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Key oversight and federal workforce nominees confirmed by Senate

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:37:20 -0400

The Senate on Friday confirmed in a 51-47 party-line vote multiple executive branch nominees, including several involved in government oversight and federal employee matters.

Justice Department Inspector General

Since President Donald Trump fired nearly 20 of the agency watchdogs at the start of his second term, most of the individuals who have been approved as replacements previously worked in the first or second Trump administration, which government oversight advocates argue threatens the independent nature of IG offices.

But Don Berthiaume, the newly confirmed watchdog at DOJ, is a career IG employee. Most recently, he served as a senior adviser in the office he now leads and had a stint as acting DOJ IG from October 2025 through January 2026 but was limited by rules for how long an individual can serve in an acting position.

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Berthiaume testified that he has a personal appreciation for whistleblowers, as he himself was one while at the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“That experience taught me that whistleblowers are not abstractions, they are public servants who often take personal and professional risks to bring forward information the government needs to hear. It also taught me that the OIG functions best when it is operationally independent, but not isolated,” he said. “The OIG must retain full authority over what it reviews, how it conducts its work and what conclusions it reaches. But effective oversight also benefits from good information sharing, open lines of communication and professional engagement with the components it oversees.”

The DOJ IG has historically taken on high-profile cases. For example, Berthiaume has worked on a review of the FBI’s use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorities against Trump 2016 campaign staffers. And he told senators that he is aiming to complete an audit of the DOJ’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act within one year.

Federal Labor Relations Authority General Counsel

A backlog of hundreds of cases has piled up at this agency, which manages labor-management relations for the civil service, due to there not being a Senate-confirmed general counsel.

But many federal employee unions opposed the nomination of Charlton Allen, a conservative lawyer, arguing that he lacks experience in labor relations and pointing out that, while running for a state elected position in 2012, he said public employees shouldn’t be allowed to unionize.

The unions also flagged that Allen, while a student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in the early 1990s, ran a student publication that featured racist attacks.

During his confirmation hearing, Democratic senators asked Allen about a cover of that publication, which featured a Jewish candidate for student body president with horns and a pitchfork. The nominee said that the cover was a “mistake” but that it was referencing UNC’s rival — the Duke University Blue Devils.

Special Counsel

While he was confirmed on Friday, Charles Baldis is not new to the Office of Special Counsel, which protects feds from prohibited personnel practices — including retaliation for whistleblowing. Baldis, a former Senate staffer, has been the designee of the agency’s acting chief since spring 2025 while also serving as OSC’s chief counsel.

The president’s first OSC nominee, Paul Ingrassia, withdrew in October 2025 following objections from Senate Republicans over reports of sexual harassment accusations and racist text messages. In March 2025, Trump removed the incumbent special counsel — Hampton Dellinger, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden — before the end of his five-year term.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator

The government’s disaster response and recovery agency now has a Senate-confirmed leader for the first time since the start of the second Trump administration.

Cameron Hamilton, the new chief, served as acting administrator at the start of 2025 but was fired after testifying to Congress that he did "not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate [FEMA].” The president and other administration officials have proposed axing the agency.

The White House-backed FEMA Review Council in May recommended reducing the size of the agency while giving state and local governments a larger share of responsibilities following emergencies.

The Government Accountability Office recently reported that FEMA pushed thousands of its employees out in 2025 and 2026 without considering the impact that doing so would have on fulfilling the agency’s mission.

Merit Systems Protection Board Chairman

James Woodruff, who has been a Republican member of the MSPB since October 2025, is now the chairman of the agency, which hears appeals for federal employee disciplinary actions.

Henry Kerner, the board’s other GOP member, had been serving as acting chairman.

The MSPB is led by three board members, but no more than two can be from the same political party. Trump last year fired Cathy Harris, a Democratic member of the board, for no specified reason. While she appealed her removal, the Supreme Court in June ruled in a separate case that the president can fire bipartisan board members of independent agencies without cause.

Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director

Hal Duncan, who already holds a senior position in the White House budget office, was confirmed as the agency’s number two leader. During his hearing, Democratic senators criticized a proposed OMB rule to overhaul the federal grantmaking process, including by requiring political appointees to approve awards to ensure they advance the president’s priorities.

The bipartisan Senate agreement to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1 includes language that would temporarily freeze OMB’s proposed rule. As of Friday afternoon, it’s unclear if senators will vote on the continuing resolution before the start of a five-week recess.

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Judge rejects VA’s third attempt to cancel union contracts

Erich Wagner — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:54:57 -0400

The Veterans Affairs Department for the third time this year has been admonished for attempting to terminate its contract with the nation’s largest federal employee union.

The saga traces back to President Trumps March 2025 executive order that banned collective bargaining at the VA and many other federal agencies under the auspices of national security. The department first moved to terminate its contract with the American Federation of Government Employees last August, only for U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose, a Biden appointee in Rhode Island, to issue an injunction unwinding that decision in March.

In response to that decision, the VA issued a new termination notice to AFGE, which prompted an update to the injunction as well as the threat of contempt proceedings. A federal appeals court upheld most provisions of that order in May.

But last month, the VA told the union it would again seek to terminate the agreement on Aug. 8, the date that the contract was initially set to expire. The union again asked for the court to intervene, arguing that because the department requested that the contract be reopened for negotiations, management triggered a rollover clause that automatically extends the contract’s duration until a successor agreement can be reached.

The VA for its part accused the union of refusing to meet for negotiations within 30 days of its request, despite a litany of written correspondence seeking to hash out the scope and ground rules for negotiations.

In a three-page order published Friday, DuBose described VA’s latest effort to debride itself of AFGE’s collective bargaining agreement as “in direct contravention” of her prior orders.

“The defendants’ assertion that the plaintiffs failed to comply with the 30-day clock to begin negotiations and that this purported failure is a lawful basis on which to terminate the agreement, is not well-taken,” she wrote. “The exhibits each party provided in support of their positions on this motion are chock full of correspondence between the parties directly related to the defendants’ notice of intent to renegotiate the master CBA (rather than allow it to auto-renew as is on August 8).”

In a statement Friday, AFGE National VA Council President Mary Jean Burke applauded the judge’s ruling.

“Unions that represent federal employees have long been under attack,” she said. “Why? Because we are the roadblock preventing the privatization of the agencies we swore to protect. No matter how many times we are kicked while we are down, we get back up, brush off the dirt and get right back in the fight because we believe in the VA’s mission to serve our nation’s veterans. Today’s victory is proof that the law sides with AFGE/NVAC because we fight for what is right.”

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A key cybersecurity system is getting a closer look from Congress

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:25:18 -0400

LAS VEGAS — The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sees value in formally placing the world’s dominant software vulnerability tracking program into federal law but is cautioning Congress against imposing rules that could make it harder to adapt as artificial intelligence and international partners reshape the system.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program, or CVE, gives publicly known security flaws standardized identifiers so that governments, software companies and researchers can easily communicate about the same issue. It was first created in 1999, and it underpins cybersecurity discussions across both private industry and the national intelligence community.

Policymaking interest in the program followed a funding scare last year that exposed the fragility of the arrangement supporting its functions. MITRE, the scientific research giant that helps operate CVE under a federal contract, warned last April that its funding from the government would imminently expire.

CISA then extended the contract within hours, a sweeping relief for the cybersecurity community that raised fresh questions about why a major global cybersecurity resource leaned so much on a sole U.S. contract. A CISA official previously said that a “broad internal contracting review caused a brief renewal delay in April 2025, but operations continued without disruption and MITRE was ultimately retained as the program operator.”

A legislative proposal reported by Nextgov/FCW in June would formally authorize CVE within the Department of Homeland Security and establish a clearer legal role for CISA, its longtime federal sponsor.

“Defining the importance of the program in legislation in general seems like a very helpful thing,” Lindsey Cerkovnik, branch chief for vulnerability response and coordination at CISA, said Thursday during a panel at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference.

But Cerkovnik, whose office helps oversee CVE, said legislation could become counterproductive if it dictates too precisely how the program must operate.

“When you overdefine how to execute the thing, it can make it very restrictive and difficult,” she said. “In some ways, we are wary of overly-restrictive guidance” that could make CVE less nimble, agile and flexible, she added.

The congressional proposal would also require CISA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop a modernization plan and establish a 15-member board to set CVE policies and priorities. Permanent seats would go to CISA, NIST and top-level CVE authorities, while rotating members would represent industry, academia, researchers and foreign governments.

Reps. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., and George Whitesides, D-Calif., submitted the proposal as an amendment to the fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill. But the House Rules Committee didn’t select it for floor consideration, preventing it from getting a vote in the full House last month.

Cerkovnik said CISA had reviewed the proposal and saw both benefits and challenges. Formal recognition could help preserve support for the program, although CISA and DHS have maintained its operations without a lapse for more than 26 years, she said.

CISA is CVE’s sole federal sponsor, while MITRE helps execute the program alongside a global network of more than 530 CVE Numbering Authorities, known as CNAs. Those organizations — which include software vendors, research groups and national cybersecurity agencies — can assign identifiers and publish information about vulnerabilities within their areas of responsibility.

The number and variety of those participants has allowed CVE to keep pace with a growing volume of software flaws. AI, however, is widely expected to accelerate vulnerability discovery further and may require the program to make changes that its current structure did not anticipate.

Cerkovnik pointed to a recently announced AI researcher CNA pilot program that would allow selected AI companies to assign CVE identifiers for vulnerabilities uncovered through research using their own models.

That program may need to bring people with AI expertise into its leadership, she said, and rules narrowly prescribing who can serve on CVE boards or how new participants are admitted could complicate that kind of response. Cerkovnik didn’t say the current congressional proposal would block the pilot, instead using it to illustrate why the program needs room to adjust as technology changes.

CVE is also becoming less centered on the United States. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, known as ENISA, became a CVE Numbering Authority in 2024 and a CVE Root in November 2025. Roots oversee groups of numbering authorities, helping organizations join the program and maintaining the quality of the vulnerability records they produce.

ENISA has since begun bringing European organizations under its Root, building on the agency’s stated goal of helping strengthen and modernize CVE.

Nuno Rodrigues Carvalho, ENISA’s head of sector for incident and vulnerability services, said on the panel Thursday that the agency now wants to “step up in the coming months” to also be a top-level Root, bringing it to the same level as CISA and MITRE.

He described a more federated model in which organizations in Europe, Japan and potentially other regions oversee nearby numbering authorities and provide further support to the project.

Europe already accounts for roughly one-fifth of the organizations authorized to assign CVE identifiers, Carvalho said. ENISA also operates the European Vulnerability Database, although he emphasized that it relies on CVE identifiers rather than competing with the existing system.

Cerkovnik backed growing foreign participation, arguing the past year had reinforced the need to describe CVE as “a global program and not just a U.S.-centric program.”

AI poses another challenge by potentially increasing the number of vulnerabilities companies and governments must process. Cerkovnik said she expects CVE to scale alongside that growth but is more concerned about whether organizations can determine which flaws demand immediate attention.

“Not all vulnerabilities matter. Not all vulnerabilities matter at the same level,” she said. CISA made a similar argument in a binding directive issued in June that tells federal agencies to base patching deadlines on a variety of factors.

Some lower-risk flaws could be left until a system receives a major upgrade, while the most dangerous vulnerabilities may require action within days. That kind of triage will become more important as AI produces more findings, Cerkovnik said, because neither CVE nor the organizations relying on it can treat every newly discovered flaw as equally urgent.

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The government's AI guardrails are taking shape behind closed doors

Patrick Tucker — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:17:18 -0400

No one is saying, officially, what was decided when top frontier AI labs—Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—met with White House officials on Tuesday to discuss voluntary guidelines for testing new models.

But Democratic lawmakers described the Trump administration's approach to regulation as “ad-hoc and unpredictable,” and said it’s likely to boost global adoption of rival Chinese models at the worst possible time.

Two officials with one of the labs said that Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI submitted a joint draft of the regulation around nine days ago and then began to work with each other and with the White House to find points of agreement. According to the officials, the labs all agreed they should be able to continue A/B testing as part of the process for developing models, and the White House concurred.

Companies that agree to the framework will submit their models to U.S. inspectors to be evaluated for safety for 30 days before those companies can receive federal funding—including from the Defense Department, whose 2027 budget request seeks more than $54 billion for AI companies, according to the officials.

A June White House executive order adds that models from participating companies would get extra intellectual property protection from Chinese competitors or others who might seek to steal secrets.

The White House is not commenting on how it will conduct the inspections. One of the officials said the the Office of Science and Technology Policy is still trying to set testing standards and how bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will conduct or design tests.

The murkiness around the policy’s details has angered some top lawmakers. In a Tuesday letter, Senate Democrats ask the White House to “provide an unclassified response, with a classified annex if necessary, clarifying the Administration’s current policy and approach to limiting access to advanced AI models.”

The lawmakers also evinced concern about the models' new abilities to defy easy inspection, scrutiny, and limitation.

“During an internal evaluation [in July] OpenAI models escaped their testing environment and used high-level technical capabilities to compromise a third party’s network without any instructions to take those actions,” the letter reads. “The Federal Government cannot be passive as these capabilities emerge.”

AI’s Jurassic Park moment

Last week, Chinese company Moonshot AI released a new open-weight model, Kimi 3, that performs as well as some top U.S. models and is being offered to consumers around the world at a far lower price.

Lawmakers and others are increasingly worried the United States could fall behind China in a race to develop faster, more efficient, more profitable models and to shape the way global populations use, buy, sell, and even build AI. Open weight models have become a key point of contention.

Anthropic wants more scrutiny of open-weight models and more efforts to curb sales of high-performance chips to China to thwart distillation attacks. But others in the industry are taking a more supportive view of open weights.

A former senior White House official and a former senior defense official with direct knowledge of the discussion said Anthropic pushed for more language in the framework to address open-weight security, but came away disappointed.

Anthropic did not comment for this story.

In recent months, several of the newest AI models have broken out of their virtual testing containers.

Anthropic disclosed the first such incident in April, when an early version of their Mythos model was able to “autonomously write some remarkably sophisticated exploits,” including one that allowed it to escape an isolated testing environment that programmers use to test code for effectiveness and safety before it’s released.

Anthropic pulled the model from general release, but made it available under "Project Glasswing" so the government and a handful of large companies could find and fix vulnerabilities in their software.

The White House responded with an export-control ban on June 12, barring access to the model not just to foreign countries but even foreigners in the United States. That meant that Anthropic’s own researchers, many of whom were born outside of the United States, could not work on the model. The White House reversed the ban on June 30.

In July, tensions around a national AI safety strategy, or lack thereof, grew hotter. Both Anthropic and OpenAI revealed new incidents in which models breached their containment. It came as no surprise to many veteran cybersecurity experts. AI researcher and author Gary Marcus, in 2022, predicted such a possibility on his blog, describing it as an “AI’s Jurassic Park Moment.”

Last week, AWS Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt told reporters: “Containers are not security boundaries. I actually have a T-shirt that says that, which I started wearing about three years ago.”

AWS hosts multiple models for users through its Bedrock platform. Schmidt said the AI Mythos era requires a far more vigilant approach to cybersecurity, especially for researchers.

“One of the reasons that we built the virtualization infrastructure for AWS using our own Nitro Hypervisors so many years ago was we realized that containers were not an appropriate security boundary then. The same is true for AI. You cannot use an AI container as a security boundary.”

In March, a group of British researchers calculated the sandbox breakout period for various large language models, which proved very accurate months later.

A follow-on paper published this week by the same group describes how to build better containment environments for the models emerging today.

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The state of play around the 2027 pay raise, or lack thereof

Erich Wagner — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:55:28 -0400

President Trump is expected sometime this month to issue a plan to freeze federal employee pay in 2027, though if last year was any indication, it may not be that straightforward.

When the White House published its fiscal 2027 budget proposal in April, the document, which normally lays out the administration’s pay plan for the following year, was silent on civilian compensation. The Office of Management and Budget later confirmed that Trump was in fact proposing “no pay increase” for 2027, while military service members would see between a 5% and 7% raise, depending upon their rank.

Trump now has until the end of August to formalize his alternative pay plan for next year; otherwise, much larger automatic increases in locality pay would take effect, due to a formula in the 1990 Federal Pay Comparability Act that has been criticized by presidents of both parties since its enactment.

Congress thus far has not taken action to overrule Trump’s pay plan. The House’s fiscal 2027 financial services and general government appropriations bill is silent on federal employee pay—effectively endorsing the president’s plan. And while the Senate has not yet published its draft of the FSGG funding bill, lawmakers in that chamber have proposed reducing the military pay raise to an across-the-board 3.6% raise as part of its proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

Democrats in both the House and Senate have called for a more fulsome raise of 4.1% on average next year, as part of their annual advocacy for the Fair Adjustment of Income Rates Act. Under that plan, civilian federal employees would receive a 3.1% increase in basic pay, coupled with an average 1% increase in locality pay.

While Trump is expected to formalize his plan for a pay freeze later this month, it’s not a sure thing. Last year, the president’s so-called “skinny” budget was also silent on federal employees pay, while OMB documents to agencies instructed them to plan for a pay freeze in 2026.

But ultimately, the president’s alternative pay plan enacted a 1% across-the-board increase in basic pay and no increase in locality pay for most workers. Feds in “law enforcement” fields were granted a 3.8% raise, in line with the increase afforded to military service members in 2026.

More changes to federal compensation could be in the offing in the coming months, as the Office of Personnel Management has signaled it plans to issue new regulations governing the locality pay system.

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DOGE took credit for savings that never happened, watchdog finds

Christian Robles — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:50:52 -0400

The Trump administration should prominently display data quality issues and limitations on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website listing estimated savings, the Government Accountability Office recommended in a new report, finding the public tally heralding billions of dollars in estimated savings was rife with errors.

The watchdog found that the website’s estimated savings tracker — or “Wall of Receipts” — listed contracts that were not actually cancelled, took credit for leases that were in the process of termination before DOGE’s existence and did not adequately explain how savings were calculated. The findings cast doubt on DOGE’s claim that it saved taxpayers $215 billion by slashing contracts, grants, leases and other wasteful expenditures.

The report, requested by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., analyzed the wall of receipts’ estimated savings of roughly $110.34 billion from supposedly terminated contracts, grants and leases.

GAO found that roughly $34.6 billion of the estimated $61 billion saved from cancelled contracts came from either contracts that were never actually terminated or could not be corroborated as terminated.

DOGE specifically reported it cancelled 13,476 contracts but “almost 2,000 contracts were not terminated,” according to GAO’s analysis of the Federal Procurement Data System. In one case, DOGE continued to estimate saving taxpayers more than $1.7 billion by cancelling a Defense Health Agency IT support contract after Defense Department officials got DOGE officials to agree the contract should not be terminated, GAO wrote. No action was ultimately taken on the contract.

Additionally, about 27.8% of contracts listed as terminated — including all contracts at the DOGE-dismantled United States Agency for International Development — did not include identifying information, GAO found. Because of this lack of information, the office could not find 1,856 supposedly terminated contracts on the Federal Procurement Data System even after taking additional steps to do so.

The watchdog added that DOGE did not consistently use its stated methodology for calculating estimated savings from terminated contracts. And even in cases where DOGE did use its stated methodology, it did not “account for many complexities and nuances of federal contracting or sufficiently identify limitations.” DOGE — whose operation formally ended as of July 4 — did not return GAO’s requests for interviews or clarifications.

DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify about 96.2% — or $47.32 billion — of estimated grant savings, GAO found. But even for the small portion of grant savings GAO could replicate, “the amount of reported savings may not be realized,” according to the report.

DOGE reported that it terminated 264 leases, saving taxpayers about $113 million. But the General Services Administration told GAO that 108 out of those 264 leases were identified for termination before DOGE was established. Because of that discrepancy and other inaccuracies, GAO estimated DOGE overstated how much it saved on terminated leases by $81.1 million.

DOGE also further overstated lease savings by not considering other factors, such as relocation costs and potential early termination fees, according to the report.

The White House did not return a request for comment by the time of publication.

“This GAO report underscores the need for increased transparency and accountability from the Trump Administration so the American public can better understand DOGE’s activities as the organization guts vital government programs,” Blumenthal said in a press release.

The GAO released a separate report Wednesday where it said it could not verify if DOGE employees completed required ethics training designed to avoid conflicts of interest.

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Calls for IG probe of Reflecting Pool renovation come amid questions over watchdog's independence

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:40:10 -0400

Two Democratic senators on Tuesday asked for an investigation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation by the Interior Department inspector general, an independent oversight office whose former leader and a lawmaker say is the new workplace of a Trump political appointee.

Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., the ranking members of the Environment and Public Works and Energy and Natural Resources committees respectively, submitted their request after the U.S. Attorney's Office for D.C. dropped charges against several individuals accused of vandalizing the landmark. Instead, federal prosecutors now say that the damage to the pool’s new lining was likely caused by faulty contractor work.

Bare patches are visible where newly applied blue paint has peeled from the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 20, 2026.

KEN CEDENO /GETTY IMAGES

“We urge your office to open an immediate investigation into DOI’s knowledge of coating and peeling issues with the Reflecting Pool — including what was known, who knew it and when they knew it — and whether DOI employees intentionally withheld evidence from USAO-DC,” the senators wrote.

Caryl Brzymialkiewicz, the deputy IG at Interior, is currently leading the office after IG Mark Lee Greenblatt was removed in a mass firing of the watchdogs at the start of Trump’s second term.

On Tuesday, Greenblatt alleged that Dennis Kirk, a co-author of the conservative Project 2025 presidential transition initiative, was installed at the Interior IG.

“This is not about one individual, or whether Mr. Kirk is capable or well-intentioned,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “It is about whether placing a political operative inside an independent watchdog office creates a structural conflict that undermines public confidence in the office's independence.”

Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, also criticized Kirk’s apparent appointment in a statement on Wednesday.

“This man helped write the Project 2025 playbook for seizing control of the federal workforce. Now he sits inside the office charged with rooting out corruption at Interior — the department that manages our national parks, public lands, Tribal programs, and now under Trump, gold-slathered statues and a botched Reflecting Pool renovation,” he said. “That same office is weighing serious ethics investigations into senior officials in this administration. It’s no surprise the White House suddenly wants its own man inside the one place that Trump's cronies still have reason to fear.”

In response to questions about the Reflecting Pool investigation request and Kirk’s alleged appointment, a spokesperson for the Interior IG said the office has no comment.

The Washington Post reported that in 2025 former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard assigned Kirk, then one of her advisers, to a position at the IG for the intelligence community.

In June, the Partnership for Public Service reported that the Trump administration placed political appointees in the IG offices at the Housing and Urban Development and Labor departments. The nonprofit said that it’s rare for such government officials to work for the watchdogs because “it introduces a structural conflict of interest into an institution whose effectiveness depends on independence.”

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Former feds have a new way to find their personnel files

Tammy Flanagan — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:00:00 -0400

One of my colleagues, retirement benefits expert Michele Bollier, who answers emails from members of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, was helping a retiree and discovered more good news coming from the Office of Personnel Management.

The agency has taken an important step toward modernizing access to federal personnel records with a new resource called the eOPF Resource Center and the recent launch of the eOPF Documents Request Service.

The electronic Official Personnel Folder, or eOPF, began 20 years ago when the National Finance Center payroll provider started sending SF-50s, Personnel Action Statements, and transactions to the eOPF system for processing. Scanned documents from paper Official Personnel Folders began being added to eOPF in 2007. Two decades have passed since the Commerce Department implemented an e-government initiative that provided easier and faster access for current employees to their personnel files.

Now, if you are a former federal employee or retiree looking for personnel records from your eOPF, there is a new and faster way to request them.

For current and former federal employees, the “electronic Official Personnel Folder,” or eOPF, is more than an administrative archive. It is the official record of federal employment, containing documents such as SF-50s, appointment and separation actions, position changes, benefits-related forms and other records that may be needed years after someone leaves government service.

For many former employees, getting these records has historically been frustrating. Once an employee separated, online access to the agency eOPF system generally ended, leaving the former employee to contact a previous agency human resources office or submit a written request to the National Personnel Records Center.

OPM’s new resources are designed to make that process clearer and, for many people, faster.

The most significant new resource is the Documents Request Service, a secure, public-facing portal. The service allows eligible separated federal employees to request and receive a copy of their eOPF employment folder electronically.

OPM describes the tool as a self-service option that eliminates the need for former employees to rely on government networks, agency-issued credentials or manual paper-based fulfillment methods when their records are already maintained in eOPF.

Being a former federal employee, I decided to try out this new service. I had my doubts since I left federal service in 1988 and doubted that anyone had scanned my old personnel records into the eOPF system. I was right: There were no records.

However, I was reminded that to sign into the Login.gov system, you will need to scan your driver’s license or passport into the system and then provide your Social Security number as further identification that it is you who is trying to log in.

If you are informed that the system could not find your records, you should check the information you entered and try again. Common mistakes are an incorrect Social Security number or ZIP code. You can try it four more times. Then you must wait six hours before trying again.

The service is intended primarily for separated federal employees whose records are in eOPF. It may also be used by current federal employees who do not have government-furnished equipment, a PIV card, a government email address or secure access to their agency’s eOPF system.

It is not intended for current employees who already have normal access through their agency, third-party requesters, the public or individuals whose records were never maintained in the eOPF system.

Former employees who want to use the Documents Request Service should generally wait at least 30 days after their separation date before submitting a request. OPM advises this waiting period because final separation documents, including the SF-50 documenting separation, may not be profiled into the eOPF immediately. Requesting too early could result in an incomplete folder.

OPM’s user guidance says the file should be downloaded and saved promptly because the link expires after 24 hours. The password format described in OPM’s guide uses the employee’s date of birth and the last four digits of the Social Security number.

Because the file contains sensitive personnel information, former employees should save it in a secure location and avoid forwarding it through unsecured email.

In case your records can’t be retrieved through this new system, OPM points users to more traditional options: Contact the former employing agency or request records from the National Personnel Records Center. NPRC maintains official personnel folders for many former federal civilian employees whose service ended after 1951. These records remain subject to the Privacy Act, so access is restricted.

The person of record may request copies of most civilian personnel records, including SF-50s, by submitting a written, signed and dated request. The request should include identifying information such as full name, date of birth, Social Security number, last employing agency, duty station, approximate dates of employment and a clear description of the records needed.

Timing is important here as well. NPRC guidance notes that OPFs are generally retired to the center after separation. If not enough time has passed, the former employee may need to contact the last employing agency instead.

OPM’s post-separation FAQ also explains that eOPF records are often transferred from the former agency to NPRC within 30 to 60 days after the separation action is processed, though an agency may retain the eOPF longer. If the agency still has the folder, it may be required to provide physical copies upon request.

For older personnel records, former employees should understand the difference between non-archival and archival OPFs.

NPRC’s Federal Records Center Program maintains OPFs for former federal civilian employees whose employment ended after 1951. These files generally remain in OPM’s legal custody and are protected by the Privacy Act, which means the person of record, or an authorized third party with signed consent, is usually the proper requester.

Civilian employment records are normally transferred to NPRC within 120 days after separation. If fewer than 120 days have passed, the employee should write to the last employing agency instead.

A written NPRC request should be signed and dated and should clearly identify the records needed, such as the most recent SF-50 or the complete official personnel folder. To help NPRC locate the file, the request should include the full name used during federal employment, date of birth, Social Security number if applicable, employing agency name and location, duty station and approximate beginning and ending dates of service.

Records for federal civilian employees whose service ended before 1952 follow a different archival access process through the National Archives. Those older OPFs may be handled as archival holdings rather than current federal records, so requesters should use National Archives guidance for archival civilian personnel folders.

In practical terms, a former employee seeking older records should first determine the approximate separation date: After 1951 generally points to NPRC’s non-archival OPF process, while before 1952 points to the archival OPF process.

Access to personnel records is not just a matter of convenience. Former employees may need their SF-50s and related documents to verify prior federal service, apply for another federal position, resolve pay or leave questions, support a retirement or benefits claim, confirm military service credit or assist with a security clearance review.

Having an easier electronic path to these documents can reduce delays at moments when former employees may be facing deadlines or life transitions.

The new eOPF resources also reinforce a best practice: Employees should review and download important records before leaving federal service whenever possible. It is much easier to identify missing or incorrect documents while still employed and while agency HR staff can correct problems directly.

Before separation, employees should check key documents such as SF-50s, service computation dates, beneficiary forms, military deposit records, retirement coverage and benefits elections. Any discrepancies should be raised with HR before access ends.

OPM’s updated eOPF Resource Center and Documents Request Service give former federal employees a clearer roadmap for obtaining personnel records after leaving government. The best approach is to start with the new portal if eligible, wait long enough for final separation documents to be added, download the completed folder promptly and keep the records secure. If the portal cannot locate the folder, the next step is to contact the former agency or submit a written request to NPRC. Together, these resources should make it easier for former employees to prove their service, protect their benefits and manage federal employment records long after their last day on the job.

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What history tells us about the potential government shutdown

Frank Konkel — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:22:29 -0400

The Senate is working to pass a bipartisan funding bill before a summer recess that would fund the federal government through Dec. 11, prevent a potential government shutdown during November’s midterm elections and avoid a repeat of last year, when agencies began the fiscal year with a record 43-day shutdown.

Senators easily cleared the first in a series of procedural motions Monday by a vote of 89-4, fast-tracking the bill for final vote before the Senate recesses for five weeks. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., all but promised Wednesday that senators would delay the recess—scheduled for Friday—until they navigate a “train wreck” of legislation that includes the spending bill.

The bill has several key differences from the one the House passed on July 21—which Senate Democrats declared dead on arrival—including no new funding for immigration agencies and language temporarily blocking the Trump administration from putting political appointees in charge of federal grant approvals. Unlike the House bill, the Senate bill does not include $1 billion for the Trump-class battleship program, and it would provide government funding one week longer than the House bill, which would fund agencies through Dec. 4.

To be signed into law and avoid a shutdown, one chamber would have to adopt the other’s bill, or appropriators will need to develop a compromise bill that both chambers pass and President Trump signs.

On its face, Congress’ unusual early efforts to avoid a shutdown dramatically decreased the odds of a shutdown—at least in October. On prediction market Kalshi, odds of an Oct. 1 shutdown now sit at 25%, down from 64% last month.

“It’s good they’re getting ahead of it. I cannot recall a time when a CR was introduced in July,” said David Berteau, a longtime budget expert and former high-ranking Pentagon appointee in both the Reagan and Obama administrations. “I don’t really know what the parties want, but the members want to not have a shutdown.”

That should alleviate some angst for federal employees and government contractors who’ve dealt with three partial or full government shutdowns in the past year. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees missed several consecutive pay periods, forcing many to take odd jobs or seek loans to pay bills. Many contractors, meanwhile, weren’t paid at all during the shutdown, since they are not legally entitled to backpay. Millions of Americans suffered too, with fewer domestic flights and hours-long security lines at airports, disruptions to public services and tens of billions of dollars in lost economic output.

In decades past, chances of a shutdown with a government and presidency under the same party—during a critical midterm election—would have been exceedingly low. Lately, though, there are no sure bets.

What history says

Given recent history, Berteau said it’s anything but a done deal.

Until 2018, every government shutdown for the previous four decades occurred under a divided government, when either the majority in the House or Senate was held by a different political party than the presidency.

“Until 2018, the last time we had a shutdown with unified government was under Jimmy Carter in 1980,” Berteau said. “That trend broke briefly in 2018, which started under unified gov’t and ended under a divided government. Then we had no shutdowns until last year, and all three of those were under a unified government.”

“Normally, I would say don’t worry about it, but it’s not normal anymore,” Berteau added.Neither House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., nor the White House has weighed in yet on the Senate’s spending bill. Once Congress returns from summer recess, they’ll be under a time crunch, with only 16 working days in the legislative calendar to advance a stopgap before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30. Other competing priorities, including a reconciliation bill and the SAVE Act, may take some oxygen during those proceedings.

“The possibility of an October shutdown, even in an election year, even in a unified government, that possibility is not zero,” Berteau said.

Even with apparent momentum in the Senate, government executives would be wise to dust off their shutdown plans, while government contractors who serve the government should prepare their pipelines and communication strategy for a possible shutdown. That’s because even if an October shutdown is avoided through a stopgap measure, the federal government faces the prospect of running out of money during a lame-duck Congress—midnight on Dec. 12 in the Senate’s current bill—wherein at least one of the House or Senate is favored to flip into Democratic control.

The scenario is eerily similar to the 2018 shutdown, which until last year held the record for the longest shutdown at 35 days. The 2018 shutdown began Dec. 22 when government funding ran out in President Trump’s first term, with Republicans in charge of the House and Senate. The crux of that shutdown was Senate Democrats’ opposition to more than $5 billion in funding for Trump’s border wall. That shutdown finally ended Jan. 25, 2019, three weeks after Democrats took control of the House under new Speaker Nancy Pelosi, following their successful flip of the chamber in November.

With three months to go until elections, most polls give Democrats better than an 80% chance to take the House in November, with Democrats only slight underdogs to take the Senate. There is a very real possibility that Republicans lose control of either the House or Senate in November, leaving a lame-duck Congress the responsibility of passing another budget bill to avoid a holiday shutdown.

“History says that when one House or both change hands in the midterms, they wait until a new Congress is seated before any final spending deals,” Berteau said.

That doesn’t mean a deal couldn’t happen. Both parties may have incentives to negotiate.

John Weiler, cofounder and executive director the IT Acquisition Advisory Council, said, “If Republicans lose the House as is expected, they will be moving to pass appropriations bills and a budget reconciliation package before the new Congress is sworn in, so they’ll be looking to make a deal with the Democrats on appropriations.”

Similarly, Weiler said, “Democrats should also be looking to strike a deal on appropriations because the Trump administration is happy to operate under a continuing resolution since it gives them more leverage and might be the last chance they have to set new spending levels versus ongoing CRs and budget showdowns.”

Until the president’s signature is dry on a spending bill, all bets are off.

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Mediation agency changes how labor disputes move forward

Erich Wagner — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:45:56 -0400

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service this week promulgated new regulations to formalize a controversial April policy change that allows some agencies to effectively halt pending grievances that unions have filed against them.

FMCS’ primary role is to assign mediators to try to resolve disputes that arise during collective bargaining negotiations in both the private and public sectors, and to provide arbitrators to adjudicate alleged violations of union contracts at federal agencies as part of the grievance process.

But earlier this year, labor attorneys reported that the agency had abandoned its purely ministerial posture and begun asking “threshold” questions regarding the arbitrability of grievance prior to issuing an arbitrator or panel of arbitrators for the parties to choose from. By the end of April, FMCS settled on and released a new policy via memo: it would no longer appoint arbitrators for grievances at agencies implicated in President Trump’s two 2025 executive orders banning collective bargaining on national security grounds.

That policy conflicted with the agency’s own regulations, which state that arbitrator panel requests, “whether joint or unilateral, will be honored.” Federal sector labor law also stipulates that union contracts must allow for “either” party to invoke arbitration.

In May, the American Federation of Government Employees, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, National Federation of Federal Employees and National Treasury Employees Union accusing FMCS of violating the Administrative Procedure Act by not following its own regulations.

But in an interim final rule published in the Federal Register Wednesday, FMCS formally changed its regulations to allow it to make “limited threshold determinations” regarding its authority to issue arbitrator panels. The rule, which FMCS said is necessary because some agencies have objected to its issuance of arbitrators due to the anti-union EOs, is effective immediately, though the agency is accepting comments on the change until Sept. 4.

“FMCS has determined that the current sentence stating that every joint or unilateral panel request ‘will be honored’ could be misread as requiring FMCS to provide panels even where doing so would be inconsistent with law, a court order or FMCS’ statutory or regulatory authority,” the agency wrote. “That was not the intended effect of the regulation. The proposed rule clarifies that FMCS retains authority to make limited threshold determinations concerning whether FMCS may lawfully provide the requested service.”

During the threshold question investigation process, FCMS said it may request information from the parties and decide to decline the panel request, hold it in abeyance or “take another administratively appropriate action.”

“FMCS’ action on such a threshold question does not adjudicate the parties’ underlying contractual, statutory or arbitrability dispute," the rule states. “These changes reflect the longstanding principle that arbitration is voluntary and correct confusing and potentially misleading language in FMCS’ current regulation.”

But Suzanne Summerlin, an independent attorney that represents unions in grievances and other matters, said FMCS is effectively usurping authority from both arbitrators, who are empowered to decide questions of arbitrability on their own, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which hears appeals of arbitration decisions.

“FMCS is a ministerial agency—they’re not supposed to be determining whether there’s a duty to arbitrate by an agency or a union,” she said. “[It’s] not a matter of consent as to whether there is a binding arbitration provision in your contract, it’s a matter of statute . . . The statute requires arbitration to happen and it is not by operation of consent of the parties.”

Robert Tobias, distinguished practitioner in residence at American University’s Key Executive Leadership Program and a former president of NTEU, said he struggled to understand the reasoning behind FMCS’ policy change in its regulations.

“I don’t see a rationale, I just don’t see one that make sense at all,” he said. “On the one hand, it’s argued that unions need to file administratively before they can go to court, but then they say, ‘We’re not going to let you exhaust your administrative remedies.’ There can be no rationale when you have the juxtaposition of those two points of view . . . I think it’s pretty hard to construct something when the language in the law is so clear.”

FMCS’ move comes amid a tide of recent arbitrators’ decisions in favor of unions on issues like the 2025 cancellation of telework and firing of probationary employees, some of which occurred with agency management in absentia.

“Unions—and my clients—have been winning those cases left and right,” Summerlin said. “I’ve had three cases go before arbitrators against the EPA with the agency in absentia. EPA, VA, all of those agencies are just not participating at all.”

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Watchdog puts new numbers on the size of DOGE, but many details remain unknown as agencies refuse to turn over information

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:52:42 -0400

The Government Accountability Office on Wednesday published a report that uncovered more information about the individuals who worked for the Department of Government Efficiency. Still, the congressional watchdog’s findings were limited, including with respect to whether the DOGE employees completed required ethics training and paperwork, due to a lack of cooperation from agencies.

Investigators determined that there were at least 206 employees who worked for the Trump administration’s cost-cutting entity that held positions in the Executive Office of the President, even if they were detailed to other agencies, between Jan. 20, 2025, and Jan. 31, 2026. That number excludes DOGE staffers who were not assigned to the EOP.

GAO found that at least 128 of these individuals separated from their EOP positions by Jan. 31, 2026.

Of those 206 staffers, at least 27 were special government employees, meaning they could not serve for more than 130 days during any one-year period. For example, Elon Musk, the former de facto head of DOGE, was an SGE, which raised conflict of interest questions due to his companies receiving billions in federal contracts.

However investigators were not able to determine the appointment type, such as Schedule C political appointee or noncareer Senior Executive Service, for more than 150 of the personnel because many agencies did not provide the requested information.

“This total includes the 127 [U.S. DOGE Service] employees who held titles as digital services experts or consultants within USDS,” according to the report. “Although USDS has stated that USDS positions last no more than 4 years, we were unable to determine whether these USDS employees or other personnel had held such time-limited appointments.”

In total, 10 agencies and the EOP did not respond to requests from GAO for records that these DOGE employees participated in ethics training and completed financial disclosure reports.

“As a result, we are not able to determine the total number of DOGE personnel who held positions within EOP who received trainings or who completed financial disclosures at those 10 agencies or at EOP,” investigators wrote.

Nine agencies, covering 64 DOGE employees, did submit information about whether the staffers did such training and reports. But GAO argued that much of the documentation was incomplete. For example, the Agriculture Department provided an “ethics-related presentation” for Trump appointees but didn’t offer evidence for when, or if, the DOGE staffers received the training.

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

While “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization” terminated on July 4, pursuant to the executive order establishing it, GAO pointed out that the directive permanently renamed an existing White House office as the U.S. DOGE Service.

“Since the EO does not call for the termination of the broader USDS entity, it is possible that USDS and personnel at federal agencies could continue to do work that advances some of these initiatives after the temporary organization’s termination,” investigators wrote.

DOGE spearheaded many of the civil service reductions that took place last year, resulting in a decrease of more than 350,000 to the federal employee headcount.

GAO in April reported that the Treasury Department and DOGE did not follow all security protocols with respect to granting access to government payment systems.

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CDC gets a new chief as agency faces questions over its direction

Shauneen Miranda, States Newsroom — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:36:28 -0400

Dr. Erica Schwartz will be the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after the Senate confirmed her nomination Wednesday.

The Senate confirmed, 51-44, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the national public health agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, which has taken heat over the vaccine-skeptical agenda pursued by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

That agenda marked a central theme of Schwartz’s tense confirmation hearing in July before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pressed her on how she would deal with any political interference from the Trump administration when it comes to vaccine policy.

Schwartz ultimately scored the backing of the panel’s chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who had appeared dissatisfied with her responses at her confirmation hearing.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., was the only Democrat who voted to confirm Schwartz’s bid.

Schwartz worked as an occupational medicine physician in the U.S. Navy. She transferred to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, where she achieved the rank of rear admiral.

Schwartz also served as the chief medical officer of the U.S Coast Guard and later as deputy surgeon general of the United States.

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Critics argue Education's latest restructuring risks something harder to replace than staff

Shauneen Miranda, States Newsroom — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:48:04 -0400

Senate Democrats on Tuesday rebuked the Department of Education’s efforts to transfer its special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies.

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, convened a panel of advocates and former department officials in Republican and Democratic administrations to blast the department’s moves, which represent a key step in President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department.

Education announced in June that the Department of Health and Human Services would administer programs under Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, while civil rights enforcement under its Office for Civil Rights would be transferred to the Justice Department.

Democrats have been highly critical of the moves since they were announced.

Families of students with disabilities “deserve an educational system that is going to provide their kids with the education services that (are) required under IDEA,” Hirono said Tuesday.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities. OSERS is responsible for managing and supporting IDEA. The umbrella unit includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitation Services Administration.

Meanwhile, Education’s Office for Civil Rights is tasked with investigating discrimination complaints from students and families.

Lacking expertise

Democratic critics of the interagency agreements say the Education Department is best equipped to deal with special education programs and civil rights enforcement.

“In my view, neither of these other agencies or departments have the expertise to really be able to handle their piece of this,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen said.

The Maryland Democrat noted that he’d “much rather be in a position where we’re trying to make good things happen than trying to prevent harm to the Department of Education and the effort to make sure that we address the civil rights of students and make sure that people have the special education opportunity that the law requires, but here we are.”

The Education Department announced 10 earlier interagency agreements with HHS, Labor, Interior, State and Treasury in an effort to shift several of its major functions to those agencies.

"One consistent answer"

Valerie C. Williams, who served as director of the Office of Special Education Programs, or OSEP, under the Biden administration, said the deteriorating quality of special education may not be immediately noticed, but would have significant consequences for students.

“Here’s what worries me most, as someone who ran this office: The damage does not announce itself,” she said. “The erosion of enforcement and support does not show up the week it happens. It shows up months later, as a state that quietly stops getting monitored, a complaint that just sits, or a phone call that never gets answered.”

Laurie VanderPloeg, associate executive director for professional affairs at the Council for Exceptional Children, called on members of Congress across the aisle to “stand up for infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities by preserving the Department of Education and protecting special education programs from being transferred to another agency.”

VanderPloeg served as director of OSEP during the first Trump administration.

“We must resist the urge to make the fate of children with disabilities political, and urgently remain focused on supporting outcomes for all children,” she said.

Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said “there’s a reason that Congress kept OCR and OSERS in the same building.”

Galanter, who served as the principal deputy assistant secretary for civil rights during the Obama and Biden administrations, said “school districts need one consistent answer on disability rights, not two agencies pulling in different directions.”

Administration defends transfer

Tuesday’s forum came just days after a Senate education panel advanced a bipartisan bill to rein in Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department. The bill would block interagency agreements that transfer programs regarding special education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education and Native American education.

That legislation notably would not apply to the administration’s efforts to shift civil rights enforcement under OCR to the Justice Department.

Savannah Newhouse, a spokesperson for the Education Department, doubled down on the administration’s efforts in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Tuesday.

Newhouse said Hirono and her Democratic colleagues “are either completely ignorant to the collapse of American education, or they are actively rooting for the bureaucracy over our children,” adding that “their desperate fearmongering, claiming students will lose guaranteed federal support, is flatly false.”

Newhouse added that under Education’s partnership with Justice, “families retain the exact same direct line to staff for civil rights complaints.”

Regarding Education’s agreement with HHS surrounding special education programs, Newhouse said “OSERS staff remain fully committed to protecting the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) with bolstered support from HHS — an agency that already successfully manages grants and programs that serve individuals with disabilities.”

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FEMA slashed staff without considering the effects on future disaster response, watchdog reports

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:49:00 -0400

The Federal Emergency Management Agency cuts its workforce without assessing how that would impact disaster response and recovery, the Government Accountability Office determined in a report published Tuesday.

Despite previous reports that staffing shortages have impeded past recovery efforts, FEMA in 2025 and 2026 pushed staffers to take voluntary separation incentives like the deferred resignation program and fired new and recently promoted employees who were still in their probationary periods.

Ultimately, GAO found that about 17% of FEMA’s workforce, more than 4,300 employees, separated in fiscal 2025 and that, as of April, the agency employed nearly 21,000 staffers.

“DHS and FEMA did not assess whether offering the voluntary workforce reduction programs to employees would improve or limit FEMA’s ability to meet its mission needs moving forward, and the effort was not targeted or limited based on the agency’s workforce needs and gaps,” investigators wrote.

The report also covers a FEMA decision last winter to not renew the contracts for hundreds of temporary full-time Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees, who are the largest contingent in the agency’s workforce. But officials in May — after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem — offered impacted individuals their positions back.

“We found no evidence that DHS and FEMA leadership assessed whether the nonrenewal of CORE employees’ contracts in January 2026 would affect FEMA’s ability to respond to disasters,” investigators wrote.

They also reported that FEMA was under a hiring freeze from January 2025 through May 2026, except for roles deemed “essential” or “mission-critical” by DHS.

A lawsuit against the FEMA staff cuts likewise revealed that agency officials at one point proposed halving the disaster agency’s workforce without determining which roles should be shed.

GAO also flagged that FEMA in May 2025 rescinded its strategic plan and that, while officials said they would promptly create a new one, they haven’t yet.

“Without a strategic plan that outlines clear goals and objectives, FEMA continues to operate without the strategic direction on which to base its analysis of future workforce needs to ensure it can meet its mission,” investigators wrote.

Officials told GAO that strategic planning was delayed by the activities of the FEMA Review Council. While President Donald Trump at one point mused about eliminating the disaster agency, the White House-backed review council in May instead recommended reducing FEMA’s footprint and giving state and local governments a larger share of responsibility after emergencies.

GAO recommended that FEMA develop a strategic plan and conduct a workforce analysis to assess staffing and mission needs. DHS concurred with the suggestions but said implementation is contingent on the agency getting a new Senate-confirmed leader.

The Senate is expected to consider the nomination of Cameron Hamilton to be FEMA administrator, which is part of an en bloc package of executive branch nominees to be voted on, in the near future. He led the agency in an acting capacity at the start of 2025 but was fired after testifying to Congress that he did "not believe it is in the best interest of the American people” to eliminate FEMA.

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that GAO’s report “confirms what we have been saying for over a year.”

“The Trump administration’s drastic cuts to FEMA’s workforce — as well as forcing thousands of personnel to quit — have damaged the agency’s ability to respond to disasters and has rid it of critical institutional knowledge,” he said in a statement.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers also advanced out of committee a bill that would overhaul FEMA, including by making it an independent, cabinet-level agency.

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House probe finds gaps in U.S. effort to remove Chinese telecom risks

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:44:05 -0400

Years after federal regulators invoked national security grounds to push three Chinese state-owned telecommunications providers out of the American market, the companies never fully left, a new House probe has found.

China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom retained equipment, data-center space and connections to other networks in the United States after the Federal Communications Commission denied or revoked their authority to provide certain telecommunications services, according to a nearly 50-page bipartisan House China Committee investigation planned for release Tuesday and first seen by Nextgov/FCW.

From 2019 to 2022, the FCC denied China Mobile USA’s application to provide international service and revoked authorizations held by China Telecom Americas and China Unicom Americas. But those actions did not require the companies to remove equipment, leave data centers or sever private network links, and the carriers continued offering enterprise networking, internet transit and other services, the panel found.

The committee argues that those remaining footholds could give Beijing’s cyberspies visibility into sensitive traffic, help keep malicious infrastructure online and create opportunities to reroute data or reach U.S. targets. American officials regard China as the country’s leading cyber adversary, with a record of targeting critical infrastructure and stealing military, commercial and personal data.

The three carriers did not respond to detailed requests for comment. Nextgov/FCW also sought comment from the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and several U.S. spy agencies. The Defense Intelligence Agency, which produces intelligence findings for the Pentagon, declined to comment.

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington said Beijing “firmly opposes the U.S. overstretching the concept of national security and going after Chinese companies,” adding that China would defend its “legitimate and lawful rights and interests.”

The remaining network ties took on added significance in the committee’s review of Salt Typhoon, the sweeping Chinese espionage campaign uncovered in 2024 where hackers breached major telecom carriers in the United States and abroad. The intrusion reached systems used to comply with court-authorized wiretap requests and allowed the cyberspies to target the communications of senior U.S. officials, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Reviewing routing data from Sept. 22 to 25, 2024, just as the Salt Typhoon campaign became public, the committee identified 58 groups of internet addresses that CISA had linked to Salt Typhoon servers. China Mobile International’s network appeared in routes to those servers at least 192 times, helping keep the attacker infrastructure reachable as U.S. defenders sought to shut it down, the report said.

The committee does not allege that China Mobile USA employees knew about or participated in the campaign, and it says the routing evidence does not definitively link the company to Salt Typhoon. But the panel argues that the overlap shows how China Mobile’s remaining network ties could help sustain malicious infrastructure.

That finding came from a broader analysis that identified nearly 109,000 incidents from January 2018 through May 2025 in which Chinese or Hong Kong-linked networks allegedly claimed U.S. internet addresses without authorization, potentially diverting American traffic through their systems. The committee classified them as high-confidence hijacks of the Border Gateway Protocol, a bedrock system that directs traffic across networks, but acknowledged that some may have resulted from mistakes or poor network management.

More than 4,200 of the incidents involved China Mobile-controlled networks. In September 2024, eight originated from the same network that appeared in routes to Salt Typhoon servers and diverted traffic belonging to unnamed U.S. network operators, the committee said.

Addressing the threat

Telecommunications networks have long been prized intelligence targets because they can expose private conversations and reveal what political and diplomatic leaders are thinking. Such concerns are compounded by China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires companies and citizens to assist state intelligence work. Beijing denies that the law compels companies to participate in illegal espionage.

“China’s state telecommunications carriers for too long have enjoyed non-reciprocal access to U.S. domestic networks, but the seriousness of Salt Typhoon gives the FCC and other agencies more than enough justification to restrict or expel them,” said James Mulvenon, a leading authority on Chinese national security issues and vice president of intelligence at risk advisory firm Pamir Consulting.

The committee recommends giving federal agencies greater authority over equipment and private network arrangements that remain after a license revocation, along with targeted removal funding, stronger routing protections and logging requirements for foreign-controlled operators.

Marc Rogers, a veteran telecommunications expert who helped develop the mobile internet in the 2000s and has spent roughly two decades consulting governments and companies on telecom cybersecurity, agreed with many of the panel’s recommendations. Those include treating core telecom systems as high-risk targets requiring closer oversight, strengthening checks on how traffic moves across networks and tightening rules on the foreign-made equipment U.S. carriers can use.

But he disputed the panel’s call to expand “rip-and-replace” efforts targeting legacy telecom equipment, arguing that such programs are economically unrealistic and could significantly disrupt carrier operations.

“On paper it sounds great, until you get someone with operational experience,” Rogers said. “Then they realize you’re basically talking about bulldozing an entire city and building a new one.”

Rogers also said the panel’s recommendations resemble measures in British telecom security law but warned that they would work only if countries act together.

“If only one country takes a strong position, China will just maneuver around them,” he said, adding that the proposals are largely aimed at tactics China has already used. Policymakers should learn from those incidents, Rogers said, while also preparing for how Beijing’s methods may evolve.

The findings underscore the difficulty of removing operators deemed national security risks from a telecommunications ecosystem built on private infrastructure and decades of commercial ties. Regulators can ban specific services without necessarily reaching the equipment, leases and private agreements that preserve connectivity.

The committee based its report on subpoenaed company records, eight interviews conducted under oath, federal records, routing data and network infrastructure scans. It said Cloudflare and unnamed outside cybersecurity experts independently reviewed and verified portions of its routing analysis.

Parent company control and U.S. footprint

Across all three companies, the committee found U.S. subsidiaries that remained dependent on parent or affiliate entities in China or Hong Kong for important technical and operational functions while retaining equipment and network connections inside the United States.

At China Telecom Americas, requests involving connections between U.S. and overseas networks were handled by personnel in Shanghai, Hong Kong or Beijing, according to testimony cited in the report. Service orders could also flow through a parent-controlled system to Shanghai Telecom without a separate contract. The U.S. subsidiary did not keep independent traffic-flow records, leaving employees unable to determine whether a parent or affiliate had changed routes involving equipment in the United States.

China Telecom Americas identified 10 active points of presence — sites where a carrier keeps equipment and connects with other networks — across seven metropolitan areas. A senior engineering official also told the committee that about a quarter of the company’s U.S. transmission hardware was still made by Huawei, whose equipment the FCC has deemed a national security risk.

China Mobile USA, meanwhile, was described by one witness as “basically a sales team,” while another said it had no network engineers. Orders for data center space and network connections were approved at its Hong Kong headquarters, and witnesses could not identify a network operations team based elsewhere.

Despite this, China Mobile USA’s records contained 39 point-of-presence entries across 27 data-center and interconnection facilities. The committee said those sites connected it to carrier backbones, internet exchanges and private networks used by major U.S. technology companies. Investigators identified at least 143 active China Mobile network assets in U.S. facilities.

China Unicom Americas disclosed that seven of its eight directors and two of its three senior managers were Chinese Communist Party members. Its U.S. employees used parent-controlled email and computer systems, and evidence indicated that they operated under cybersecurity, administrative and privacy policies issued by China Unicom Global.

A compliance official told the report’s authors the subsidiary could guarantee its own adherence to U.S. law, but not its parent’s.

A China Unicom Americas compliance official also acknowledged that the subsidiary did not know the identities of some third parties in China that ultimately received services ordered through China Unicom Global. The company had equipment and active connections in roughly 10 U.S. data centers.

Other carrier relations

The report also describes relationships between the three Chinese carriers and companies linked by U.S. authorities to Chinese hacking operations.

China Mobile, in one case, acted as a middleman for CloudRadium, a Hong Kong hosting provider whose infrastructure has repeatedly surfaced in malicious cyber activity, the committee said. Subpoenaed records showed that China Mobile purchased U.S. data center space and network connections on CloudRadium’s behalf, including through a four-year contract valued at $480,000.

The report also links CloudRadium to a Wyoming company of the same name and GlobalData Investments, a California corporation that markets hosting and data center services under the CeraNetworks name. Nextgov/FCW found that the companies’ websites used similar logos, layouts and animations. An email sent to an address listed for Steven Beals, identified online as GlobalData Investments’ chief operating officer, was returned as undeliverable.

The committee also details China Unicom’s relationships with Integrity Technology Group and i-SOON, two Chinese cybersecurity contractors U.S. authorities have linked to state-backed hacking.

A 2024 U.S. advisory identified Integrity Tech infrastructure as the control layer for a botnet of compromised routers and other internet-connected devices operated by Flax Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group. China Unicom Beijing network addresses were used to manage the botnet and connect it to other attack infrastructure and, according to the committee’s report, China Unicom and Integrity Tech formalized a cooperation agreement in November 2023 while the botnet was operating.

China Unicom separately appeared as a corporate partner of i-SOON. The company drew international scrutiny after a large collection of purported internal documents appeared on GitHub in 2024, exposing details about its hacking tools, targets and work for Chinese police and intelligence agencies.

The Justice Department later charged eight i-SOON employees and two Chinese police officers in a years-long hacking campaign, alleging that the company worked with at least 43 intelligence or police bureaus. The charges have not been proven in court.

Integrity Tech’s website was unavailable when Nextgov/FCW attempted to contact the company, and a functioning corporate website for i-SOON could not be located.

“China has been conducting an escalating campaign of cyberattacks on U.S. networks as a form [of] operational preparation of the battlefield,” said Jack Burnham, a senior research analyst in the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies whose work focuses on China’s military, emerging technologies and science and technology policy.

“Key to these efforts is Beijing’s capacity to access core domestic networks, either via installed equipment, routing relationships, or other interconnections,” Burnham said. “While the FCC has sought to tamp down on Chinese state-owned telecoms firms that pose a national security threat, there is clearly more work to be done, both in terms of regulation and rip-and-replace, to properly handle these threats.”

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Blanche clears key hurdle in bid to lead Justice Department

Ashley Murray, States Newsroom — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:42:30 -0400

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche moved one step closer to permanently leading the Justice Department Tuesday after two skeptical Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans voted to advance his nomination, following Blanche’s signed promise that President Donald Trump’s nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is dead.

Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who had been withholding support for Blanche, voted with other members of the committee along party lines, 12-10, to send Blanche’s nomination to the full Senate. It is unclear how soon the Senate will vote on the confirmation.

Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, issued a brief signed statement on social media Sunday night promising the fund is “rescinded.” An attached unsigned memo stated the tax immunity deal for Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization only applies “retroactively.”

Trump did not sign the documents, and the president has defended the fund in recent days.

Cornyn said ahead of the vote Tuesday that he and Tillis came to an agreement with Justice Department officials on an “agency interpretive guidance document” that reaffirms what Blanche said in his sworn testimony: the tax audit immunity is limited to the parties and subject matter in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against his administration’s own IRS.

Trump voluntarily dropped the lawsuit in May in exchange for tax enforcement immunity for him, his sons Eric and Don Jr. and the Trump Organization. The agreement also created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that could potentially pay out to violent, but now pardoned, Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted police.

“Given this agreement with Mr. Blanche, I expect the department to live up to this in future litigation, and I will vote to advance him out of the committee today,” Cornyn said at the opening of Tuesday’s meeting.

Tillis said the question over the “payout pot for punks” was settled.

“I've never liked this 1776 fund. It made no sense to me, and I thought it was an insult to the police officers and the people that defended us on January the 6th. It's done, it's been rescinded, and I am satisfied,” Tillis said.

Tillis argued “both (sides) have a problem,” and he hopes Blanche will attempt “a bending of the curve of this absurdity.”

“If you want to talk about weaponization, take a look at the Biden administration … Maybe it's a little bit more intense in this administration than the last one, and that a little bit more intense than the prior administration, and so on and so forth. But folks, we've got to end this stuff,” he said.

He added the “bonehead” DOJ official in North Carolina who is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for a social media post of seashells on a beach spelling out “8647” — a nod to a restaurant kitchen term to get rid of something — “better damn sure have information to back it up because if all it is is a picture, that person should lose his or her job.”

Democrats united in opposition

All committee Democrats followed ranking member Dick Durbin of Illinois in delivering remarks opposing Blanche’s nomination.

The panel’s minority members raised concerns about Blanche’s handling of the Epstein files, his meeting with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, federal lawsuits involving states’ voter records and a promise to faith leaders that the DOJ will make the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn federal abortion protections “permanent in every single state.”

The Department of Justice did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment about the criticisms.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., chastised his Republican counterparts for comparing the Trump administration’s actions to the Biden administration, including President Joe Biden’s pardons of his son Hunter and other officials just hours before leaving office.

“That is like being obsessed and using a magnifying glass to study the stain on the living room carpet when behind you is a mountain of excrement covering the living room couch and coffee table,” Booker said.

He added that Trump’s recent financial disclosure revealed he made nearly $2 billion in crypto and foreign investments, and pointed to his sons Eric and Don Jr.’s backing of defense tech business ventures.

“The lack of proportionality going on (by) my colleagues, it is laughable,” he said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., described Blanche’s two-paragraph signed statement and unsigned memo in response to Cornyn and Tillis’ concerns as “decorative.”

Whitehouse said the Trump administration could reverse course and create a similar fund.

“Nothing in this document prevents anything like that from happening,” he added.

Durbin accused Blanche of lying under oath when he denied during his confirmation hearing a comment he made about the “anti-weaponization” fund during a pre-hearing meeting with Durbin.

“Mr. Blanche told me he made, quote, ‘a mistake,’ end quote, by creating the January 6th slush fund. Where did he say it? In my office, with witnesses on my staff to what I'm about to say. When I asked him about this under oath, Mr. Blanche falsely claimed that he never made this statement,” Durbin said.

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., criticized Trump for suing the Internal Revenue Service in the first place. The contractor who leaked Trump’s and his sons’ and organization’s tax information to reporters in 2019 was sentenced for the crime in 2024.

“He waits til he’s president. He sues the IRS for $10 billion. In a stunning act of self-dealing, he purports to settle with himself. He's represented by his personal lawyers on the one hand, and by his other lawyers at the Department of Justice on the other hand,” Schiff said, highlighting the Florida federal judge’s order that Trump used his presidency to “manipulate” the court for his benefit.

“Now there was an effort, and I appreciate my colleagues from Texas and North Carolina making an effort to try to rein in this tax settlement. But what they attempted to achieve has not been achieved,” Schiff said.

Epstein survivors disappointed

Blanche’s nomination vote drew criticism from outside the committee as well.

In an open letter Tuesday, 18 survivors of abuse by the now-deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and convicted sex trafficker Maxwell called the vote “a profound disappointment.”

Survivors have criticized Blanche’s handling of the Epstein files release, which unmasked several survivors’ names and images in the process “while he concealed the identities of alleged abusers and others connected to Epstein’s trafficking network,” the letter stated.

“When we met with Blanche (after his confirmation hearing), he interrupted us. He told us to ‘get to the point.’ He told us to report what happened to us to the FBI. We already have. Some of us have been reporting these crimes for decades,” the survivors wrote.

In another line of criticism, the legal advocacy organization Democracy Forward said in a letter to the Justice Department Monday that Blanche has refused to provide a sworn statement in federal court that the “anti-weaponization” fund will not accept and pay out claims.

Democracy Forward is representing several plaintiffs in a lawsuit over the fund, including a former federal prosecutor who alleges he was fired in June 2025 for his involvement in Jan. 6 prosecutions.

“The American people are not fooled by this latest move, and neither are we. The Trump-Vance administration cannot ask the public or our clients to accept a late-night social media post in place of legally binding action,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, in a statement Monday.

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TSP investments continued to tumble in July

Erich Wagner — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:22:19 -0400

Most funds offered as part of the federal government’s 401(k)-style retirement savings program finished July in the red, continuing the downward trend that began the prior month.

Only the Thrift Savings Plan’s G Fund, which is made up of government securities, grew last month, increasing by its statutorily mandated rate of 0.39%. So far this year, the G Fund has gained 2.57% in value.

The common stocks of the C Fund were virtually flat in July, falling 0.07% and bringing its 2026 performance down to 10.13%. And the international (I) fund lost 1.01% last month; since January, the I Fund is up 15.35%.

The small- and mid-size businesses of the S Fund finished July 4.12% in the red. So far this year, the S Fund has gained 13.52%. And the fixed income (F) Fund lost 1.29% last month, bringing its 2026 losses to 0.56%.

Each of the TSP’s lifecycle (L) funds, which shift toward more conservative investments as participants approach retirement age, likewise lost ground in July. The L Income Fund, designed for those who have already begun making withdrawals, fell 0.06%; L 2030, 0.41%; L 2035, 0.57%; L 2040, 0.66%; L 2045, 0.73%; L 2050, 0.79%; L 2055, 0.92%; L 2060, 0.92%; L 2065, 0.92%; L 2070, 0.92%; and L 2075, 0.92%.

So far this year, the L Income Fund has grown 5.18%; L 2030, 7.89%; L 2035, 8.93%; L 2040, 9.48%; L 2045, 10.45%; L 2050, 12.36%; L 2055, 12.36%; L 2060, 12.36%; L 2065, 12.36%; L 2070, 12.36%; and L 2075, 12.36%.

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GSA’s digital roadmap looks to enhance agencies’ services, CIO says

Edward Graham — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:29:57 -0400

The General Services Administration’s push to transform how the U.S. government procures new technologies will radically improve the way public servants deliver services at scale, according to the agency’s IT chief.

The Trump administration has moved to enhance federal adoption of new IT services, including artificial intelligence tools and other products that can automate many of the time-consuming tasks that slow agencies’ citizen-focused operations. GSA has been at the forefront of many of these modernization efforts by helping agencies onboard and experiment with capabilities from leading tech firms in a cost-efficient manner.

In a recent interview with Nextgov/FCW, GSA Chief Information Officer David Shive said the agency’s push to get new capabilities into the hands of federal workers has “disrupted the longstanding practice of how technology is driven into this government."

The typical process for government procurement, he said, was that “academia would create something, and then standards bodies would assess the thing, and then the White House would send out guidance on how to implement the thing and then agencies would then implement the thing.”

Shive added that this approach could take as long as two to three years, which resulted in “all this lost business value in that timeline.”

“Instead, what we're doing now is we're taking a disruptive technology, we're putting thoughtful, logical controls around that thing, and — just like the private sector — building [minimum viable products], building pilots, assessing value and then sharing that with our standards-setting bodies so that their standards are informed not by academic theory, but instead informed by actual use cases in government,” he said.

By shifting the typical procurement approach to speed up tech adoption, Shive said the White House’s governmentwide guidance on large-scale IT implementation efforts is now “based on those actuals rather than theory,” which he added, “has allowed us to drive technology into this government and generate the business value of that enabling technology at a much higher velocity than ever before.”

A new approach to federal tech modernization

Shive framed this as GSA’s digital roadmap for enhancing government services. It’s an approach, he said, that is not just about working to modernize federal systems in a safe and secure manner, but reshaping the entire model for onboarding new technologies downstream so “we buy technology based on these knowings, rather than based on theory.”

One notable example of GSA’s streamlined IT-focused procurement work is the OneGov initiative, which launched in April 2025 with the goal of assisting agencies in their technology modernization efforts by treating the government as one centralized customer. So far, the strategy has led to agreements with more than two dozen tech companies, with many of these deals including temporary discounts of as much as 70% to 90% on relevant products and services, including AI tools.

Shive called the OneGov deals “a perfect example of being able to buy, on a relatively short timescale, AI that allows [agencies] to do exploration and even full-scale implementation, but in a safe contractual model that doesn't lock them into a technology that might not end up being best of class.”

GSA officials previously said that OneGov has led to over $1 billion in cost savings since its launch last year, with the departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Transportation and State among the agencies that have taken advantage of the initiative’s discounted offerings. GSA is also looking at how the current agreements can ultimately lead to longer-term deals and even broader savings beyond the software and tech products that are currently offered.

The agency similarly launched USAi last August as a way for federal employees to experiment with AI capabilities in a trusted sandbox environment. Shive said GSA is able to see how agency personnel are using the platform and its offered AI tools — insights, he added, which “will inform our next round of negotiations” through OneGov.

At the Government Service Delivery conference in June, Shive said during a panel discussion that he believed more AI adoption will allow federal workers to drastically improve customer service delivery.

“Right now, I say we’re 50% of the way there,” he said at the time. “And by this time next year, I suspect we'll be 90% of the way there.”

Shive told Nextgov/FCW that accomplishing this lofty goal also extends beyond tech adoption to organizational change management, which he noted has often been “the biggest challenge historically.”

GSA released a step-by-step guide in June — the Elimination, Optimization and Automation playbook — to help agencies better adopt emerging capabilities in a way that can maximize their operational benefits.

While Shive said the playbook’s main goal is “helping agencies kind of think the same way” when it comes to modernizing their IT services, he added that “the secondary value that we're trying to generate there is that organizational change management part, to demonstrate to our agency partners, ‘look, this doesn't have to be a big, bad, scary thing; it does work.’”

One of the efforts that helped inform the playbook is GSA’s “Million Hour Challenge,” which seeks to eliminate one million hours of employee work during the 2027 calendar year by relying on technology.

Shive noted that this initiative doesn’t solely focus on adopting AI, “but [using] all the tech in the toolbox, including eliminating tools and systems and processes that should no longer be around, optimizing existing processes or automating and augmenting stuff with AI and other things.”

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LGBTQ+ feds sue to restore FEHB coverage of gender affirming care

Erich Wagner — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:18:35 -0400

A group of five federal employees filed a class action lawsuit against the Office of Personnel Management Monday, alleging that the agency’s cancellation of employer-sponsored health insurance coverage of gender affirming medical treatments amounts to unlawful sex discrimination.

When President Trump returned to office in January 2025, he signed an executive order requiring agencies to cease recognizing the concept of “gender identity” or the existence of transgender or otherwise gender non-conforming people. At OPM, implementation included instructing insurance carriers participating in the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs to cease covering gender-affirming care in most cases beginning last January.

The pseudonymous plaintiffs, four transgender or non-binary federal employees and one employee whose daughter is transgender, said they face medical bills in the tens of thousands of dollars if forced to pay out of pocket for the hormonal and surgical treatments their doctors have prescribed.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., alleges violations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and describes the gender-affirming care ban as “akin to denying continuing insulin treatment for someone with diabetes.” And the treatments sought by transgender or gender non-conforming employees are still approved in other contexts for cisgender workers and beneficiaries.

“[OPM’s] carrier letters discriminate on the basis of sex on their face,” the lawsuit states. “[The first letter] excludes ‘chemical and surgical modification of an individual’s sex traits through medical interventions (to include “gender transition” services)’ from FEHB and PSHB coverage. This exclusion targets gender-affirming care—care that is sought by transgender and gender non-conforming people—and thereby singles out current and former employees for less favorable treatment and fewer employment benefits than accorded their non-transgender counterparts.”

Under 2024 Supreme Court precedent, discrimination on the basis of someone’s gender identity is unlawful under Title VII, though the executive order underlying this case itself advocates for Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., to be overturned. Federal judges have blocked that edict’s implementation by a number of agencies, including the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in regard to its treatment of transgender inmates, though the agency violated that order last week.

Representing the plaintiffs are the Human Rights Campaign Foundation as well as former Merit Systems Protection Board Member Cathy Harris. Attorneys estimated that nearly 40,000 federal employees, retirees or dependents could be impacted by OPM’s gender affirming care ban.

“Healthcare access should never be weaponized to advance discrimination—and the denial of coverage for critical healthcare based simply on who you are blatantly violates the rights of all of us,” said HRCF President Kelley Robinson. “This odious policy is the latest example of the Trump administration’s obsession with targeting transgender people, using shameful and cruel tactics to threaten their employment, their health and the well-being of themselves and their families.”

“Federal employees have been through the wringer with the Trump administration,” Harris said. “We draw the line at blatant discrimination to deny healthcare to our nation’s dedicated civil servants.”

OPM did not respond to a request for comment.

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OPM tells agencies to put tech recruiting at the center of staffing plans

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:00:34 -0400

Agencies should prioritize recruiting tech talent in their hiring plans for next fiscal year, the Office of Personnel Management said in guidance released on July 30.

“Planning for technology and planning for talent are no longer separate conversations,” wrote OPM Director Scott Kupor in an associated blog post.

Specifically, agencies should reserve positions for individuals who specialize in areas like artificial intelligence, data science and cybersecurity. The government’s HR agency encouraged officials to fill these roles by utilizing Tech Force and Scholarship for Service.

The Trump administration created Tech Force last year to bring on early-career software and data engineers for two-year tours. While officials set out to recruit 1,000 individuals potentially as soon as the end of March, OPM said in response to a question for this article that it has hired about 300 participants so far.

Scholarship for Service was established in 2000 and covers college tuition for recipients who agree to work in a government cybersecurity role upon graduation. The program was recently updated to emphasize AI competency.

Many scholarship participants told NextGov/FCW last year that agencies rescinded their job offers, as the Trump administration sought to downsize the federal workforce. In all, more than 19,500 technology employees left or were pushed out of the federal government in 2025.

OPM’s guidance also directs agencies to address in their staffing plans how they plan to leverage AI technology, including through reskilling and upskilling current employees.

“This process involves identifying mission-critical positions that deliver the greatest value while understanding how technology can enhance service delivery,” Kupor wrote in the blog. “And it requires an honest look at opportunities to simplify organizations, improve internal processes and maximize the use of taxpayer resources.”

Additionally, the guidance sets a governmentwide target that at least 33% of external hires be in the early stages of their careers and pushes agencies to use the Early Career Talent Network, which OPM created to bolster recruitment of younger workers.

While Kupor frequently touts OPM’s efforts to bring more early-career staffers into government, which has been a longstanding issue for agencies, the Partnership for Public Service, a good government nonprofit, reported that the share of civil servants who are younger than the age of 30 decreased last year. Partnership officials attributed this to the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze and mass firings of probationary employees, which impacted many individuals who had been in their jobs for less than a year.

The specific annual agency staffing plans that the guidance refers to were mandated by an October 2025 executive order that set new requirements for filling vacancies and new hiring. Kupor also wrote that these plans would provide a “centralized view of workforce needs across agencies” in order to determine which skills the government workforce is lacking and where duplication is occurring.

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Funding deal could spare agencies another shutdown fight

Jacob Fischler, States Newsroom — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:32:22 -0400

Leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee announced a bipartisan deal over the weekend that would keep the federal government funded through Dec. 11 and pause the Trump administration’s effort to add controversial new criteria for federal grants.

The agreement — which Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine,, and Vice Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., released Sunday — would avoid an Oct. 1 government shutdown and keep federal spending at current levels, punting debates about full-year spending past the midterm elections. It would also extend authorization for the federal fund for highway and transit.

The Senate bill differs considerably from the more partisan stopgap spending measure the House passed last month, with Republicans providing nearly all the votes in support.

The Senate was scheduled to take a procedural vote Monday evening to advance the bill and, if that attracts more than 60 yes votes, would likely consider final passage this week.

In a statement, Collins said she worked with committee members of both parties and that the measure, known as a continuing resolution, or CR, excludes provisions that would doom its chances in the consensus-driven Senate.

“This CR is straightforward,” Collins wrote. “It continues current government funding levels until December 11th and includes necessary adjustments for programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), vital national security programs, including shipbuilding across multiple vessels, and the Disaster Relief Fund. The CR also avoids any poison pills.”

Murray championed Democrats’ success in blocking provisions of the House bill that would increase spending for military action in Iran and allow transfers for immigration enforcement, while adding sections to extend housing and food assistance programs and a section blocking the proposed rule on grant funding.

“This bill includes important extensions and language that House Republicans’ CR did not, and it rejects Trump’s frivolous war spending wish list,” Murray wrote. “Importantly, we closed the loophole in House Republicans’ CR that would have allowed the Trump administration to transfer funding provided for other programs to Border Patrol, which desperately needs reform, not more money.”

The Senate bill would keep nearly all federal spending steady until Dec. 11, which would save lawmakers from the painstaking work of cobbling together the 12 annual spending bills — and taking potentially difficult votes on them — while freeing more time to campaign ahead of the November elections.

OMB proposal paused

It would also freeze until Dec. 11 the White House Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule that Democrats have criticized for giving immense decision-making power to executive branch political appointees who would be empowered to confirm that federal grants align with the administration’s policy priorities.

House Appropriations ranking Democrat Rosa DeLauro said she was pleased to see the Senate bill block the rule from taking effect into December, but wanted a more permanent ban.

“While the bill temporarily blocks the proposed OMB rule, the fight must continue,” she wrote Sunday. “The Senate bill forces OMB to continue reviewing the half-million comments that were submitted, but Congress must permanently prevent this corrupt, harmful power grab before the new deadline of December 11.”

A draft of the rule, posted May 29, said the policy aims to downplay criteria based on diversity, equity and inclusion goals “and make merit-based decisions.”

Some Democrats, including those in Maryland’s congressional delegation, criticized the policy, saying it would create “arbitrary standards that are ripe for abuse” and “seeks to prohibit freedom of association, speech, and … international collaboration.”

More broadly, Democrats and some moderate Republicans objected to the power the rule would centralize in OMB and other executive agencies.

“The proposed rule would systematically politicize federal funding and allow Trump officials to cancel grants at any time for any reason,” Murray wrote. “Enabling this rule would only give Trump the greenlight to take even more federal funding hostage.”

In a July letter to OMB Director Russ Vought, Collins said she agreed with the principles of awarding grants based on merit, but that the rule would add a level of bureaucracy to grants that have already been approved by the scientific community and weaken Congress’ power over spending decisions.

“While I agree these principles should guide the administration and oversight of Federal funds, the rule would impose new, burdensome requirements on award recipients that would harm small and rural communities, undermine scientific and biomedical research, and conflict with Congress’ control over the federal funding process,” Collins wrote.

Road funding extended

The stopgap measure would also extend the major federal transportation trust fund through the duration of the bill.

The Highway Trust Fund sends set funding to state departments of transportation and local authorities to finance road and transit infrastructure.

Its authority to collect revenue, mostly through the federal gas tax, and send it to states is set to expire at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The continuing resolution would keep in place the contract authority level, about $80.2 billion per year, Congress approved in a 2021 law.

It would not, however, include the “advance appropriations” from the 2021 law that provided additional funding to several Transportation Department programs that disperse money to states and local governments.

Murray said she sought to have the $36.8 billion annual program extended, but was rebuffed by committee Republicans.

White House spokespeople did not immediately return a message seeking comment Monday.

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OPM breach victims could get identity protection for life

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Federal employees and contractors whose sensitive personal data was stolen in the massive Office of Personnel Management breaches disclosed a decade ago would receive identity protection for the rest of their lives under new bicameral legislation.

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner, D-Va., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., plan to introduce the RECOVER PII Act on Monday, aiming to prevent the federal government’s identity-protection program for victims from expiring Sept. 30, according to bill text first seen by Nextgov/FCW. Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va.; Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md.; and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., are also Senate cosponsors.

Just over 10 years after the OPM breaches compromised personal information belonging to roughly 22 million people, the identity-protection services provided to affected federal workers, contractors and their families have begun expiring. People who enrolled in OPM’s MyIDCare program are receiving notices that their complimentary coverage will end 10 years after their individual enrollment date. Some notices began arriving late last year and will continue through September, when OPM plans to conclude the services at the end of the federal fiscal year.

“More than ten years after the OPM data breach exposed the personal information of millions of federal employees, the threat remains,” Warner said in the statement. “The data stolen included workers’ most sensitive and personal information — from Social Security numbers to security clearance records — and once that information is in the hands of a bad actor, you don’t get it back.”

The two breaches compromised information belonging to some 22.1 million current, former and prospective federal employees, contractors and others. One intrusion exposed personnel records for roughly 4.2 million people, while a second compromised 21.5 million background-investigation records. About 3.6 million people were affected in both incidents, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Foreign intelligence services can hold onto these OPM records for years, combine them with information from other cyber intrusions and use the fuller picture to identify or target government personnel and their families.

Those risks can also grow over time. Data stolen from a lower-level employee in 2015 could become far more valuable if that person later moves into a more sensitive national security role. GAO warned last year that adversaries can combine publicly available data to identify military personnel and their families or disrupt Defense Department operations.

Congress responded to the breach in a 2017 appropriations law by requiring OPM to provide victims with at least 10 years of complimentary identity protection and no less than $5 million in identity-theft insurance. The new bill would replace that limit with coverage lasting for the remainder of each affected person’s life while retaining the insurance requirement.

“We have a responsibility to stand by the federal workers who were put at risk through no fault of their own,” Warner said. “This legislation will ensure those affected continue to receive the identity protection they need, while helping better safeguard personal information from future exploitation.”

The bill would also allow agencies to reimburse federal employees and contractors for privacy tools and services, such as those that remove or limit their personal information online. Agencies would decide whether to offer the reimbursements, which would not be limited to OPM breach victims and would come from their salary-and-expense budgets.

Norton has introduced legislation in the past seeking lifetime protection for OPM victims, beginning after the breaches were disclosed. Similar bills introduced over the years have not become law.

“Lifetime identity protection is the only solution that will give the workers whose data was compromised the peace of mind they deserve,” Norton said in a statement. “Because there is no limit on how long personal information can be exploited, Congress must protect these federal employees and contractors in perpetuity. Thank you to Senator Warner for working with me to secure this vital protection for those affected.”

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