” Whistleblower Aid told Nextgov/FCW. “Accordingly, the timeframe investigated by the GAO has no relationship to the wrongdoing witnessed by the whistleblower in February to early April 2025.”

GAO found that the DOGE team asked for access to NLRB systems, but didn’t use the access it was granted. DOGE didn’t even pick up NLRB laptops before their detail agreements expired in July, according to GAO.

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IRS whistleblower program set for possible overhaul after bipartisan House vote

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:29:05 -0400

The House on Monday passed, 346-10, a bipartisan bill that would make several reforms to an IRS whistleblower program that has recovered billions from noncompliant taxpayers.

“This is real money returned to the Treasury that would otherwise have been lost,” said Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., the measure’s sponsor, during floor remarks. “In many cases, these are complex, high-dollar schemes that would not have been identified without insider information, proving that whistleblowers play an essential role in upholding the integrity of our tax code.”

The IRS Whistleblower Program Improvement Act (H.R. 7959) would:

Modify the standard for reviewing whistleblower award determinations in the U.S. Tax Court in order to allow new evidence to be introduced during appeal.
Permit whistleblowers to be anonymous before the Tax Court, unless there is a “societal interest” in disclosing their identity.
Require interest on certain whistleblower payments if the IRS does not meet the deadline to inform the individual of an award recommendation, as part of an effort to ensure the tax agency distributes payments in a timely manner.

“Whistleblowers often face uncertainty and long delays. And in some cases, they face real personal and professional risk just for coming forward,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., a cosponsor of the bill, in a statement. “We need to be doing everything we can to fix those problems.”

Kelly and Thompson are the chair and ranking member of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Tax.

In 2025, the IRS reported that it has collected about $7.5 billion as a result of protected disclosures since 2007, leading to more than $1.3 billion in awards to whistleblowers. According to the tax agency, payments tend to be 15 to 30% of funds received due to the whistleblower’s information.

The National Whistleblower Center nonprofit backed the bipartisan measure, arguing it would “revitalize” the IRS whistleblower program after experiencing declining financial recoveries in recent years. The right-leaning National Taxpayers Union nonprofit also endorsed the legislation.

The bill is now headed to the Senate. Provisions that are identical to the House-passed measure are also in the bipartisan Taxpayer Assistance and Service Act (S. 3931), which was introduced in February but has not yet received any votes.

A spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has previously introduced similar legislation regarding the IRS whistleblower program, said in a statement to Government Executive that he “welcomes” passage of the House bill and will work with the sponsors of the Senate measure “to enact these important reforms into law.”

The IRS recently completed its first tax season since the Trump administration’s staffing reductions across government. The tax agency also had to contend with implementing changes to the tax code mandated by the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act as well as onboarding delays due to the fall 2025 government shutdown and federal hiring freeze.

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EPA workers disciplined for dissent letter get legal aid from whistleblower groups

Erich Wagner — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:22:18 -0400

A pair of whistleblower protection organizations announced Tuesday that they will represent dozens of Environmental Protection Agency staffers who were suspended last year following their endorsement of a “declaration of dissent” to Administrator Lee Zeldin in proceedings before a quasi-judicial agency challenging their discipline.

Last summer, more than 600 EPA employees signed the letter excoriating Zeldin’s leadership of the agency, alleging among other things that his leadership undermined scientific consensus in favor of polluters. Though a majority of signatories did so anonymously, the agency quickly suspended more than 100 employees who publicly signed onto the letter. Ultimately, the agency handed out a range of disciplinary measures, from letters of reprimand to unpaid suspensions and even termination.

Last December, half a dozen of those employees who were targeted with firing challenged their terminations before the Merit Systems Protection Board, but at the time said they were working with environmental advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility to obtain legal representation in those cases. On Tuesday, whistleblower organizations Lawyers for Good Government and the Government Accountability Project announced they would aid in their cases.

According to L4GG and GAP, 15 complaints in connection with the firings and other discipline have already been filed with the Office of Special Counsel, alleging violations of the employees’ First Amendment and whistleblower protections, and “many more” will be lodged in the coming days.

“Lawyers for Good Government is proud to stand with these courageous employees for doing exactly what the law protects, and what the public demands, in telling the truth about dangerous government misconduct,” said Traci Feit Love, L4GG’s founder and executive director. “Retaliation against them is not just illegal, it’s a direct assault on the democratic principles that protect public servants who expose threats to public safety.”

Recent reporting from E&E News suggests that EPA leadership was warned that disciplining those who signed the dissent letter was likely unjustified under the rules governing federal employment. Officials within the agency told leadership that signing the letter did not run afoul of ethics rules, and a top EPA lawyer warned taking action against them constituted a “significant” risk of legal liability in an email apparently accidentally divulged by EPA’s Freedom of Information Act office.

“Taking any such action would present significant legal risk, as the letter is likely protected speech under the First Amendment,” said Nate Nichols, an assistant general counsel at EPA within its employment law practice group.

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McMahon distances herself from past Education layoffs, vows some rebuilding even amid elimination effort

Eric Katz — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:51:06 -0400

The Education Department went too far with some of its cuts last year and certain issues were handled in an “inadequate” way, the agency’s leader told lawmakers on Tuesday as she vowed to reempower some parts of her agency.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon stressed that the cuts were in motion before she arrived at the department and in some cases were “difficult” to defend. The department has laid off one-third of its employees and has seen an overall cut of about half of its workforce through those cuts and various incentive programs.

McMahon did not strike an entirely remorseful tone, however, as she repeatedly defended both efforts to outsource core Education responsibilities to other federal agencies and the larger project of shuttering the department entirely. She has overseen 10 partnerships with the departments of State, Interior, Health and Human Services and Labor to date, which has led to Education employees detailing out to those agencies and conducting largely the same work from a different location while remaining on the Education payroll.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee panel that held Tuesday’s hearing, questioned the virtue of such changes.

“You are sending Department of Education employees to work at other agencies to administer the same programs from different buildings,” Baldwin said. “At best, this will prove nothing about what the Department of Education does. It's making everything more complicated for states and local school districts.”

Lawmakers and advocates have repeatedly expressed concerns with the Trump administration’s plans, echoing those within the department both before and after the changes took effect. Baldwin alluded to previous findings of issues with Labor’s grants management, suggesting it was ill-suited to take on even greater responsibilities from Education. McMahon conceded “there are opportunities in every agency to improve their grant programs.”

“There's some hiccups along the way at the beginning, but in the end, this is a program that I believe will help our students,” the secretary said, adding the prevalence of students unable to read or write at their associated grade level made clear that Education required a shakeup.

While McMahon boasted of her success in having “shrunk our bloated bureaucracy,” she acknowledged some services have been negatively impacted and lamented some of the reductions in force.

“The RIF happened a week after I got sworn in,” McMahon said. “The process had been in place to reduce greatly the Department of Education, the number of people there, under very stringent budget requirements that we were given.”

Asked by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., how she could defend the cuts given growing backlogs in some areas, McMahon acknowledged it was a challenge to do so.

“It is very difficult when I’m trying to address those particular issues except to know that those things were happening and we look forward to them stop happening,” McMahon said.

When Murphy pushed back that the resulting challenges were foreseeable due to the staff cuts, the secretary responded, “Well, that is hindsight.” Murphy asked for clarification, leading McMahon to say, “You know perfectly well what that means.”

Several senators focused on backlogs to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and cases before the Office of Civil Rights, with the latter drawing particular scrutiny after the department shed half of the component’s staff. McMahon said the department is working diligently to address casework and has asked laid off OCR staff to return. Education joins the Health and Human Service Department, Interior Department, General Services Administration, Internal Revenue Service and other agencies that have recalled employees it had pushed out.

McMahon suggested the department’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal would lead to the hiring of more attorneys to process claims at OCR. Murphy pushed back, noting the office was slated for a 35% cut in the proposal. McMahon denied the claim, suggesting Murphy’s numbers were inaccurate.

The budget would in fact cut the OCR by 35%, from $140 million to $91 million. As of February, the office employed 327 individuals. While McMahon insisted the budget would increase that total, it instead proposed a total of 271 employees, a 17% reduction. The secretary later said that staffing level “a floor number,” and she was hopeful “we’ll have the ability to increase” it.

The issue was one of several in which McMahon told lawmakers they would have to “agree to disagree,” something Democrats on the panel were reluctant to accept.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of disagreeing,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. “I think it’s a matter of very poor policy.”

In Education’s fiscal 2026 appropriations bill, lawmakers included language prohibit the transfer of funding for interagency agreements without direct support in law and stated that "no authorities exist for the Department of Education to transfer its fundamental responsibilities under numerous authorizing and appropriations laws, including through procuring services from other federal agencies, of carrying out those programs, projects, and activities to other federal agencies.” Lawmakers did not appear to explicitly ban the agreements and details altogether, however, instead asking for biweekly briefings with significant details on the costs, staffing implications and impacts on grantees and other stakeholders.

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DHS funding bill stalls as House GOP seeks changes to Senate deal

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:20:16 -0400

House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to make changes to a Senate-passed bill that would end the shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, a move that will further delay funding and prolong the stalemate that began in mid-February.

The holdup could again interrupt paychecks for workers at the Transportation Security Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency, both of which are part of DHS. Huge backups in airline security lines resulted in March when TSA officers went without pay for weeks until the administration scrambled to reprogram funds.

Johnson, R-La., has chosen not to negotiate potential tweaks in the funding bill with Senate Democrats, who will be needed to advance it if the House makes alterations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said during a Tuesday afternoon press conference the bill that’s stalled in the House doesn’t “need tweaks.”

“They're just stuck. So they come up with, ‘We need some technical changes,’” he said. “Hold up national security for technical changes? It's absurd. They can pass the bill right now.”

Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, said during a brief interview she was “flabbergasted” by Johnson’s comments.

She added during the press conference she has “no idea what technical changes they're looking at.”

House hasn’t voted on DHS funding

The Senate unanimously passed a bill to fund the vast majority of the Department of Homeland Security in late March and again in early April. Johnson hasn’t put it to the House floor for a vote, blocking it from becoming law.

The legislation doesn't include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Border Patrol, a compromise negotiated after Republicans and Democrats were unable to broker agreement on guardrails for immigration enforcement operations.

Republicans plan to provide upwards of $70 billion in additional spending for ICE and Border Patrol in a party-line budget reconciliation bill they hope to pass in the coming weeks.

Johnson said last week he believes the “sequencing is important” on when each of the two bills becomes law. But time is running out for the tens of thousands of federal workers, who are about to miss out on their paychecks once again.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement the executive order President Donald Trump signed earlier this month to pay all DHS employees despite the funding lapse can only stretch so far.

“That money is dried up if I continue down this path the first week of May,” Mullin said. “My payroll through DHS is just over $1.6 billion every two weeks so the money is going extremely fast and once that happens there is no emergency funds after that.”

‘We’ve got to get these agencies funded’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he’s working with House GOP leaders to “massage” the DHS funding bill in hopes it will become law sometime soon.

“I'm very sympathetic,” he said. “We talked last night and he's got to manage his challenges there. We have to manage our challenges here. But one way or the other, we've got to get these agencies funded.”

The disconnect between House Republicans and their Senate GOP counterparts on when to fund DHS is just one of several challenges party leaders are attempting to address this week.

“We're trying as best we can to coordinate strategy with the House. But, you know, it's a unique situation. We've got very narrow margins and people with real strong opinions,” Thune said. “So it's going to take, obviously, I think, the heavy involvement of the White House to bust some of these things loose. But we're trying as best we can to ensure that we can get all of these issues across the finish line and ultimately on the president's desk.”

Republican leaders will need the support of their own members as well as at least some Democrats in order to get major legislation, including the DHS funding bill, to Trump.

But as of midday Tuesday, it didn’t appear they’d looped in key negotiators on possible changes to the Senate-passed spending bill.

Recess next week

Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt, chairwoman of the subcommittee in charge of funding DHS, said she didn’t know what changes House GOP leaders wanted to make.

“I am not aware. I just know that we need to find a pathway forward,” she said. “And nobody should be leaving here, or certainly flying off to (congressional delegation trips), until we do.”

Both chambers of Congress are scheduled to leave on Thursday for a weeklong break.

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, ranking member on the DHS funding panel, said House Republicans hadn’t reached out to him or his staff.

“I don't know why he's making this more complicated than it needs to be,” he said. “Our bill, which passed the Senate 100 to zero, would pass the House easily.”

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House GOP on Trump’s 2027 pay freeze: ‘That’s politics’

Erich Wagner — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:44:56 -0400

Republican appropriators in the House last week thwarted efforts by their Democratic colleagues to override President Trump’s apparent plan to freeze civilian federal employees’ pay next year and restore civil service and workplace protections currently on the chopping block.

The House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines to advance its draft of the fiscal 2027 Financial Services and General Government spending bill last week, the culmination of a marathon markup hearing that spanned multiple days. That legislation is traditionally the vehicle by which lawmakers move to overrule a president’s pay raise plans for the following year.

Earlier this month, President Trump released his budget blueprint for fiscal 2027, but the document was silent on civilian federal compensation. An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson told Government Executive that the plan envisions a pay freeze next year, while military personnel would get raises between 5 and 7% next year, depending on their rank. Last year, Trump’s so-called “skinny budget” was similarly silent on federal pay, but the president ultimately implemented a 1% across-the-board increase for most feds, with supplementary increases for feds in some law enforcement positions.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., urged lawmakers to support a 3.1% raise for feds, a figure he said was aimed at approximating the cost-of-living adjustment federal retirees and Social Security beneficiaries would likely see next year. Democrats earlier this year put forth a plan to provide a 4.1% average pay raise to federal civilian workers, split between a 3.1% across-the-board increase and a 1% average increase in locality pay.

“[This raise would be] a recognition of the extraordinary service that they perform on a regular basis for the American people, and very importantly, in carrying out the duties that we have assigned them through legislation,” Hoyer said. “[This] enmity toward government ought not be enmity toward federal employees. We ought not to devalue them.”

But Rep. David Joyce, R-Ohio, chairman of the panel’s financial services and general government subcommittee, said his caucus would not step on the president’s toes in his efforts to reshape the federal workforce, including on issues of compensation.

“Just as President Biden increased the workforce by 6%, this administration has made streamlining the workforce and reducing spending two of its main goals,” he said. “Presidents often use alternative pay plans when setting pay increases, and this president has chosen to increase law enforcement [salaries] at a higher rate than office workers, which is his prerogative. That’s the reality of politics, and that’s exactly why we have elections every four years.”

The amendment failed by a 28-32 vote.

Hoyer also proposed an amendment that would have barred federal agencies from using fiscal 2027 funding to implement a pair of new job categories—Schedule Policy/Career and Schedule G. The first, formerly known as Schedule F, threatens to strip at least 50,000 career federal workers in “policy-related” positions of their civil service protections, making them at-will employees, while Schedule G creates a new avenue to hire more political appointees into government.

“What they want to do is, which the [1883] Pendleton Act was designed to avoid, is the politicization of the civil service,” Hoyer said. “The pride of our country has been that we have a non-hack civil service, a civil service composed of people who carry out their duties faithfully, and if they don’t, they ought to be fired. But what they should not be is turned into 50,000 additional political appointees, by either administration, Democrat or Republican.”

Joyce again declined to mount a policy defense but nonetheless opposed the measure. Republicans defeated the amendment by a 27-33 vote.

“While I certainly appreciate his various positions regarding some of the administration’s changes to the federal workforce, they fall within his prerogative,” he said. “The previous president made workforce changes as well, and these prerogatives only reinforce that elections have consequences.”

Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., offered another amendment, this time blocking federal funds from being used to terminate collective bargaining agreements pursuant to the president’s pair of executive orders stripping two-thirds of the federal workforce of their union rights on national security grounds. The proposal mirrored a bill that the House approved on a bipartisan basis last December, following a successful discharge petition, but has stalled in the Senate.

“I represent a district where we have tens of thousands of federal government employees, many of whom were impacted by that EO, and these people are hardworking patriotic Americans, dedicated to serving the United States,” he said. “Many of them are veterans, who elected to continue to serve the public by becoming federal employees after they left military service and I think it’s important to treat all of these people fairly.”

But Republicans again opposed the measure, on the grounds that the issue falls under another committee’s purview. The amendment failed by a 29-31 vote, with Rep. Nick Lolota, R-N.Y., a sponsor of last year’s bill, joining Democrats in support.

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Former civil servants aim to shape policy as members of Congress

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:19:30 -0400

After Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, Chris Backemeyer urged the federal employees he supervised not to leave their jobs.

“I was trying to encourage them to stay in government and to continue their public service,” he said. “I tried to explain how, even when parties change, we're nonpartisan civil servants who are supposed to be implementing their policies, you’ll still find rewarding work, we need your expertise — all that sort of thing.”

Soon after, however, the senior State Department official realized that this administration change would be different from the several other transfers of power he had previously experienced.

“The [Department of Government Efficiency] came in, and they just wanted me to fire a lot of people. We were asked to basically pick 15%, and that's when I realized that I was playing by different rules,” he said. “I was trying to be faithful to the oath that I took to the Constitution. But there wasn't any mission or purpose left when DOGE came in. It was just about destruction and retribution. That's when I decided to leave.”

But Backemeyer could be returning to the federal government soon; this time as a member of Congress. He is one of dozens of former civil servants who left or were pushed out under Trump who are now running for political office.

Backemeyer, a Democrat, is a candidate for a House seat in Nebraska, where he was born and raised.

He argued that his experience in government, which included overseeing billions in foreign assistance, advising Vice President Kamala Harris on national security and participating in nuclear negotiations with Iran, would bolster his ability as a lawmaker to identify waste, fraud and abuse.

“A lot of the inefficiencies in federal agencies are a result of reporting requirements and appropriations that are required to be made for pet projects,” Backemeyer said. “In Congress, I want to work really hard to identify places where we can find more efficiency and try to get rid of some of the special interest projects that gum up the works and make our government less efficient.”

Backemeyer switched careers after 9/11, which resulted in him spending about two decades at the State Department. Today, however, he cautions people interested in public service about working for the federal government.

“I certainly have not discouraged people from considering public service, either through the civil service or otherwise in the federal government, but it is a hard place to be,” he said. “I have warned people that it's a difficult time to be in those jobs. As a general matter, I encourage everybody to figure out how they can find their own corner to fight in right now, because the only way that we reunite our country and move forward is through an active public debate and civic activism.”

Likewise, Lauren Reinhold, a Democrat running for a congressional seat in Kansas, originally intended to remain working in government during Trump’s second term. Both of her parents were federal employees, and she had enjoyed serving in several different roles at the Social Security Administration as well as the National Labor Relations Board.

But she chose to leave after the Trump administration began implementing Schedule Policy/Career, which would remove civil service job protections for tens of thousands of federal employees.

“I realized the job would become loyalty-based, patronage-based and not about serving the public anymore and [instead] about serving essentially a potentially authoritarian government,” she said.

Rather than go into the private sector, she decided to run for Congress in response to the Trump administration’s reforms and cuts to agencies across the federal government, including at SSA.

“It was so upsetting to me that I've felt driven to run for this office to fight for Kansans and our federal services,” she said. “And I wanted to keep serving, so that's why I didn't go into a for- profit or corporate environment.”

Similarly, Terry Jackson, who left his Justice Department job under a settlement that resolved claims of disability discrimination with respect to the Trump administration’s crackdown on telework and remote work, is running for a House seat in Maryland.

“I want to take these experiences that I have had — being in the military, being a federal employee, seeing how government works — I have the lived experience that I can take with me to Congress, and I can advocate for people who experience these types of situations,” he previously told Government Executive for an article about federal employees with disabilities being ordered to work in-person despite exceptions for them from the return-to-office directive.

Former feds are also competing in Republican primaries. For example, Kim Farington, who served in the federal government for more than 30 years, is running to challenge Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. She mostly worked in agency finance roles and says on her campaign website that her first priority is to “expose and eliminate inefficiencies, waste, and fraud in government spending, and reduce the national debt.”

A New York Times analysis found at least 36 first-time political candidates who left their federal jobs in 2025.

Reinhold hopes that she — and other former feds running for elected office — can increase trust in government, which has been at a historical low for years.

“I want to be an ambassador to restore trust in our federal services. Get people to recognize the importance of federal services — the ways they depend on it, even if they don't agree with everything the way it's done,” she said. “For the most part, people see my experience as good. I'm so excited, not just for myself, but all these other candidates who are running for offices at the state, local and federal level because we're going to really be able to impact government and bring trust back to government and make it more effective.”

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Agencies doled out $186B in improper payments last year, GAO says

Natalie Alms — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:48:58 -0400

The federal government made at least $186 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2025, according to a report released Monday by Congress’ watchdog.

The Government Accountability Office’s new estimate comes as the Trump administration continues to doggedly pursue its “war on fraud” to hunt out fraudulent government spending.

The latest numbers offer a point-in-time look at how the government is doing with preventing payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in the incorrect amount. The category is broader than fraud, which is defined by willful misrepresentation. Although the majority of the $186 billion evaluated by GAO are overpayments, at least $10 billion of the total is money that should’ve been sent out, but wasn’t.

The government’s improper payments total is up by about $24 billion from the prior fiscal year, although that’s largely because of changes in what programs reported data, GAO said. The watchdog audited the improper payment data from 15 agencies’ financial statements across 64 programs.

Most of the improper payments are concentrated in five programs, GAO found, including Medicare, Medicaid, the earned income tax credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The Trump administration has been zeroing in on fraud in Medicare and Medicaid already, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced last week that the Trump administration will require all states to revalidate Medicaid providers.

Oz has also announced state-level Medicaid probes, mostly of blue states, as part of his effort to stamp out fraud, although that rollout hasn’t been flawless. Last month, CMS admitted to an error in the fraud analysis of Medicaid in New York that it used to justify the scrutiny into the state program.

The White House is also working across federal agencies to comb through government programs as part of Trump’s anti-fraud task force being led by Vice President JD Vance.

The crackdown is happening as midterms loom, with voters saying that they’re concerned about healthcare affordability.

Critics of the administration’s anti-fraud work say the administration is using the issue as a pretext for political goals and that false claims and the dismantling of government watchdogs are worsening the problem.

“As someone who has spent my career fighting fraud, I welcome any renewed attention on ferreting out fraud,” Mark Lee Greenblatt, formerly the inspector general at Interior Department, told Nextgov/FCW. But he said some of the administration’s moves have been “puzzling.”

“They’ve proposed slashing OIG budgets markedly. And that is counterproductive to the fight against fraud,” said Greenblatt. “If you want to fight fraud, fund the fraud-fighters.”

Trump fired Greenblatt and about 20 other watchdogs soon after taking office last year. He also issued nearly three dozen pardons and commutations for people accused of fraud last year.

Lawmakers have also taken on the mantle of fraud fighting. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is planning to mark up nine bills tomorrow focused on the issue. Among them is a proposal to create a permanent anti-fraud data platform for OIGs. Oversight officials have long recommended that lawmakers improve data sharing within the government.

The bills being considered are a “huge bright spot,” Linda Miller, an anti-fraud expert who worked at GAO for years, told Nextgov/FCW. They remove “a ton of barriers that I have been talking about for a decade.”

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From bowling repairs to zoology, Trump admin consolidates job titles affecting 5,000 feds

Eric Katz — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:55:28 -0400

Bartenders, meatcutters, woodworkers and bookbinders will all no longer be official job titles in the federal government after the Office of Personnel Management announced on Friday it was consolidating 115 occupational series that it said are obsolete or redundant.

The change will impact around 5,000 employees, the federal government’s human resources agency said, though the employees will be shifted into new job titles and may not see any impact to their pay. OPM said the consolidated roles, which will be absorbed into the many hundreds of remaining job series, will help streamline positions with low employment or obsolete duties, modernize job classifications, promote more transparent qualification standards and better support hiring based on skills rather than educational attainment.

In the first phase of the overhaul, OPM said it focused primarily on job series with fewer than 100 employees across government, outdated roles that require non-transferable skills, little or no hiring activity over the last few years or no projected need for replacements based on workforce planning. It also identified roles that are duplicative with other occupational categories or that no agency identified a need to maintain.

The impacts will be felt across a wide range of governmental activities. The elimination of the “office automation clerical and assistance” role will affect the most individuals at 862. More than 600 “guides” throughout government — those who give talks, tours, explanations and provide other services to guests at parks and other sites of public interest — will be absorbed into the “general arts and information” job series.

Just two staff involved in “bowling equipment repairing” — whose work includes “minor repairs to bowling approaches and pins” — will see their job series phased out. Many military bases throughout the country maintain bowling alleys on site. The vast activity at military sites account for additional job series the government no longer needs, in part due to the outsourcing of such work, including bakers, bartenders, meatcutters and waiters. Those roles will now be consolidated into the “general food preparation and serving” category.

Some of the eliminated jobs no longer have any people working in them: the government currently employs zero elevator operators or film assemblers and repairers, and the titles will be abolished.

Interior of passenger elevator, showing operator controls. Credit: Library of Congress

One federal HR official praised OPM for the changes, saying it made sense to generally clean up and simplify the list of federal roles and would significantly reduce back-end burdens when hiring for certain specialized or scientific roles.

“It’s the most reasonable and data driven change we’ve seen [from OPM] so far,” the official said.

OPM said the effort would bring “clarity and consistency” across the government and better support the needs of agencies.

“The evolution of work across government, including new technologies, scientific advances, and shifting mission demands, has led many series to become low-use, outdated, or overlapping,” OPM said.

It reminded agencies to follow all existing statutes on pay and grade retention, as well to adhere to their collective bargaining requirements. The agency said it would “provide comprehensive implementation guidance” to ensure a consistent approach across government, protect employee rights and minimize disruption.

OPM acknowledged that employees and stakeholders would have questions about the changes and vowed to ensure a smooth transition. Some of the consolidated jobs require highly specialized skills and extensive hands-on training and those expectations will not change, it said. It will work with agencies to help them write clear position descriptions for specialty, mission-critical jobs.

Some of the impacted jobs are technical or scientific in nature, such as for the government's nearly three-dozen zoologists or its more than 300 employees in fish and wildlife administration. Those employees will become general natural resources managers and biologists. The federal HR official said the more generalized categories will make it far easier for hiring personnel to determine whether an applicant meets minimum qualifications.

As OPM stated, many of the consolidated job functions already appear to be waning in prevalence. The government will no longer hold a specialized title for its nine theater specialists and its lone remaining “coin/currency checker” — whose job is to visually examine finished coins for defects, discoloration or missing letters, as well as U.S. currency, stamps and bonds for any imperfections — will no longer have such a distinct title.

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The ‘doers’ need a budget: Why a $100 million council fund can end federal management failures

Dana Fowler — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

When a problem exists within one federal agency, it’s a safe bet it exists elsewhere — maybe everywhere. But how would any agency leader know that? Only by bringing key executives together will you discern a pattern, identify the scale and scope of the problem, and be able to develop and implement potential solutions.

A forum exists today to focus on cross-government management issues and solve big problems — in theory. In practice, the Federal Executive Councils are vastly underutilized, underfunded and ultimately without ‘power’ to solve real cross-agency issues. Today’s chaotic environment challenges us to rethink and repurpose the councils into a more functional, directed and empowered community.

Members of the councils may not have chainsaws, but they do have deep knowledge of Financial Management (CFO), Acquisition (CAO), Data (CDO), Human Capital (CHCO), Information Technology (CIO), Grants (GMO), Evaluation (EO), Performance (PIO), Privacy (CPO) and Real Property. These are not the “talking heads” you see on the news or even those leading critical federal programs. These are the leaders who ensure those folks can do their jobs. These are career executives whose work keeps the lights on, pays the bills, ensures contracts are legal and programs are evaluated. These are the people who know where the systems are broken, what legislation ties their hands and where critical investments can solve pervasive problems.

Currently, the policy direction for management functions within the federal government is established by the Office of Management and Budget, specifically the M-side (Management) as they are known. While well intentioned, staff on this side of OMB is overextended and generally has limited agency experience. Policy is often developed by OMB staffers without any input from the agency staff — “the doers” — who must implement these government-wide directives. These agency staff often have both deep technical knowledge in the key operational areas — IT, procurement, HR, data collection and reporting — as well as broad-based knowledge of potential implementation challenges, unintended consequences, hidden costs and tradeoffs.

Even when input from agencies is solicited, this is typically more performative than informative, often via working groups in which agencies are expected to salute and not raise any questions or concerns.

This disconnect between OMB and agencies can lead to fundamental errors in policy, undermining future implementation. Further, when the M-side releases a guidance document directing agencies to comply, there is absolutely no incentive to do so beyond avoiding the ‘stick’ — and even that is limited as it is the B-side (Budget) who control the purse strings. Neither side of OMB has money to fund these new tasks, so most are assimilated by existing functions with limited staffing. The directives are thus relegated to simply one more ‘compliance’ task.

Alternatively, the Federal Executive Councils, properly unleashed, could craft management policies based on real experience “in the trenches” at agencies. Proposed policies could be sufficiently pressure tested with the broad agency representation on the councils and ensure implementation is possible within existing limitations. Ultimately, these councils could tackle and manage big challenges which have, to date, been slow to resolve, like fraud detection, budget transparency and acquisition streamlining.

Solving big problems that cross federal silos cannot be accomplished with current funding models. Federal appropriations law typically limits the use of funds to mission and mission-support. When a problem exists that extends beyond a single agency, there are tight controls on how dollars can be spent.

Currently, a small fund exists for the Federal Executive Councils and their innovations, but it is far less than it would take to solve these issues. As such, the current fund has been used for projects with relatively limited impact — handbooks for a specific council, trainings, shared hiring announcements, etc.. These monies are collected from existing agencies and their use is expanded by Congress. Imagine what could be accomplished with an unrestricted, direct appropriation to seasoned management executives, in the $100M or greater range, more than five times the current fund amount. Executives would stay plugged into their agency work, while spending a dedicated portion of their time on cross-federal work.

The time is ripe for big change, impactful change. Political appointees — with or without chainsaws — simply can’t do the job if they don’t understand the federal space, the policy constraints and the problems. Let’s use the Federal Executive Councils to confront the challenges and give them a budget that will allow them to innovate, test and scale solutions to tackle government’s biggest management problems. Members of our Federal Executive Councils are a virtually untapped resource for cost-effective, impactful, cross-agency solutions to some of the federal government’s most vexing challenges.

Dana Fowler, a former federal manager, is currently senior advisor for We the Doers, a nonprofit focused on government reform informed by career leaders. For a period of nine years, Ms. Fowler worked with the Executive Councils, first as deputy director of the Performance Improvement Council, then as deputy associate director of the Federal Executive Councils support team in the Office of Governmentwide Policy at GSA.

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Trump evacuated from White House Correspondents’ Dinner after shots fired

Jane Norman, States Newsroom — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:33:25 -0400

President Donald Trump was declared safe by the Secret Service after being evacuated from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at a hotel in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night after shots were fired.

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president would deliver a statement in the briefing room at the White House later Saturday night. In a social media post, Trump said he was in “perfect condition.”

Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said in a statement on social media the incident occurred near the main magnetometer screening area at the dinner. “The president and first lady are safe along with all protectees,” he said. “One individual is in custody.”

An initial press pool report from the hotel after the shooting occurred said, “There were several loud bangs, and the Secret Service, with guns drawn, rushed the pool out of the room. The Secret Service pushed us back, screaming ‘Shots fired.’”

Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News said on social media shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern that she was behind the podium with other guests, “in a hold,” and Trump was still down the hall and did not want to leave.

Trump himself confirmed that in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job,” he wrote. “They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’ but, will entirely be guided by Law Enforcement. They will make a decision shortly. Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned, and we’ll just, plain, have to do it again. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said on air that he heard “a really loud blasting away,” and the next thing he knew, he was being pushed to the floor by police. “I was just a few feet away from the gunman, and it was a really scary moment,” Blitzer said.

The annual formal dinner, at the Washington Hilton hotel, is hosted by an organization made up of journalists who cover the White House. Trump’s invitation to the event had been controversial, given his frequent personal attacks on reporters and the news media in general.

The Hilton was also the site of another attack on a president when, on the afternoon of March 30, 1981, gunman John Hinckley shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan while he was leaving the hotel. Reagan recovered after a stay in the hospital. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, also was wounded.

Details of the shooter’s motive and plan were not immediately clear, but if the shooter was targeting Trump, it would be the third attempt on his life.

Trump was injured in an assassination attempt during a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Another suspected assassin was arrested near Trump’s home in Florida on Sept. 15 of that year.

This is a breaking report that will be updated.

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Senate advances GOP budget blueprint to boost ICE and Border Patrol funding

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:10:19 -0400

Senate Republicans approved a budget resolution early Thursday intended to speed the way for billions for immigration enforcement, sending the measure to the House, where GOP lawmakers in that chamber need to adopt it to unlock the reconciliation process.

The 50-48 vote followed a marathon amendment voting session that Democrats used to highlight policy differences on cost-of-living issues and stalled federal emergency relief dollars for states.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul were the two Republicans to vote against approving the measure. Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Mark Warner, D-Va., did not vote.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said just before the vote-a-rama began that Democrats would put Republicans on the record about the soaring cost of living and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

“America will see even more clearly tonight where the Republicans are — not on the side of lowering costs, but on the side of masked agents occupying our streets,” he said.

Republicans plan to use the complex budget reconciliation process, which avoids the need for Democratic support in the Senate, to provide between $70 billion and $140 billion in additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.

The money is supposed to cover those agencies for the next three years, avoiding the need for Republicans to negotiate constraints on immigration activities with Democrats, who have been calling for guardrails since federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

When combined with the Senate-passed bill that funds the vast majority of the Department of Homeland Security for the current fiscal year, the two pieces of legislation are expected to end the ongoing shutdown at that department, which began in mid-February.

One amendment adopted, 15 turned down

Senators ultimately debated 16 amendments, 12 offered by Democrats and four proposed by Republicans. The only one adopted was from South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, which senators approved on a 98-0 vote.

The proposal would create a reserve fund to bolster federal immigration agents’ ability to detain and deport adults who entered the country without proper documentation and were then convicted of rape, murder or sexual abuse of a minor.

“Everybody in this body should be for this,” Graham said. “These people need to be caught, put in jail or kicked out of our country.”

Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said he supported the amendment because “under current law, undocumented immigrants who are convicted of rape, murder or sexual abuse of a minor are subject to mandatory detention and deportation.”

“What we object to is what is happening in the streets of Minneapolis and Chicago,” he added.

SAVE America Act sidelined

Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy tried but was ultimately unable to convince his colleagues to add a new set of instructions to the budget resolution that would have allowed the Rules & Administration Committee to write a voter identification law.

Kennedy said he wanted that bill to have three provisions.

“Require that in federal elections, you have to be an American citizen to vote and provide for the provisions to enforce that. Number two, it would require that in federal elections, you have to prove you are who you say you are in order to vote, and it would provide provisions to enforce that,” he said. “Number three, it further instructs the Rules Committee that we're going to go back to having an Election Day and not an election month, and it instructs the Rules Committee to provide the provisions to enforce that.”

California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla, the ranking member of the rules panel, opposed the amendment during debate, saying he couldn’t believe lawmakers were once again experiencing a “partisan attempt to rush through what I refer to as a solution in search of a problem.”

“Despite the president's claims, there is zero evidence of massive voter fraud across the country, which is the premise of these proposals,” he said. “So not only is it a solution in search of a problem, to paraphrase a wise man, this measure is all foam and no beer.”

Padilla added that a provision in Kennedy’s amendment would have required states to count ballots within 36 hours of an election, a new mandate he said could cause considerable problems for larger states with millions of voters.

“It's unfortunate elections administration has been turned into a partisan issue,” he said. “I actually ask our colleagues to protect the early voters, not just in my state but in yours. Protect vote-by-mail opportunities, not just in my state but in yours. Let's protect women who are married and change their name and their right to vote, not just in my state but in yours.”

Senators did not agree to waive a point of order against Kennedy’s amendment on a 48-50 vote. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Murkowski and Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted with Democrats.

Ban on Planned Parenthood funding via Medicaid

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley tried unsuccessfully to create a pathway to extend the one-year prohibition on Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood that the GOP included in its “big, beautiful” law. That funding ban expires on July 4.

Hawley didn’t speak about abortion access during debate but focused his criticism of the organization on gender-affirming health care services for transgender youth.

“Under no circumstance should Medicaid money dedicated to the poor and the needy be used for transgender surgeries and treatments for minor children,” he said. “It is a moral outrage. This body has a duty to stand against it.”

Planned Parenthood’s website states the organization provides surgery referrals as well as hormone therapy, puberty blockers and “transition support.”

Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden argued the amendment represented “Republicans’ latest attempt to strip women of the health care they need and depend on so that they can go score some political points.”

Senators didn’t agree to waive a point of order against the amendment, which would have allowed it to move forward, by a vote of 50-48. Collins and Murkowski voted with Democrats.

Private equity and home ownership

Senators rejected an amendment from Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley that would have addressed the rising cost of housing after he invoked comments President Donald Trump made during his State of the Union address.

“We have an opportunity tonight to send a message that we agree with the president, that we have a challenge in home ownership, because home ownership is dying,” Merkley said. “And one of the factors is private equity buying up the homes.”

Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno spoke out against adopting the amendment, saying lawmakers have already addressed it in a bipartisan way.

“I obviously urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment, because we've already passed it,” he said. “We've already solved this problem. In fact, congratulations to all of us. 89 to 10. We banned institutional ownership of single-family homes. I think that's fantastic.”

The Senate voted in March to approve a bill designed to increase the country’s housing supply, according to reporting from NPR. But since the House has approved a bill of its own, the two chambers will need to work out their differences before any housing bill becomes law.

Senators did not agree to adopt Merkley’s amendment following a 46-52 party-line vote.

Disaster relief funds from FEMA

California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff proposed an amendment that would have addressed stalled funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which he said is “holding more than $3 billion in disaster relief funding for California.”

“But as we debate this budget resolution, I know our state of California is not alone,” he said. “North Carolina is waiting on millions in relief designated for Hurricane Helene in 2024. Kentucky saw landslides and flooding just weeks after Los Angeles County burned. Florida and the Gulf Coast have also been battered. Texas communities under siege from last year's floods have still not seen the federal relief their communities need and deserve.”

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford opposed the amendment, saying that while he agrees FEMA funds need to get to communities, the best way to do that is for the House to pass the annual funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which the Senate already approved.

House GOP leaders are holding on to that bill instead of putting it on the floor as they wait for the reconciliation process to play out. That Senate-passed DHS bill funds FEMA and all of the agencies that make up the department except ICE and Border Patrol.

“Our challenge has been, we've been in a government shutdown on DHS now for two months," Lankford said. "We've got to be able to get those funds released. That means we've got to get DHS funding completely done for all of DHS. We have FEMA employees that are being paid but they don't have program dollars that they can actually release.”

The Senate rejected the amendment following a 49-49 vote. Collins, Florida Sen. Ashley Moody and Murkowski voted with Democrats.

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NIST is giving fingerprint examiners better tools for a messy job

John Breeden II — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:49:32 -0400

Americans have spent generations watching detectives in dark trenchcoats pore over complex crime scenes in movies and on television. They examine the room, snap photos and break out the familiar blue powder to dust for fingerprints. The ritual is so familiar that it can seem almost automatic.

What those scenes rarely capture is how much effort goes into making fingerprint examination more accurate, more consistent and easier to teach. That quieter work is exactly what the National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to strengthen.

NIST recently released two resources aimed at helping forensic fingerprint examiners do their jobs better. One is a fully annotated version of NIST’s Special Database 302, a collection of roughly 10,000 latent fingerprint images. The other is what NIST calls OpenLQM, newly created open-source software that helps assess the quality of latent fingerprints and sort them according to how much useful detail they contain. NIST says the two releases are meant to improve forensic fingerprint examination, which remains an important part of many criminal investigations.

Fingerprint analysis is one of those forensic tools that many people assume was perfected long ago. In reality, examiners often work with partial, smudged or otherwise imperfect prints recovered from real-world objects. Training people to evaluate those prints well takes experience, repetition and good examples. It also increasingly requires better ways to train software systems that can assist human examiners without replacing them.

NIST says the newly completed dataset will help train both human examiners and machine learning algorithms to distinguish important features and weigh their value as evidence.

The most vivid part of the NIST fingerprint accuracy project is how ordinary the source material really was. As NIST computer scientist Greg Fiumara explained, “The prints are from people we recruited to come in and do things like write a note, pick up a circuit board, handle a dollar bill, that sort of thing. Then we recovered the prints they left behind using different methods that crime scene investigators commonly use.”

So the new collection is not made up of idealized prints from a textbook. They are the kinds of latent impressions that people leave behind all the time while moving through everyday life.

That realism has been part of the project from the beginning. When NIST first released SD 302 in 2019, it described the database as a set of latent fingerprints left on everyday items by a few hundred volunteers in a lab setting, with other personal information stripped away. The point was not to create a neat archive of perfect examples, but to give researchers and examiners a more realistic way to measure accuracy and test methods against the kinds of prints they actually encounter.

What is new now is that the entire collection has been annotated. Those annotations mark details about fingerprint quality, including regions where ridge patterns are clear, smudged or incomplete.

NIST says those markings make the dataset much more valuable as a teaching tool because they show both humans and algorithms what to look for and what to avoid when evaluating a print. The annotations add structure and interpretive guidance to a dataset that already had broad global use. NIST says more than 1,000 research organizations in more than 90 countries have downloaded the collection since its initial release.

The second part of the project is just as practical. OpenLQM gives examiners a way to score the quality of a latent print on a scale from zero to 100. And it can run as a standard executable or be embedded inside another program or application for maximum portability. The new software can help investigators sort through large volumes of prints and focus their attention first on the ones most likely to contain useful identifying details.

As Fiumara put it, “you give OpenLQM a fingerprint and it returns a number from zero to 100 that is an assessment of the print’s quality.” NIST says the software was adapted from a tool once limited to U.S. law enforcement. It is now being made openly available in a form that can run on Mac, Windows or Linux.

Since the software is open-source and available for anyone to download, NIST is not just improving a government tool for internal use; it’s pushing better forensic resources into the wider scientific and practitioner community. The agency’s biometrics resources page now lists both Special Database 302 and OpenLQM among its available forensic databases and software tools, reinforcing the point that this is part of a broader effort to build reproducible, shareable infrastructure around forensic biometrics.

What makes the fingerprint accuracy project especially useful is that it focuses on the less glamorous side of forensic work. Instead of chasing some dramatic new breakthrough, NIST is improving the underlying tools that fingerprint examiners rely on every day. Better data, clearer annotations and a faster way to assess print quality may not look dramatic from the outside, but they can make difficult work more consistent and efficient.

That is what gives this release its value. It strengthens one of forensic science’s oldest disciplines without pretending to reinvent it. Human judgment still matters, and fingerprint work will probably always involve a measure of skill and interpretation.

So all those movies and TV shows with investigators (still wearing stylish black trenchcoats) dusting for prints will still be accurate — at least for now. But with better training material and advanced tools, that work can become more consistent and easier to teach while also producing more trustworthy results.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

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Fed employee appeals system independence at stake in new Supreme Court brief

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

A group of Senate Democrats on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision that enabled President Donald Trump to fire a member of their party from the agency that adjudicates federal employees’ appeals of adverse personnel actions.

In 2025, the president removed Merit Systems Protection Board member Cathy Harris as well as several other Democratic leaders of independent agencies.

Harris has argued that her firing violates the law, which stipulates that MSPB board members can only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” A federal appeals court in December, however, determined her ouster was lawful because “Congress may not restrict the president’s ability to remove principal officers who wield substantial executive power.”

In their amicus brief, Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., Mark Warner, D-Va., Tim Kaine, D-Va., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., contended that allowing a president to fire an MSPB member would upend the appeals system Congress set up for civil servants.

“The MSPB’s independence is central to the proper functioning of the civil service system,” they wrote. “Congress enacted the [Civil Service Reform Act] amid a growing consensus that the existing regime had become politically corrupted and inefficient. Congress’ answer to political meddling in the civil service was to create an independent MSPB to adjudicate federal employee claims.”

The Supreme Court has already heard arguments in a similar case regarding Trump’s firing of Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. Harris’ attorneys, however, have argued that the MSPB member’s removal is a legally distinct matter.

There can be up to three members of the MSPB, and no more than two can be from the same political party. The agency currently has two Republican members.

The MSPB in March ruled that the president has the authority to remove immigration judges and similar officials on an at-will basis. In response, a group of Senate Democrats likewise urged a federal court to expedite its consideration of two immigration judges’ appeal of their firings.

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Catch me if you can’t: How fraudsters are outpacing the government

Jordan Burris — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

For years, conversations about government fraud have focused on scale. The numbers are staggering. The Government Accountability Office estimates between $233 billion and $521 billion is lost to fraud annually but if we say the quiet part out loud that estimate is far too low. The reality that emerged from a recent cross-government roundtable of federal leaders shines a light on the urgency in this moment that is greater than any single number.

Fraud is no longer just large. It is fast.

Today’s fraud landscape is defined by speed, adaptability, and coordination at a level government systems were not built to match. What once took months to orchestrate can now happen in days, or even hours. As detailed in the report from the roundtable, in one documented case, fraud actors used artificial intelligence to generate more than 24,000 synthetic identities and launch nearly 36,000 attacks within a matter of weeks, many within just 48 hours of identity creation. That velocity makes it increasingly hard to keep up with the fraudsters.

This is no longer a question of fixing gaps in existing systems. It is a structural mismatch between how quickly fraud evolves, how slowly public sector controls adapt, and how the public sector continues to implement yesterday’s approaches to stopping fraud to a next generation problem. Programs designed to update annually by looking backwards are facing threats that iterate in real time and not as slowly as the federal budget process.

At the same time, something else is happening beneath the surface. The signals the government has long relied on to detect fraud are weakening. Identity markers, like consistent email addresses, phone numbers, and device fingerprints, are disappearing as fraudsters deliberately engineer around them. The result is a system where traditional safeguards are not just failing, they are being outpaced. And yet, the most striking takeaway from the roundtable was not the risk. It was the opportunity to do something better.

Prevention Is Finally Within Reach

There is now clear, operational evidence that fraud can be prevented before it happens. Recent efforts across Treasury and oversight bodies show that earlier intervention, backed by better data and modern analytics, can stop improper payments upstream without slowing down services. Prevention and speed are no longer opposing forces. Done right, they reinforce each other.

For decades, the government has relied on a “pay and chase” model. Funds go out quickly, and fraud is identified, prosecuted, and recovered later. But recovery is expensive, slow, and often incomplete. Prevention, by contrast, is immediate and far more effective. The challenge is that government incentives have not fully caught up.

Today, agencies are still rewarded for rapid disbursement and post-payment recovery, even as practitioners and evidence alike show that earlier screening delivers better outcomes. Fixing that misalignment is fundamentally a policy challenge.

The Coordination Problem

That theme emerged most sharply in discussions around federal grants. It is clear there are tools the public sector has available to prevent fraud, some older and many that have yet to be adopted. However, the responsibility, data, and intelligence is spread across agencies, states, and systems that were never designed to work together. When billions of dollars move through decentralized structures, even small coordination gaps can create significant exposure. Closing those gaps requires orchestrating what already exists, not reinventing the system.

And there are real reasons for optimism. Data-sharing authorities are expanding. Tools like Treasury’s Do Not Pay system are proving their value, identifying and preventing millions in improper payments with strong returns on investment. (This strategy is only scratching the surface of what is needed.) Perhaps most importantly, there is growing bipartisan consensus that prevention must happen earlier in the payment lifecycle. The Administration’s recent Executive Order on Fraud demonstrates commitment at the highest levels.

The Window to Act

The question now is whether that momentum can be sustained and scaled. Because fraud actors are not waiting. They are already adapting to new controls, leveraging artificial intelligence, global infrastructure, and increasingly sophisticated identity strategies. The window to respond is now measured in days or months, rather than years.

The takeaway from this roundtable is that the path forward is clearer than ever.

Move prevention upstream before the payment goes out.
Treat data and fraud risk intelligence sharing as essential and find the right way to do it.
Align incentives with outcomes that reward dollars never lost, not just dollars recovered.

Fraud is evolving quickly. The real test is whether government can evolve just as fast.

Jordan Burris is the Head of Public Sector at Socure, an industry-leading digital identity verification provider. Burris was previously Chief of Staff to the Federal CIO at the White House during the first Trump Administration.

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Executive order on mail ballots tests limits of Postal Service independence

Jonathan Shorman, States Newsroom — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:03:26 -0400

President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting would shatter decades of U.S. Postal Service independence intended to shield it from partisan politics, postal experts and attorneys say.

Postal experts said Trump ordering the postmaster general to take any action — let alone on a matter as sensitive as elections — violates guardrails in federal law against presidential control of the mail. Multiple people with deep knowledge of Postal Service history said they could not recall a similar order in the agency’s modern era.

“For the president to direct the postmaster general to do anything, including handling these ballots, is contrary to the statutes, contrary to law,” said James Campbell Jr., an attorney in the Washington, D.C., area who consults on postal law.

The order, signed March 31, attracted swift condemnation as an unconstitutional attempt by Trump to control state-run elections. If it stands, the directive would also represent a White House power grab over the Postal Service, which remains a key part of American life and business.

Trump’s order directs the postmaster general, who acts as the Postal Service’s CEO, to set out rules that would require states to notify the Postal Service if they intend to send ballots through the mail during federal elections. States that want to use the mail would be required to provide lists of mail voters to the Postal Service, which would be prohibited from delivering ballots to individuals not on a list.

A Board of Governors leads the Postal Service and holds the power to hire and fire the postmaster general. No more than five of the nine governors may belong to the same political party.

While presidents nominate the governors and the Senate confirms them, they serve seven-year terms. The length, in theory, insulates them from political pressure.

S. David Fineman, a Philadelphia attorney nominated to the Board of Governors by President Bill Clinton who served as its chairman from 2003 to 2005, said he had never heard of the White House or a president directing the postmaster general to take certain actions. He called the executive order highly unusual.

“The postmaster general serves at the pleasure of the board,” Fineman said.

The board currently has only four members, all appointed by President Joe Biden, and five vacancies. Trump has sent four nominations to the U.S. Senate this year. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has not scheduled confirmation hearings for the nominees.

Cash-strapped service

Trump has expressed interest in having more control over the mail.

Last year, he floated the possibility of merging the Postal Service with the Commerce Department, a move that would require approval by Congress. The Washington Post reported in February 2025 that Trump was expected to try to fire the Board of Governors and take control of the Postal Service.

The Trump administration takes a dim view of independent agencies. Many allies of the president subscribe to the unitary executive theory, the idea that the U.S. Constitution grants the president full power over the entirety of the executive branch — meaning Congress cannot constitutionally create agencies that exist outside of White House control.

Trump has moved to assert authority over a number of independent and quasi-independent agencies since taking office, most notably the Federal Reserve. The Department of Justice is investigating cost overruns on a Federal Reserve construction project, widely seen as a pretext to target Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate policy has angered Trump.

The Postal Service is under tremendous financial pressure — potentially making it more vulnerable to proposals to bring it under White House control. Mail volume peaked in 2006 at 213 billion pieces that year. The Postal Service today handles 109 billion pieces annually.

The current postmaster general, David Steiner, told a U.S. House committee last month that the Postal Service will run out of cash within a year without changes to its prices and operations. The Postal Service is generally funded through stamps and other forms of user revenue, not by tax dollars.

Steiner emphasized the independent nature of the Postal Service throughout his prepared testimony. He has laid out a number of options to improve the Postal Service’s financial stability, including changes to pension funding and raising its borrowing limit from $15 billion, a level that has remained unchanged since 1992.

“It is important to remember that we face these challenges as a self-financed, independent establishment of the Executive Branch,” Steiner wrote.

Congress approved sweeping legislation in 1970 reorganizing the U.S. Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service, an independent corporation. Before that, the postmaster general was a Cabinet-level position nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Trump’s order marks “a dramatic shift away from the intent of the 1970 legislation to insulate the Postal Service from interference,” Joseph M. Adelman, a history professor at Framingham State University in Massachusetts who has researched mail history, said.

Election security

The White House did not directly answer States Newsroom’s questions about Trump’s views on the independence of the Postal Service or the legal justification for the executive order.

“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

“The president will do everything in his power to lawfully defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Jackson also called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship when registering.

The Postal Service did not answer questions about how it plans to respond to the order. A USPS spokesperson said only that the Postal Service was reviewing it.

Lawsuits

Steiner has indicated he is awaiting a court decision on how to proceed.

“If a court says that’s not what the law means, we’ll follow that,” Steiner told The New York Times after the executive order was signed. “And so from our perspective, we don’t get involved in policy or law, we just follow the law.”

The order on mail ballots faces at least five lawsuits. The Democratic National Committee, top Democrats in Congress and Democratic state officials have all sued. The legal challenges emphasize the Postal Service’s independence in federal law.

The lawsuit filed by the DNC, top Democratic lawmakers and other Democratic campaign groups asserts the Postal Service is structured to operate independently of partisan politics. The complaint calls the Postal Service “indispensable” to voting by mail, noting that it delivered more than 222 million pieces of ballot mail in 2024, including nearly 100 million general election ballots.

A dozen Republican state attorneys general filed motions in court this week seeking to defend the executive order from the Democratic legal challenges. The motions call the order an example of cooperative federalism to provide states with optional resources to help protect their elections.

The GOP officials argue the Democrats lack standing to challenge the Postal Service provisions of the order and that their objections are premature because the Postal Service has not finalized any new rules on mail ballots.

The order “simply directs” the Postal Service “to initiate rulemaking — it does not regulate the states directly and it does not directly inhibit anyone’s voting rights,” a court filing by the state attorneys general says.

The states involved in the Republican-led defense of the order include Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.

Vote-by-mail

Mail-in voting surged in the 2020 general election amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when 43% of voters cast their votes by mail. The percentage of voters mailing their ballots has fallen from that peak but remains above pre-pandemic levels. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

During the 2024 election, 584,463 mail ballots returned by voters were rejected by election officials — 1.2% of returned mail ballots. About 18% of those ballots were rejected because they did not arrive on time.

American Postal Workers Union President Jonathan Smith said in a statement that the Postal Service does not block mailers from sending letters or refuse to deliver letters because of the identity of the sender. Postal workers take extraordinary measures to ensure ballots reach their destinations promptly and securely, he said.

“Postal workers take the sanctity of the mail seriously, and every process and policy of the Postal Service ensures that mail is accepted, processed and delivered, no matter who sent it or where it is going,” Smith said.

On Monday, more than 100 U.S. House Democrats sent a letter to Trump demanding he refrain from future actions that undermine the Postal Service’s independence and calling on him to rescind the executive order. The letter says the order sets “a dangerous precedent for political interference” in postal service operations.

Senate Democrats followed up with a letter to Steiner and the USPS Board of Governors on Tuesday, urging the Postal Service not to implement the order. The letter, signed by 37 senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, calls the Postal Service’s independence a “hallmark” of its operations.

“The Postal Service doesn’t care which politicians you may support,” Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said on the Senate floor last week. “Its only priority is to deliver the mail to every community in the country.”

“The president is now trying to corrupt this mission,” Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate committee that oversees USPS, said. “If the president is successful in forcing the Postal Service to play a role in running elections, he will completely erode the trust of this storied institution.”

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USDA kicks off more employee relocations, including some that spark déjà vu

Eric Katz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:15:07 -0400

Updated April 23 at 5:42 p.m.

The Agriculture Department on Thursday announced additional relocation plans for employees as part of its larger reorganization, including a new center for food inspectors in Iowa and a second attempt at sending research staff to Kansas City.

The Food Safety Inspection Service will send out two-thirds of its headquarters staff currently based in Washington, the agency said, to a newly stood up National Food Safety Center in Urbandale, Iowa, a new Science Center in Athens, Ga., or other locations. The Iowa facility will become FSIS’ largest office with 200 people and USDA said the changes will move staff “closer to the agricultural and food production systems that FSIS regulates.”

The department’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, meanwhile, will once again relocate employees to Kansas City. It also did so in President Trump’s first term, though President Biden subsequently moved the agencies’ headquarters back to Washington while keeping the Kansas City offices open. This time around, ERS and NIFA will move employees out of the capital region to Kansas City and bring other employees who have since been shifted to other locations back to that hub.

Following the 2019 moves, both agencies lost more than half of their staff, leading to a significant decline in productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover. The latest USDA reorganization plan received overwhelmingly negative feedback during the public comment period from lawmakers, employees and local governments on the larger USDA reorganization, as well in meetings the department held with tribal governments.

The reshaping of those components is part of a larger USDA reorganization that will see 2,600 employees shifted from the capital region into new regional hubs around the country. In addition to Kansas City, those hubs will be in Salt Lake City, Raleigh, N.C.; Fort Collins, Colo., and Indianapolis. The department previously announced it would move its U.S. Forest Service headquarters, and 260 employees, to Salt Lake City.

USDA’s fiscal 2026 appropriations bill blocked the department from reorganizing or relocating any offices or employees unless Congress authorizes it. The head of USFS recently told Congress his general counsel’s office approved the moves anyway, though Democrats suggested that would play out in court.

FSIS said none of its front-line employees—the inspectors themselves who make up 85% of the agency’s workforce—will be impacted by the changes. It will instead by relocating administrative, technical and support staff, which officials said would reduce duplication and increase accountability.

Justin Ransom, the FSIS administrator, said the moves will improve training and bring more policy expertise to the front-line workforce.

“The National Food Safety Center will help us better prepare and support our workforce while also creating new opportunities to attract and develop the next generation of food safety professionals,” Ransom said.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has pushed the Trump administration to consolidate office space and move employees out of Washington and openly encouraged USDA specifically to place those workers in her state. The new center will be placed in an existing FSIS building.

The Georgia-based science center will expand upon an existing laboratory in the area and expand capabilities in microbiology, chemistry and epidemiology. The facility will boost access to academic institutions and industry partners, the agency said, and improve recruiting.

FSIS will not issue any layoffs, though employees who reject management-directed reassignments must either accept those roles or lose their jobs. USDA has vowed to provide employees with relocation assistance and other benefits required in statute. Secretary Brooke Rollins told lawmakers this week she was not sure how much those payments would cost. USDA requested $55 million for relocation costs and to prepare buildings for sale as part of its fiscal 2027 budget, though department officials said it hopes to complete the moves this summer so employees with children can enroll their kids in new schools before the school year starts.

The agency plans to leave 100 employees in the national capital region, while also establishing a presence in Fort Collins.

In an email to staff obtained by Government Executive, Ransom said there were still details FSIS was working out and the agency would do its best to provide information as it becomes available.

"I recognize that changes of this scale have real personal and professional impacts," he said. This transition will take place over time and we are committed to working through it together."

In addition to NIFA and ERS, the Agricultural Research Service and National Agricultural Statistics Service—the four components collectively make up the Research, Education and Economics Mission Area—will also be moving staff. As previously announced, ARS will shift employees out of its Beltsville complex comprised of 400 buildings and into field locations around the country. It did not specify where the employees will go, but said they will be better suited to support producers after reporting to locations the agency has identified to absorb additional personnel.

NASS will move some employees out of Washington to Saint Louis and other locations.

“Science is most effective when it’s connected to the people and places it’s meant to serve,” said Undersecretary for Research, Education, and Economics and Chief Scientist Scott Hutchins. “This effort strengthens our ability to deliver actionable research, trusted data, and innovative solutions by aligning our teams more closely with agricultural producers across the country.”

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IRS lacks transparent plans to leverage tech in the face of staffing cuts, GAO and employees say

Natalie Alms — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

The IRS is banking on using technology to do more with fewer employees. But staff inside the IRS say that how the agency will do that — considering that its own IT shop has lost personnel — is still unclear, and Congress’ watchdog says that the IRS still isn’t being transparent about its long-term tech plans.

The IRS continues to rely on some systems that date back to the 1960s. It’s been trying to modernize them for decades, and was using some of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to do so under the Biden administration. Congress has since clawed back most of that funding, and the remainder is set to run out in fiscal year 2028.

A few months after President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, the IRS paused its modernization work to re-evaluate its strategy. IRS leadership said they wanted to rely more on generative artificial intelligence to convert legacy code into modern programming languages, and the agency set a goal to finish most of its tech modernization efforts within two years.

Over a year later, the IRS still hasn’t provided the Government Accountability Office with details on its new modernization plan, said David Hinchman, director of IT and cybersecurity at GAO, during a recent roundtable on the IRS.

“Recent changes to IRS' long-term plans have also cast uncertainty over what the agency's modernized end state will look like,” said Hinchman, explaining that the IRS has published “very little” on its new approach.

That’s despite the fact that technological progress is a lynchpin in the IRS’ bigger, overall strategy. After already pushing out over 28,000 employees since Trump took office, the tax agency is aiming to shed more staff and use technology to make up the difference, it said in its recent budget request.

“Without modernization, the IRS would be unable to sustain performance with a reduced headcount,” the budget request said.

Compounding the lack of transparency is a pause in strategic workforce planning, said Hinchman, which would help ensure that the IRS has the right workforce to get the job done.

The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The IRS hasn’t spared its IT shop from the workforce upheaval that has taken place over the last year. The IRS lost over 2,600 IT employees between January 25 and December 18 of last year, a 31% reduction, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2025 report.

The IRS also moved over 1,000 IT staff to the office of the chief operating officer last winter, and transferred some of those to jobs helping with filing season, along with human resources specialists.

Agency IT leadership recently told staff that the agency plans to hire 175 IT employees, a tech employee at the agency said.

Even so, IRS leadership isn’t sharing much information internally on the agency’s current plan for its technology, a second tech employee told Nextgov/FCW. Detailed IT strategic plans used to be available within the agency, they said. What’s now available is very abstract.

“It’s hilarious,” they said of the claim that the IRS can use tech to make up for fewer employees.

Using technology to do more with less might be possible in the long run, but “not right now,” the first IT employee told Nextgov/FCW. “We are so short-staffed.”

Despite the staffing shortages, the IRS is planning to capitalize on updates to the online accounts it offers for taxpayers to give Americans access to more self-service options.

The agency is also building a single interface for customer service representatives to allow them to see data about taxpayers that’s currently stored in disparate systems in one centralized place. The IRS thinks this will cut down on call times by speeding up the work of those manning the phone lines. The agency has been trying to build this system since the second Obama administration.

The IRS has also long been working to modernize its core system for individual tax account data, called the individual master file.

The tax agency did put its long-awaited new processing engine for the system into production last year, it said, but more work needs to be done. The effort is one of the most complex modernization efforts in the federal government, and the individual master file touches hundreds of other IRS applications.

“They are shoving AI at us and they think that with that, things can be converted super quickly,” the first employee said of efforts to modernize legacy systems. “But they don’t have the right tools for us yet.”

Frank Bisignano — the head of the Social Security Administration who is also helming a new chief executive officer role at the IRS — told senators earlier this month that data and AI are helping the tax agency with enforcement, even as it’s lost staff and is set to lose more under the Trump administration’s recent budget request.

But GAO reported recently that the agency is facing a skills shortage that could hamper its ability to roll out AI, including systems to prioritize audits.

Among the things that aren’t clear to Congress’ watchdog are how the IRS’ new plans relate to its old strategy to modernize, as well as how and if certain endeavors are continuing, said Hinchman. This isn’t the first time that watchdogs have dinged the IRS for a lack of IT planning.

Leadership under the new administration has altered at least some efforts started during the Biden years. The IRS launched an initiative to digitize paper with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023 by developing an in-house system. Last spring, leadership directed the IRS to stop working on the project, despite spending $61 million on it already, and shifted to a new approach using contractors, according to a watchdog report.

The IRS also shuttered the Direct File program, launched in 2024 to help certain eligible Americans file their taxes with the government online for free.

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They did everything right and still haven’t been paid

Tammy Flanagan — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:00:00 -0400

I was planning to write about the number of TSP millionaires for this week’s column — until I started getting messages from former federal employees, all who retired on September 30, 2025, and are still waiting for their retirement benefit from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to be finalized.

It is not completely surprising that retirement processing has slowed down, and for some former employees, they continue to wait for their retirement benefits to be finalized. But for the employees who have reached out for assistance, many have not received any money since their last paycheck was received in October 2025.

It has been almost six months with very little or, in some cases, no money and little communication to help them understand how long they will have to continue to wait.

Here are the stories that I received this week:

Angie retired from the USDA Farm Service. Angie represents one of the thousands of federal employees who accepted the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and agreed to resign or retire at the end of the fiscal year in 2025.

Angie told me that she has been preparing for retirement by attending pre-retirement training, and she saved her annual leave so that she would have some money to hold her over while her retirement was being processed. She also saved extra money so that she could pay her bills for up to six months should her retirement be delayed. She considered herself as prepared as she could be.

After numerous calls to OPM, with many hours spent waiting on hold, she finally found out what appears to be the reason why she has not received any of her retirement benefits since her last day of work.

Angie was divorced 13 years ago. Her court order clearly stated that she and her ex-spouse would not share any of their retirement benefits. She answered “no” to the question on the retirement application regarding her former spouse having any entitlement to her retirement and/or survivor benefits.

She did not include a copy of her divorce agreement, as the application required that the document be included only if he were entitled to benefits. Unfortunately, a copy of her court order had been sent to OPM, presumably by her HR specialist. For some reason, a copy had been filed in her personnel file.

The first thing she was told by OPM was that the copy was emailed and was not a “certified copy” of the order. Unfortunately, Angie was not informed of this until months after her retirement date. She stated that she would have been happy to provide a certified copy had she known the reason for the delay.

She was also informed that there were “red flags” because she had a name change during her career and a change in health insurance from self plus one to self only. The OPM customer service representative told her that her retirement package was sent to the Court Ordered Benefits Branch, where it sat waiting for review.

Angie recently requested assistance from her congressional representative, and she thinks that this may have helped. She received promising news on her latest phone call to OPM earlier this week.

She was told that her case is now showing that it is “ready for payment!” Angie hopes that she will soon see a large deposit in her bank account, with her first regular payment on May 1. However, she said, “I will believe that when I see the money!”

Laura, who retired from the IRS, shared with me that she spoke with a benefits specialist at her former agency who told her that her paperwork wasn’t sent to the National Finance Center (NFC) until Feb. 1.

In addition, she was informed that, from that date, it would likely be an additional 90-day wait before her retirement package would be forwarded to OPM. The reason why her retirement wasn’t sent to NFC until February was unclear.

Other than that, she was told that it wasn’t assigned to a retirement specialist in her human resources office until Dec. 31. She received her lump-sum annual leave payout in early February from NFC, which was promising, but nothing else.

She has not yet received any communication from OPM. She has now submitted a request to her elected representatives in Congress in hopes that it will help her to receive her overdue benefits soon.

Shawn, who also retired on Sept. 30, has also been waiting for his retirement benefits since his last day on the job on Sept. 30, 2025.

He stated that he retired as a 37-year IRS revenue officer advisor, GS-13, one of the most senior in the country. He accepted the DRP 2.0 in response to the mandate in 2025 requiring him to return to his physical office. He had been working from home since 2021.

He stated that he consistently received outstanding performance ratings and did not want to change his remote work arrangement. As of this week, he has not received any annuity payments.

He understands that the IRS Human Capital Office (HCO) has a massive backlog, as does OPM. IRS HCO informed him that OPM has his retirement package now. However, when he contacted OPM, they told him that they had not received his retirement package.

Shawn, like many others, contacted his congressman’s office, but so far they could not get the package pushed through.

He informed me that he has had to take two large distributions from his Thrift Savings Plan to pay bills. He is now at the point where he may have to take another.

It appears that the delays may stem from the payroll provider, NFC. After HR completes work on the retirement application, it must go through payroll processing before OPM can begin work on the claim.

As Laura related above, there were extraordinary delays reported regarding the processing of the thousands of retirement cases that descended on NFC since Sept. 30, 2025.

Susan, another Sept. 30 retiree, related to me that her retirement application has been in NFC since Jan. 12 — no movement, no communication.

She made a request for assistance but only received a canned response that was not helpful in letting her know how long she will have to continue waiting.

“I planned for a long wait,” she said, “but it is now just short of eight months since my retirement date.”

She, like Shawn and Laura, retired from the IRS. Her career lasted more than 25 years. I mentioned some of the possible reasons for her case being delayed, such as being hung up in the Court Ordered Benefits Branch at OPM, but she stated that she has been married for more than 40 years and has never been divorced.

I mentioned that paper applications take longer to process. However, she applied using the new ORA. It appears that the hang-up, like the others, hasn’t been with OPM, but with her payroll provider, NFC.

She hasn’t received any interim retirement benefits or other communications from OPM. It is possible that her retirement package has not yet been submitted to OPM.

Stacy retired from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), where she worked for eight years after spending 18 years working for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

NFC does the payroll for USCIS under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). She is more fortunate than some of the others, since her retirement landed at OPM much earlier. She received her Civil Service Active (CSA) number in November 2025, and she has been receiving interim retirement payments and still is in interim pay as of this week.

When she called OPM, she was told they were waiting on an NFR from June 1999 to December 2001. Stacy was not sure what they needed. They told her that OPM had asked her former employer to provide this information.

Her retirement has been assigned to a Legal Administrative Specialist (LAS) at OPM, but they won’t share the name or contact information.

Her former agency informed her everything was sent, including all her Individual Retirement Records (IRR). The Individual Retirement Record (SF 2806/SF 3100) is maintained by the agency for each employee subject to CSRS or FERS.

The Individual Retirement Record is used by OPM as the basic record for determining the retirement benefits payable to a separated employee or his or her survivors. It is, therefore, important that each SF 2806 and SF 3100 be correct, complete, clear in every detail, and properly certified so that, when the record is received in OPM, claims may be processed expeditiously.

Stacy is frustrated with the lack of transparency and seeing so many others who are receiving full retirement while she is stuck in a holding pattern. It appears that the holdup is with her payroll provider, which, as you may have guessed, is NFC.

Stacy learned that her HR office contacted NFC and sent the missing information on Nov. 3, 2025. They were told the information was sent along with a register number. A Register and Separations Report is sent to OPM by each payroll provider.

Payroll offices are required to send the register number and date to the separated employee, indicating that the payroll office has completed their separation from the former agency.

She sent a request for information to OPM’s general email, hoping they would get it. The generic response she received, however, is a “do not reply” email.

The last employee who contacted me recently only wants to be identified as a Sept. 30 retiree from the Department of State, where she has worked since 1999.

She previously served for nine and a half years in the military and “bought back” the military service, giving her a long career of more than 36 years, which would be a full career of federal service by any definition.

Initially, things went well, as she received her OPM CSA number and started to receive interim retirement payments within two months of her retirement. By February, she learned that her case had not been assigned to an LAS yet.

No one has reached out to her, and her help requests have not received a response. She calls OPM almost daily but rarely gets through.

She was divorced, but it was prior to her civilian federal service and does not believe that this could be the cause of the delay in processing. She submitted her retirement application last May using GRB software, not the new ORA system.

She submitted all the documentation required, proving she paid her military service credit deposit, along with her DD-214, her discharge certificate for her active duty.

She is without a clue as to when she will be made “whole” and said that this delay is causing her family a severe financial hardship.

She took the Voluntary Early Retirement at age 54 and did not turn 55 until 2026. This means that the withdrawals she has needed to take from her TSP account are subject to an early withdrawal penalty of 10%, in addition to the regular income tax she must pay in the year she receives the payments.

Legal Administrative Specialist

According to an OPM job posting, an LAS employee at OPM is responsible for processing claims, reviews and program evaluations intended to maintain the integrity of retirement benefits arising under the federal retirement systems and enunciation of program policy.

They are the employees responsible for adjudicating and/or making determinations of eligibility and entitlement on cases of retirement annuities and survivor benefits.

They analyze records and imaged documents to make decisions that may involve any feature of eligibility for retirement benefits or for health and life insurance benefits related to retirement.

They may also act on allegations of fraud or impropriety concerning the receipt of payments or benefits under retirement programs.

They respond to inquiries from congressional sources, agency and union officials, retirees and survivors. They also assist employees with higher salary grades in the preparation of regulation packages, bill reports, drafting of instructional issuances or similar material.

Providing advisory and information services to agencies through formally established channels on legislative changes. The estimated salary range for this position is $39,226 to $50,492.

As I have shown in these examples, the delays may stem from the HR office or the payroll providers that were buried under mountains of separations and retirements that had to be processed at the same time.

When a federal employee resigns or retires, the payroll office is responsible for processing final pay, issuing lump-sum payments for unused annual leave and certifying retirement records for OPM. They calculate and pay out unused annual leave, often within four to six weeks, audit leave accounts and submit the Individual Retirement Records to OPM.

Why do some cases move quickly while others sit?

In my experience, retirement processing is less like flipping a switch and more like closing out a file with dozens of tabs. One missing document or unresolved question can stop forward progress.

Common culprits include late or incomplete payroll certifications, missing service history, unposted deposits or redeposits for prior service, unresolved military service credit, periods of leave without pay that need to be documented, name discrepancies, incomplete beneficiary or survivor elections, or court orders that require special handling.

None of these problems are rare, and when thousands of cases arrive at once, the odds go up that more people land in the exception pile.

According to OPM’s “Retirement Processing Quick Guide,” these are the factors that might delay your retirement processing. While most retirement cases will be straightforward, certain circumstances can significantly delay the process, including:

Court orders such as a divorce decree or property settlement. These require an additional step and are sent to the Court Order Benefits Branch for review.

Service as a law enforcement officer, firefighter, air traffic controller, Capitol Police, Supreme Court Police or nuclear materials courier, as these cases use a special annuity computation.

Past or active workers’ compensation claims.

Service as a part-time or intermittent federal employee.

Federal service at multiple federal agencies.

Missing documents and forms, or incomplete or incorrect information in your retirement application.

Moving without updating your address with OPM.

Even when everything is perfect on the employee’s side, the reality is that OPM and agency partners are balancing staffing, training and competing priorities — while retirees are balancing mortgages, insurance premiums and everyday life.

A delay of a few weeks can be irritating. A delay of several months can be destabilizing.

What makes this especially hard is the information gap. Retirees often don’t know whether their case is waiting in their former agency, sitting in a queue at OPM or stuck because of a specific missing item from the payroll provider that nobody has clearly explained.

What you can do while you wait

If you retired and you have not received payments, or you are receiving interim payments that don’t look right, here are a few practical steps that can help you diagnose where the delay is and, in some cases, speed up resolution:

Confirm that your separation was processed correctly. Ask your former HR or payroll office whether your retirement package was submitted to OPM and on what date.

Ask whether your Individual Retirement Record, SF 2806 for CSRS or SF 3100 for FERS, has been certified and forwarded. If it’s still at the agency, OPM can’t finalize what it doesn’t have.

Request the missing item list in plain language. If your case is pending because of military deposit documentation, a redeposit or a court order, you need to know exactly what is being requested and where to send it.

Keep a simple contact log: date, phone number or email, who you spoke with and what you were told. It helps when you follow up or request that your case be escalated.

If you’re in interim pay status, compare what you’re receiving to your estimated annuity. Interim pay is often lower, but if it is dramatically lower, it may signal that OPM is missing service or hasn’t credited key items.

If the delay is creating a cash flow crunch, think carefully about any bridge income you use while you wait. Many retirees tap the TSP, savings or part-time work to cover the gap.

That can be a reasonable short-term fix, but be mindful of withholding and taxes, and remember that pulling from the TSP earlier than planned can change the long-term trajectory of your retirement income. If you’re unsure, a tax professional or fee-only financial planner can help you run the numbers.

If you are getting nowhere, escalation is appropriate, but it works best when you bring specifics. Start with OPM’s Retirement Services and ask whether your case is received, in pay status or waiting on something from your former agency.

If OPM indicates the issue is on the agency side, go back to your HR or payroll office and ask for the status of the exact item OPM says is missing.

If weeks pass with no movement, a congressional inquiry can sometimes help surface where a case is stuck, especially when the problem is a missing document or an unanswered request between offices. It won’t guarantee instant processing, but it can improve visibility and accountability.

What I keep hearing from the 9/30/25 retirees is not just frustration, it is fatigue.

People did what they were supposed to do. They submitted paperwork, attended pre-retirement counseling, verified service history and planned budgets around an expected start date.

When the annuity doesn’t show up, retirees are forced into a holding pattern: delaying travel, postponing home repairs and rethinking health and family expenses.

And because the process is opaque, many begin to worry that they made a mistake, when the reality may be that their file is simply one of many thousands that are moving through a bottleneck.

Ultimately, this is why retirement processing delays are more than an administrative headache. They are a real-world test of whether the system can deliver a promise earned over a career of service.

OPM employees and agency payroll teams can’t solve a surge with good intentions alone. They need staffing stability, modernized processes and clear handoffs that reduce exception cases.

In case you were wondering, the number of TSP participants with account balances over $1 million is 184,532, and these participants have an average of close to 28 years of contributions.

The number of participants with less than $50,000 in their TSP accounts is 4,200,274, and these people only have an average of a little more than six years of contributions.

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Experts say Trump inflated his deregulation numbers, but his process changes are here to stay

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:32:08 -0400

Regulatory experts across the ideological spectrum agreed that the Trump administration overstated how successful it has been at cutting regulations. But they also agree that the actions officials took over the past year have changed the traditional methods for creating — and repealing — rules, setting the stage for more deregulation for the rest of the president’s second term.

10:1

At the start of his second term, Trump signed a directive requiring agencies to find 10 existing rules to be repealed any time they propose a new regulation. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs reported that officials far exceeded that threshold — issuing 129 deregulatory actions for every new regulation over the first eight months of the administration.

An analysis by the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, however, found that “OIRA gamed its methodology to produce a higher ratio.”

Specifically, administration officials only considered new regulations to be significant rules (generally those that have an annual effect on the economy of at least $100 million). In contrast, they took a broader view of what counted as a deregulatory action, including repealing regulations that were no longer in effect as well as guidance documents, policy letters and internal agency materials.

“There is a legitimate policy case for counting them, as [guidance documents, etc.] can impose real compliance burdens on businesses and individuals even when they never go through a notice-and-comment rulemaking process,” wrote Tambudzai Charumbira (Gundani), a research assistant at the Center. “Whenever there’s a party changeover in the White House, incoming administrations immediately reverse the outgoing administration’s sub-regulatory output. It’s the low-hanging fruit that every administration plucks.”

Nevertheless, the Center’s analysis found that Trump’s 10:1 rule may be slowing the pace of new regulations. In 2025, there were nearly 61,600 pages added to the Federal Register (where agency regulations are published), which is the lowest total in a president’s first year among recent administrations.

Dan Goldbeck — the director of regulatory policy at American Action Forum, a center-right think tank — emphasized that slowing down rulemaking is still important, even if it’s not outright deregulation.

“Perhaps the more significant item is just slowing the pace of new regulations,” he said. “That gives industry a better idea going forward of what they can expect in terms of not having some big regulatory surprise jump out at them.”

During Trump’s first term, when he required agencies to repeal two regulations for every new one, regulatory experts similarly found that officials inflated the number of deregulatory actions that they took but that the administration did also produce less rulemaking.

An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson said that the president’s deregulatory agenda is “a victory for the American people whether or not it is published in the Federal Register.”

“Last year, the Trump administration implemented 646 de-regulatory actions,” they said. “That includes the removal of radical, [diversity, equity and inclusion], unpopular, destructive and costly policies that were imposed through sub-regulatory guidance, and that’s how we removed them.”

Katie Tracy, a regulatory expert at the left-leaning Public Citizen nonprofit, argued that measuring the president’s deregulatory push is not just about quantity but also quality. As an example, she pointed to the EPA’s recent repeal of the Obama greenhouse gas endangerment finding, which the Trump administration characterized as “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”

“That's where I think that there's a bigger picture here. It's not just about some number of regulations. It's about what that represents,” she said. “It represents passing harm, passing cost, on to the public. Corporations don't want to pay for the harm they've imposed on communities.”

Reforms to the Rulemaking Process

Tracy also contended that the Trump administration’s actions, such as pushing out hundreds of thousands of federal employees and requiring independent regulatory boards (e.g. Federal Trade Commission) to run proposed rules through the White House, are weakening agencies’ ability to regulate industries.

“All of that is an effort to ensure that the White House is the one making the calls,” she said. “It's [no longer] what we've traditionally thought of as the agencies or people in the agencies — the subject-matter experts — who are able to make the calls.”

The Trump administration has also pushed agencies to speed up the repeal of regulations by skipping the public review steps. When an agency promulgates a new rule, or revokes one, it must seek, respond to and potentially incorporate public comment on the proposal — a process that usually takes at least a year.

Officials have instructed agencies, when repealing rules that are deemed unconstitutional or unlawful in light of recent Supreme Court rulings, to rely on the “good cause” exception. That statutory provision provides that agencies can skip notice and comment if doing so would be "impracticable, unnecessary or contrary to the public interest.”

Tracy said that Public Citizen is tracking the administration’s use of the “good cause” exception.

“It's been rarely used, but now we're seeing it used quite frequently without any justification for doing so,” she said. “So it's very clear that they don't want the public weighing in.”

Congressional Review Act

In recent history, the president and a politically aligned Congress have relied on the Congressional Review Act to repeal by simple majority rules that were promulgated at the end of the previous administration. During Trump’s first term, the GOP used the CRA to revoke 16 late Obama rules. President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats then took advantage of the law to repeal three Trump regulations.

According to American Action Forum, House and Senate Republicans in Trump’s second term have used the CRA to overturn 22 Biden rules. The GOP, however, has adopted a novel interpretation of the law, which is enabling them to repeal additional administrative actions from the previous president.

Under the CRA, Congress generally has a limited window to revoke regulations, which ended in spring 2025. But the Trump administration in January 2026 transmitted to Congress a 2023 public land order that protected about 225,500 acres of Minnesota land from mineral and geothermal mining for 20 years — making the order subject to repeal through the law.

Both the House and Senate have approved the measure (H.J. Res 140) revoking the Minnesota public land order. It’s awaiting Trump’s signature.

In floor remarks ahead of the vote, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., argued that the CRA was never intended to be used to repeal years-old public land orders.

“What would you do if the shoe was on the other foot?” she asked her Republican colleagues. “What would you do if we set this precedent where we say that with a simple partisan majority, Congress can claw back a public land order that has been in place potentially for years or decades?”

Future Deregulation

At the end of Trump’s first term, the Health and Human Services Department issued the “sunset rule” that would automatically terminate the department’s regulations between five to 10 years after they are implemented unless officials conduct a review to determine their effectiveness. The Biden administration withdrew the rule before it was implemented.

Goldbeck, of AAF, argued that such reviews would enable agencies to measure expectations about the regulation when it’s being developed against its real-world impacts. He also predicted that the Trump administration will undertake a similar effort in the remaining three years of his second term.

“Now that they have the template in place, I feel like — whether it be at HHS or some other agency, or if they try to do it across all agencies, that would be pretty ambitious — but I would foresee some instances of it coming back,” he said.

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U.S. citizens shot by ICE urge Congress to rein in federal immigration agents

Ariana Figueroa, States Newsroom — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:08:33 -0400

Nearly all Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee failed to show up for a Wednesday hearing convened by Democrats to highlight President Donald Trump’s aggressive tactics in his mass deportation campaign that have ensnared U.S. citizens.

It marked a rare full committee hearing that Democrats were allowed to conduct because of Minority Day in the House.

Democrats used the opportunity to call witnesses who are U.S. citizens and were harmed, in some cases shot, by federal immigration officers. Lawmakers also focused on two U.S. citizens killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Following the deadly shootings in January, Democrats refused to approve any more funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which has led to a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security since mid-February.

“Under President Trump, ICE and CBP have killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood, and shot, beat, harassed, arrested or locked up countless more innocent people,” the top Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said. “Congress cannot stand idly by while Americans are hurt and killed by their own government.”

Democrats also invited Trump officials tasked with crafting and carrying out the president’s immigration agenda: White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, the border czar.

Neither Miller nor Homan showed up. The White House did not answer questions from States Newsroom regarding Miller or Homan’s absence from the hearing.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson blamed Democrats for keeping “the Department of Homeland Security shuttered, not caring about vital services — like TSA, FEMA and ICE — going unfunded.”

“Instead of lying about President Trump’s extremely successful deportation operations of criminal illegal aliens, House Democrats should fully reopen the Department of Homeland Security and stop putting illegal aliens before American citizens,” Jackson said.

The chair of the committee, Andrew Garbarino, called Wednesday’s hearing “a distraction from the fact that DHS has been shut down for over 65 days and the security impacts of that (are) real.”

Garbarino, a New York Republican, and the other GOP lawmakers on the committee did not ask any of the witnesses any questions.

Americans under fire

The Americans harmed by federal immigration officials include:

Marimar Martinez, a Chicago preschool worker whom Border Patrol officers shot five times.
Rev. David Black, whom ICE officials shot in the face with pepper-ball rounds while he protested outside an Illinois detention facility.
George Retes Jr., an Army veteran in California whom immigration agents apprehended on his way to work, tear-gassed and kept detained for three days.
Ryan Ecklund, a real estate agent in Minnesota whom federal agents detained after he filmed them while at a grocery store.

Martinez has appeared in the past before Congress in unofficial Democratic events to share her story about how on Oct. 4, she was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum.

DHS shared her photo online, falsely claimed she rammed into Border Patrol with her car and labeled her a domestic terrorist. The Trump administration tried to indict her on federal charges, but eventually dismissed the case against her.

“On Friday I was teaching the young children at the Montessori school and we were singing and dancing and getting ready for spooky season preparing fall activities to do the following week and on Saturday my own government was calling me a ‘domestic terrorist’ and I was in a federal detention center with bullet holes all over my body,” she told the committee. “There were times where I did not believe this was all real and then I would touch my bullet wounds and knew it was certainly real.”

She said she was concerned other people would be shot and killed by federal immigration agents, as Pretti and Good were.

“It’s bound to happen sooner or later if we don’t hold these agents accountable for their actions,” she said.

No apologies

Following the two deadly shootings by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the leaders of ICE and CBP appeared before the Senate and House committees that have jurisdiction over DHS.

While there, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and ICE acting head Todd Lyons refused to apologize to the families of Good and Pretti. Lyons has announced he will resign at the end of May, saying he wants to spend more time with his family.

The aggressive immigration deportation campaign in Minneapolis, which has a high Somali refugee population, also spurred calls from Republicans to push then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. She stepped down last month after Senate Republicans grilled her over an ad campaign and slow response to providing disaster relief.

The president tapped former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin to steer the department. The Senate last month confirmed Mullin.

One of the witnesses, Retes, said his goal is for Congress to pass legislation in order to hold federal immigration agents accountable.

“Federal officials are basically impossible to sue,” Retes said. “Federal agents basically have immunity.”

He added that he wants Congress to do something and expressed his frustration that “change doesn't move fast enough.”

Ecklund criticized federal agents within DHS and pointed out the irony of the department’s unofficial slogan of going after “the worst of the worst” in conducting immigration enforcement.

“‘Your best’ and the ‘best of DHS’ is the least that the American public deserve,” he said. “You have not given us your best.”

Martinez said agents are not held accountable.

“I’ve been through hell and back,” she said. “These agents — Charles Exum — have not even been held accountable for their actions.”

She added that she doesn’t even know if Exum is still working for CBP.

Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green asked Martinez if she would feel comfortable showing lawmakers where she was shot. She agreed and rolled up her sleeve, showing a dark scar on her upper arm, and pulled up her pants to show another wound across her upper thigh.

“It’s hard to manage all this, to even process what happened,” she said. “Being shot for protecting your community. I want the world to see my pain, my trauma. This is not something to joke about. This is my life.”

Green thanked her and told her that “you deserve justice.”

Minister shot with pepper balls

Black told the committee that he was “horrified by the radical evil being perpetrated by my government.”

He said he was outside a detention facility in Chicago and was in the middle of praying when he was shot by federal agents with pepper balls.

“I am outraged by the blasphemy of those who support brutal ICE and CBP tactics yet call themselves Christians,” he said. “They make a mockery of the sacrifice of God’s love on behalf of the world.

“Yet instead of living into Christ’s rich promise of a Kingdom of peace, freedom and prosperity, many of those calling themselves Christian are blindly supporting institutions like ICE and CBP, even as they dominate, coerce and terrorize American communities,” he continued.

The only path forward, he argued to lawmakers, is to dismantle ICE and CBP and redirect that funding to “support programs that feed the hungry, sate the thirsty, welcome strangers, clothe the naked and care for the sick — for in the words of Jesus, ‘just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’”

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DHS to again stop paying employees in May if shutdown continues

Eric Katz — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:07:36 -0400

The Homeland Security Department will run out funds to continue paying employees next month, the agency’s head said this week, opening the possibility for the DHS to resume normal shutdown activities as the lapse carries on into its third month.

President Trump earlier this month signed a memorandum to order the immediate pay for the ongoing work DHS employees are doing during the shutdown, as well as back pay they earned since the department’s funding lapsed on Feb. 14. More than 100,000 employees who had either been working without pay or furloughed quickly began receiving their checks, while the majority of DHS employees have been paid throughout the shutdown using previously appropriated funds.

DHS spends $1.6 billion on payroll every two weeks, Mullin said on Fox News on Tuesday, and the leftover funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that the department has been tapping into are set to run dry after the first pay period in May.

“There is no more emergency fund,” Mullin said. “So the president can't do another executive order for us to use money because there's no more money there.”

Normally, around 92% of DHS employees work during a shutdown without immediate pay, while the remaining part of the workforce is placed in furlough status and sent home. After Trump signed his order, however, DHS recalled all of its furloughed employees back into active status, according to a memorandum obtained by Government Executive. Mullin did not specify what would happen to those employees when existing funds run out next month, though they are likely to be placed back into furlough status.

“DHS is using available funds to ensure employees are paid,” agency leadership told employees earlier this month. “Should the department exhaust currently available funds before an FY 2026 appropriation for DHS is enacted, you will receive a new notification of your work status at that time.”

The shutdown has now dragged on for more than two months and entered its 67th day on Wednesday, by far the longest lapse—either governmentwide or more targeted—in history. Late last month, the Senate unanimously approved a negotiated agreement to fund all non-immigration DHS agencies. The House has so far refused to bring the bill up for a vote, with some members suggesting Republicans would wait until Congress makes progress on funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to do so.

Senate Republicans took a first step to approving the funding for Trump’s immigration crackdown on Tuesday when it advanced a procedural motion to kick off the process known as budget reconciliation. The lawmakers are looking to use reconciliation to approve multi-year funds for ICE and CBP without requiring any Democratic support, though the a quick resolution is still not expected. Mullin said funding those agencies for the remainder of Trump’s term would enable them to function without risk of further shutdowns.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on Wednesday that Republicans were intentionally keeping the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Coast Guard and other “law-abiding” DHS agencies shut down despite Democrats agreeing to fund them.

“Republicans are at each other’s throats, tying their party up in knots,” Schumer said. “Democrats stand united, and we stand firm.”

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., predicted his party’s new plan would finally bring an end to the current standoff.

“We have a multistep process ahead of us, but at the end Republicans will have helped ensure that America’s borders are secure and prevented Democrats from defunding these important agencies,” Thune said.

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Space Force scrambles to repair workforce as massive budget increase looms

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:17:58 -0400

The Trump administration, which last year stripped the Space Force of 14 percent of its civilian workers, now wants the service to handle a budget more than twice as large.

The service’s 2027 budget request of $71.1 billion—way up from the $31.6 billion allocated in the current fiscal year—includes boosts for new space-based technologies and weapons in line with President Donald Trump’s “space superiority” executive order.

The administration official who is temporarily handling the duties of the Pentagon’s chief financial officer conceded that it’s a tall order.

“One of the major challenges for this budget is to be able to obligate dollars in a timely manner, because it's such a large increase,” said Jules W. Hurst III, who is performing the duties of the Under Secretary of War (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer.

But Hurst, a former Ranger-turned-legislative aide for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., downplayed the effects of the hastily implemented workforce cuts.

“We haven't been taking away workforce from areas that are involved in critical efforts like the [Defense Autonomous Working Group] or, you know, space acquisition, which is where a lot of this money goes,” he said in a Tuesday press briefing at the Pentagon.

In fact, Space Systems Command—the branch’s acquisitions arm—lost about 10 percent of its workforce in the wake of policies ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Service officials were already talking about the impending acquisition crunch last fall.

“We have a looming increase in acquisitions coming down the pike, and so that presents us with a really difficult situation of where we need to double down on our acquisition workforce, our acquisition training. We are in a situation where we barely have enough acquirers to do all of the work that we have now,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, acting assistant Air Force secretary for space acquisition and integration, said Nov. 20 at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event.

Now, the service is struggling to rehire people to fill the gaps.

Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, who leads Space Systems Command, told reporters at the Space Symposium conference in Colorado last week that he's faced with “a really challenging goal” to hire 100 civilians a month following the large number of departures.

“We've never hired that many people in a month,” said Garrant, who added that the most the command has hired in one month is 66 people. “It's really to get the workforce in place to execute all this funding that's coming our way.”

Garrant added that some of that has been “backfilling” positions from the Deferred Resignation Program. Other roles can’t be replaced because the service permanently lost those billets.

Of the $71 billion for the Space Force’s 2027 budget request, about $38 billion is for research, development, testing and evaluation initiatives. Nearly $10 billion would be for procurement of new technologies.

Space Force Lt. Gen Steven P. Whitney, the Joint Staff’s director of force structure, resources and assessment, told reporters that the new request supports a wide range of initiatives tied to Trump’s executive orders.

Whitney said it includes 31 national security space launches, $13 billion dollars to develop and field missile warning and tracking capabilities, development of two new GPS satellites and their supporting infrastructure, $5.9 billion for satellite communication systems, $7.7 billion for Airborne Moving Target Indication capabilities, and a $3.1 billion investment in the military’s next-generation space data network, which is tied to Trump’s sprawling Golden Dome missile defense program.

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