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GSA claims it found $1.2B in suspected COVID-related contracting fraud

Christian Robles — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:02:38 -0400

The Trump administration claims it found more than $1.2 billion in suspected fraud and stopped $41 million more across five COVID-related contracts, according to a Wednesday press release from the General Services Administration.

GSA said although the COVID-19 national emergency and related acquisition flexibilities were cancelled in 2023, unnamed federal contractors continued to receive funding. The alleged fraud was uncovered in collaboration with the Health and Human Services Department and under the direction of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.

“The COVID emergency ended over three years ago, yet fraudsters continue to weaponize outdated emergency contracts to abuse taxpayer dollars,” GSA Administrator Edward Forst said in the release. “GSA will continue to work with the Vice President’s task force to stop improper payments, refer suspected fraud to law enforcement, and fight to recover every dollar.”

GSA estimates that about 93% of the contract funding — which would have been distributed for COVID vaccines and other pandemic-related services — has not yet been distributed to vendors, while roughly 6.78% has already been expended, according to a Fox News exclusive attached to the release. The agency has suspended payments to contractors, although the uncovered funding is not currently tied to criminal charges for contractors, the outlet reported.

“We're not after the honest contractors who did real pandemic work — we're after the leftover contracts hiding behind a crisis that no longer exists. The emergency is over. So is the free pass,” said Scott Brady, executive director of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, in the GSA press release.

The alleged COVID-related contracting fraud comes roughly a month after GSA said it found $13 billion in suspected procurement-related fraud since March 2026. At the time, an expert told Nextgov/FCW the alleged procurement-related fraud is a “trust but verify situation” and cautioned that fraud suspicions are different from adjudications.

In announcing suspected procurement-related fraud, GSA said it was reviewing COVID-19 spending, the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program spending, contractor eligibility, bid rigging, cybersecurity false claims, bribery and other contractor-integrity risks.

The administration claims it has uncovered about $260.7 billion in fraud since January 2025, including $96.4 billion at HHS and $13.9 billion at GSA, according to its fraud.gov ledger.

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Your federal benefits changed this year. Here’s what to know

Tammy Flanagan — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:00:00 -0400

What changed in your federal benefits in 2026 — and what could change next? Agencies updated federal retirement, insurance, Social Security and Thrift Savings Plan programs, while Congress considered proposals affecting future pay and benefits. This article summarizes the changes that took place in 2026 along with the links to official sources.

Review the 2026 changes now and watch for 2027 updates this fall. During Federal Benefits Open Season, OPM will soon begin to publish 2027 plans, premiums and coverage information. The September CPI release on Oct. 14, 2026, will provide the final CPI-W data used to determine 2027 Social Security and federal retirement COLAs.

Legislative watch: enacted changes and congressional proposals

Status as of Sept. 24, 2026: A proposal changes benefits only after both chambers pass identical text and the president signs it. The section below separates current-law changes from selected 119th Congress proposals.

How likely is enactment? Remember that most proposals do not become law. By September 2026, 112 of the 18,956 measures in the 119th Congress had become stand-alone laws; 431, or only about 2%, had been enacted alone or through another measure. Bills often stall in committee, lose floor time, face policy or budget objections, fail to clear Senate procedures or expire before both chambers agree.

H.R. 8364 has advanced the furthest among the proposals below because it passed the House. These are not bill-specific forecasts.

Track a bill: Search its number on Congress.gov, then review “Latest Action,” committees, text and related bills. Cosponsors show support; committee action or chamber passage shows more meaningful progress.

Other resources: Membership associations, unions and nonpartisan public-interest organizations may provide education and legislative updates. Compare their information with official OPM, SSA, TSP and Congress.gov sources. Examples: NARFE serves active and retired federal employees; AFGE and NTEU serve represented employees; FMA serves eligible managers, supervisors, executives and retirees; and NAPS serves eligible Postal Service supervisors, managers and postmasters. Eligibility, dues, services and viewpoints vary.

Federal employee pay for 2027

Administration plan: The Aug. 26 alternative pay plan would keep most 2027 General Schedule base and locality rates at 2026 levels. OPM is developing a 3.8% special-rate increase for covered law-enforcement personnel, tentatively effective Jan. 10, 2027; final coverage is still pending. OPM pay information.
FAIR Act (H.R. 7480/S. 3823): Would raise statutory basic and prevailing-rate pay 3.1% and locality pay 1% for 2027 — an average 4.1%, according to sponsors. Both bills remain in committee. House bill; Senate bill.

Federal retirement benefits

No broad 2026 FERS reduction: House-passed 2025 proposals, including elimination of the FERS annuity supplement for many future retirees, were not included in the enacted law. C
Equal COLA Act (H.R. 491/S. 624): Would give eligible FERS annuitants the full CSRS/Social Security COLA formula. Both bills remain in committee and neither has passed a chamber.
Federal Retirement Fairness Act (H.R. 1522): Would allow certain post-1988 temporary service to count under FERS after a deposit. Introduced Feb. 24, 2025, it remains in House committee.
Targeted proposals: H.R. 8364, allowing a Capitol Police retirement age of 57-65, passed the House April 27, 2026, and awaits Senate action. H.R. 10283, limiting retirement credit for certain Members, remains in House committees. Neither affects the general workforce.

Federal insurance benefits

No broad 2026 FEHB, PSHB, FEGLI or FEDVIP benefit law identified: The 2026 premium and plan-option changes described below are annual program changes, not newly enacted benefit statutes.
FEHB Protection Act (H.R. 2193): Would require OPM to verify qualifying life events and family-member eligibility when dependents are added to FEHB or PSHB coverage and to include ineligible enrollment in fraud-risk reviews. The House committee ordered the bill reported, but it has not become law.

Social Security retirement and survivor benefits

Current-law changes affecting 2026 payments: The 2.8% COLA, higher taxable maximum and revised earnings-test thresholds took effect automatically under existing law; they were not created by a new 2026 act of Congress. The most recent major statutory benefit change remains the Social Security Fairness Act, enacted Jan. 5, 2025, which repealed the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset for benefits payable after December 2023.
Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 9519/S. 5042): Would temporarily raise benefits, revise COLAs and minimum and survivor benefits, add caregiver credits and increase revenue. Both 2026 bills remain in committee. House bill; Senate bill.
Senior Citizens’ Freedom to Work Act (H.R. 8344): Would repeal the Social Security retirement earnings test, which currently withholds some benefits when a beneficiary below full retirement age has earnings above the annual limit. Read the bill.
Other proposals: H.R. 1700 and S. 3462 would raise benefits, change the COLA measure and tax higher earnings. Both remain in committee, and neither has passed a chamber.

Medicare

Current-law changes effective in 2026: Under the Inflation Reduction Act, negotiated prices took effect for the first 10 selected high-spending Medicare drugs, and the Part D annual out-of-pocket threshold rose to $2,100 after inflation adjustment.
Medicare Advantage Improvement Act of 2026 (S. 4384): Would shorten certain prior-authorization decision timeframes and make other Medicare Advantage reforms. Introduced April 27, 2026, it remains referred to the Senate Finance Committee.
Commission on Sustaining Medicare and Social Security Act (H.R. 9089): Would establish a commission to recommend options on solvency, premiums, fraud and program integrity. Introduced June 2, 2026, it remains in House committees.

Thrift Savings Plan

SECURE 2.0 rules effective in 2026: Under legislation enacted in 2022, catch-up contributions must be Roth for participants whose prior-year wages from the plan sponsor exceeded $150,000, and participants ages 60 through 63 retain the higher $11,250 catch-up limit. The regular 2026 TSP deferral limit is $24,500 and the general age-50 catch-up limit is $8,000.
TSP Modernization Act (H.R. 9214): Would require permitted transfers from TSP accounts to qualified retirement plans at brokerage firms to be available electronically. The bill was introduced June 9, 2026, and remains referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; it has not become law.
TSP Fiduciary Security Act (H.R. 7357): Would add a national-security consideration to TSP fiduciary duties and require a compliance review.
Emergency withdrawals: S. 2966/H.R. 5674 would waive the 10% additional tax on up to $30,000 during a shutdown; H.R. 6929 would allow certain separated employees up to $100,000 in penalty-free distributions. All remain in committee.
FORWARD Act (H.R. 4996): Would allow certain retired or totally disabled former uniformed-service members with an existing TSP account to continue contributing from retired pay or disability compensation, without agency matching.

The proposals above may shape future policy, but the sections below focus on changes already affecting employees, annuitants, survivors and TSP participants in 2026. Each section links directly to the agency responsible for administering the program.

Recent OPM updates

2026 retiree COLAs: Eligible Civil Service Retirement System annuitants receive a 2.8% increase, while eligible Federal Employees Retirement System annuitants receive 2.0%. The adjustment took effect Dec. 1, 2025, and was reflected in January 2026 payments. A first COLA may be prorated. FERS COLAs generally do not apply before age 62, subject to statutory exceptions, and do not increase the FERS annuity supplement.
Federal Workforce Data site: In January 2026, OPM launched the redesigned Federal Workforce Data site to replace FedScope. The separate data site offers interactive visuals, downloadable datasets, monthly updates and expanded workforce information; it was not a redesign of the entire OPM.gov website.
CHCO Council memoranda: On Aug. 28, 2025, OPM moved Chief Human Capital Officers Council memoranda directly onto OPM.gov. The change organizes agency guidance alongside other OPM resources, making policy updates easier to find and access.
Online retirement processing: OPM’s digital Online Retirement Application provides pre-filled information, annuity estimates, document uploads, completeness checks and status tracking. Contact your agency HR office to begin; OPM assists after receiving the case and assigning a CSA claim number.
August 2026 processing: OPM received 7,618 claims, processed 15,281 and ended with 15,427 pending. Average processing time was 70 days for digital claims, 150 for paper and 79 overall.
Reemployed annuitants: OPM issued new decision tables on March 24, 2026, to help agencies determine CSRS/FERS retirement coverage and the treatment of FEHB and FEGLI benefits when an annuitant is reemployed, separates or dies during reemployment.
2026 coverage: OPM offered 132 FEHB, 75 PSHB, 21 FEDVIP dental and 10 vision options. Average enrollee premiums rose 12.3% for FEHB, 11.3% for PSHB, 3.35% for dental and 0.47% for vision.

Recent Social Security updates

2026 benefit increase: Social Security retirement and survivor benefits increased 2.8% for 2026. SSA estimates the average retired-worker benefit at $2,071 per month and the average benefit for an aged widow or widower living alone at $1,919 per month after the increase.
Working while receiving benefits: The 2026 earnings limit is $24,480 before full retirement age, with $1 withheld for every $2 above it. In the year full retirement age is reached, the pre-birthday-month limit is $65,160, with $1 withheld for every $3 above it. No limit applies afterward.
Survivor eligibility: A surviving spouse may qualify at 60, at 50 if disabled or at any age while caring for the deceased worker’s child under 16 or with a disability. Eligible divorced spouses may also qualify. Benefits generally range from 71.5% to 100% based on claiming age.
Applying: Survivor benefits cannot currently be requested online; call 1-800-772-1213. If both retirement and survivor benefits apply, SSA generally pays the higher amount rather than adding them together.

Recent Medicare updates

2026 Parts A and B costs: The standard Part B premium is $202.90 per month. The Part A inpatient deductible is $1,736 per benefit period; most beneficiaries continue to receive premium-free Part A.
Part D prescription costs: The annual out-of-pocket threshold is $2,100 in 2026. Negotiated prices for the first 10 selected drugs also took effect Jan. 1, 2026, alongside updated Part D plan, manufacturer and Medicare payment responsibilities.

Recent Thrift Savings Plan updates

Refreshed TSP website: It is now easier to find what you need on tsp.gov. The redesigned site helps you quickly check contribution and withdrawal information, compare funds, find guidance for major life events, use forms and calculators and get help with My Account.
Death reporting: Anyone may report a participant’s death, although an agency reports an active employee’s death. The secure Life Events Hub accepts documents and provides updates. Gather identifying, marital and employment information plus a legible certified death certificate; foreign certificates may require English translation. Reports may also be made through the ThriftLine at 1-877-968-3778, by mail or by fax.
My Account has a new address: TSP says the new sign-in address is tsp.gov/login and advises participants to update saved bookmarks. Sign in at the new My Account address.
2026 limits: The elective-deferral limit is $24,500. Catch-up limits are $8,000 for ages 50-59 and 64+, and $11,250 for ages 60-63.
Roth catch-up rule clarification: Beginning in 2026, catch-up contributions must be Roth for participants whose prior-year FICA wages from their TSP-contributing employer exceeded $150,000. TSP updated its agency guidance in June 2026 to specify that, beginning in 2027, payroll offices should use Box 3 of Form W-2 to determine prior-year FICA wages for this rule.
Roth conversions: Eligible participants and spousal beneficiaries may convert traditional TSP money to Roth in My Account. The minimum is $500, with up to 26 conversions per account annually; conversions are irrevocable and generally taxable that year

Summary

In 2026, key developments included retirement and Social Security COLAs, digital retirement processing, insurance changes, updated TSP limits and Roth rules and new online tools. Pending bills could affect future pay and benefits, but current benefits change only when a proposal becomes law.

To prepare for retirement, review benefit statements, beneficiaries, insurance, Social Security estimates and TSP elections regularly. Watch Open Season, COLA, pay and legislative announcements, and confirm decisions with the administering agency. Acting early can make the transition smoother and protect future income, coverage and survivors.

Beginning next month and through the end of this year, get ready for the announcements of the 2027 updates for Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, TSP and your retirement.

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FLRA ruling puts ball back in courts’ court on Trump’s union EOs

Erich Wagner — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:37:29 -0400

The National Treasury Employees Union said Wednesday that a new ruling from a semi-adjudicative agency bolsters its argument in the fight over whether President Trump can strip wide swathes of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights.

Unions have been in protracted litigation over the question since Trump signed a pair of executive orders last year exempting most agencies from federal sector labor law under the auspices of national security. In total, the so-called ‘exclusion’ orders impacted roughly two-thirds of the federal workforce.

While the labor groups have succeeded in some instances of blocking the orders’ implementation at individual agencies, they have struggled to halt the initiative government-wide. In NTEU’s lawsuit, which has languished before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since oral arguments were held last December, the three-judge panel has publicly grappled with the question of whether unions may directly challenge the executive orders’ legality in court, without first going through administrative channels like the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

The FLRA, which at the time of Trump’s orders was deadlocked due to his firing of former Chairwoman Susan Tsui Grundmann last year, initially responded to the edicts by placing cases involving the unions and agencies at issue in abeyance.

But in a 2-1 decision involving employee discipline at a U.S. Marine Corps facility in Twentynine Palms, Calif., Tuesday, the agency dismissed management’s appeal on grounds that it lacked jurisdiction, due to the Defense Department’s inclusion in the executive orders. It extensively cites the American Federation of Government Employees’ lawsuit challenging the edicts’ legality, in which a Ninth Circuit appellate panel overturned an injunction blocking their implementation, and stressed the decision does not weigh in on the orders’ legality.

“Importantly, the authority did not review the merits of [previous] presidential national-security determinations at issue in any of those cases before dismissing them,” the majority wrote. “Considering the factors mentioned above—including the pertinent precedent—the authority finds it appropriate to take this case out of abeyance at this time, and to dismiss the agency’s exceptions due to a lack of jurisdiction.”

Following the ruling, NTEU submitted a letter to the court Wednesday arguing that the decision reinforces its argument that requiring unions to first seek redress from the FLRA would be time-consuming and fruitless. And it noted that the union in that case could not appeal it if it wanted to, due to restrictions on which types of arbitration cases can be reviewed by circuit courts.

“The union in U.S. Marine Corps cannot challenge EO 14251’s validity in an appeal of the decision because the decision is not subject to judicial review,” wrote Paras Shah, NTEU’s general counsel. “An FLRA order ‘involving an award by an arbitrator,’ like U.S. Marine Corps, is not reviewable by a U.S. court of appeals ‘unless the order involves an unfair labor practice.’ . . . As this decision shows, no FLRA order dismissing a case for lack of jurisdiction will ‘include a substantive evaluation’ of an unfair labor practice.”

The FLRA case is unusual in that U.S. Marine Corps officials agreed with the FLRA that it lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate management’s appeal. And although the AFGE local technically won the case, it is unclear how it can ensure compliance with the arbitrator’s underlying award now that the union is no longer recognized.

FLRA Member Anne Wagner, the agency’s lone Democratic appointee, dissented from Tuesday’s decision, calling it premature, given the litigation surrounding the executive orders.

“I continue to believe that the most prudent course of action is to keep cases covered by the exclusion orders in abeyance until the litigation over those orders reaches a definitive conclusion—including any actions by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Wagner wrote. “Although the majority cites previous examples of the authority dismissing cases based on executive orders that excluded the relevant entities from the statute, the executive orders in those cases were not the subject of pending litigation.”

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Trust in government is sinking, but a new survey suggests civil servants’ stock is rising

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:11:23 -0400

As the Trump administration downsizes the civil service and weakens federal employee job protections, new survey data shows that, by some metrics, more Americans have a favorable opinion of civil servants, even as trust in the federal government diminishes.

“Views of civil servants are more positive now than any of the previous few years,” researchers for the Partnership for Public Service wrote. “Whether that trend continues will probably depend on how the Trump administration continues its efforts to change the federal workforce and how much competence and experience are valued.”

The good government nonprofit has been conducting national surveys on the public’s view of the federal government since 2021. Its most recent data comes from a nationally representative survey of 1,000 U.S. adults performed between March 31 and April 5.

While the percentage of respondents who said they trust civil servants did decrease to 44% from 49% last year, the Partnership noted that that statistic is higher than the 27% who reported trusting the federal government in 2026.

Researchers, however, emphasized that the shares of people who agreed that most civil servants are committed to helping people “like me” and are competent have surged to record highs, largely due to increases in the sentiments among Republicans and independents.

This year, 65% of respondents said that “most civil servants are competent,” with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agreeing.

“Since 2021, far more people agreed that civil servants are competent than disagreed — often by a ratio of more than two-to-one,” the researchers wrote. “Now, that number is the highest it has been since the Partnership started the yearly surveys.”

Likewise, the percentage who agreed that “most civil servants are committed to helping people like me” went from 56% in 2025 to 61% this year.

“The increase was particularly notable among Republicans — who increased from 52% last year to 63% now — and independents, who increased from 31% to 48%,” the researchers wrote. “In fact, the view that civil servants are committed workers has risen in each of the last four years the Partnership has conducted surveys.”

The good government group argued that there are likely several different reasons for these results.

“There's obviously been a lot of attention on the federal workforce over the past two years, particularly because of the cuts made by the current administration,” said Paul Hitlin, a senior research manager at the Partnership, during a webinar on the survey data Wednesday. “It's very possible that people have learned more about civil servants and what they do and think a little more highly of them. It is [also] possible that some people think that less effective civil servants have been removed from the government.”

During the webinar, Hitlin also highlighted survey data from April showing that 64% of respondents said “the management of the federal government is headed in the wrong direction.”

Overall, trust in the federal government decreased six points from last year to 27%. This statistic has never surpassed 35% in any of the Partnership’s surveys.

“It goes up and down a little bit, but generally a third or less of the country say they trust the federal government,” Hitlin said. “That's obviously a major challenge.”

Additionally, 49% of respondents agreed that their experiences with the federal government (e.g. applying for a passport, receiving veterans benefits) have been mostly positive compared with 38% who disagreed. But a breakdown of that data by political affiliation shows a partisan gap that changes depending on who the occupant of the White House is.

In 2024, 69% of Democratic respondents said their experiences with the federal government were mostly positive compared with 41% currently. In contrast, the percentage of Republican participants who agreed with that sentiment increased from 31% to 62% over the same period.

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IRS and Social Security will see more employees quit without advanced leave, senators warn

Jory Heckman — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:39:28 -0400

Senate Democrats are warning that new limits on annual leave and sick time at the IRS and the Social Security Administration will push more employees out the door, making it harder for Americans to get assistance from these agencies.

The IRS and SSA both announced in July that employees will no longer be granted advanced annual or sick leave until further notice. Federal employees are generally allowed to use “advanced” annual or sick leave for major medical emergencies, family care and bereavement of an immediate family member if they have already exhausted their annual leave or sick leave. With advanced leave, employees essentially borrow from a reserve of leave hours they will eventually accrue.

In nearly identical emails, the IRS and SSA told employees this policy change will ensure both agencies are providing a high level of customer service to the public and address several individual cases where employees took excessive amounts of advanced leave.

In a letter to Frank Bisignano, the IRS chief executive officer and Senate-confirmed commissioner of SSA, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. led colleagues in denouncing this new policy as a “cruel and unjustified plan that is likely to drive additional employees out the door, doubling down on the administration’s already disastrous efforts to push out federal employees.”

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., also signed onto the letter, shared exclusively with Government Executive.

“We are concerned that this policy will further weaken the already stressed resources of these agencies, leaving the American people with degraded access to their rightful Social Security benefits and needed IRS services,” the senators wrote. They estimate that the suspension of advanced annual and sick leave will collectively impact more than 120,000 IRS and SSA employees.

The IRS and SSA told staff that the suspension of advanced leave will remain in effect, pending efforts to reduce “significant” balances of advanced leave already taken. Both agencies wrote that in several cases, employees are unlikely to earn back the large amounts of advanced leave hours they’ve already used.

“This is debt carried against the future work of all our employees, work that has not yet occurred, and work the public expects us to deliver. This constrains our ability to invest in the people, tools, and resources our mission requires,” both agencies wrote in an email to employees.

The senators, however, say excessive use of advanced leave isn’t an issue at these agencies because “its availability is limited.” According to the Office of Personnel Management, agencies may grant a maximum of 240 hours of advanced sick leave to a federal employee, although the total number of hours permitted varies depending on the circumstances.

OPM guidance states advanced sick leave is a “flexibility” agencies can use to help new employees who haven’t accrued much leave yet, as well as more tenured employees experiencing personal hardships.

“Your actions give the appearance that this policy is less about improving service delivery, and more about punishing federal employees — and by extension, the American people,” the senators wrote.

Federal employees replenish their annual and sick leave over time. Employees who leave government service with a negative leave balance are legally obligated to refund the agency the cost of that advanced leave.

“In sum, this policy provides critical assistance to employees with significant needs and provides sufficient protections to ensure that employees’ leave does not materially affect government operations or lend itself to any attempted abuse,” the senators wrote.

An IRS spokesperson previously told Government Executive that the agency’s advanced leave restriction “aligns with the agency’s efforts to build a high-performing, highly engaged workforce operating as One IRS to deliver a world-class customer experience and aligns to our commitment to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

The senators, however, wrote that “it stretches the bounds of plausibility to blame advanced leave, and not widespread, chaotic job cuts,” as a drain on agency efficiency.

The IRS has shed more than a quarter of its employees since President Trump's return to office, largely through voluntary separation incentives. About 7,000 SSA employees took those same incentives last year, bringing the agency to its lowest staffing level in about 50 years.

The senators wrote that the “chaos and short-staffing resulting from these cuts” led to longer wait-times over the phone, a backlog of unprocessed tax returns, longer wait times for claims appointments and employees attempting to do more with reduced training.

“When employees inevitably leave as a result of your policies, Americans will face additional challenges receiving assistance from the SSA and IRS, delaying their access to benefits and critical tax refunds, respectively, exacerbating existing failures in service delivery with the added employer costs, borne by taxpayers, stemming from an increase in the quit rate, which includes a loss in productivity and quality, as well as needed new funds to support hiring, onboarding, and training,” they wrote.

Bisignano has touted the performance metrics at both agencies, telling lawmakers that SSA and IRS don’t need more employees to meet public expectations. Both agencies are relying on widespread employee reassignments to address acute staffing shortages across their operations.

Among their questions, the senators asked Bisignano to provide data from the past 10 years on the number of employees who have taken advanced leave, the total hours of leave taken, and the total cost of providing that leave.

They’re also asking Bisignano to explain why the IRS and SSA are “imposing a blanket suspension” of advanced leave, rather than pursue “specific and targeted policy enforcement,” and whether the agencies have conducted any analysis on the impact this policy will have on recruitment and retention.

The National Treasury Employees Union is asking a federal judge to block the IRS from enforcing its suspension of advance leave, on the grounds that Bisignano’s de facto leadership of the agency without Senate confirmation violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.

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ShinyHunters claims FBI data theft, demands bureau retract cyber warning

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:21:00 -0400

The ShinyHunters cybercriminal group claims it has stolen sensitive information about FBI employees and job applicants and is demanding that the bureau retract a public warning about its tactics within a week.

The demand, addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel and Cyber Division Assistant Director Brett Leatherman, seeks to pressure the agency into changing its public account of the group’s activities. The group claims the effort was not financially motivated.

In a statement attributed to the group, the hackers claimed access to several FBI services, including human resources systems and a service identified as Medlink.

“We have compromised the FBI. We hold very sensitive data on almost ALL FBI Agents and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job,” the statement says.

An FBI jobs page also displayed a “Scheduled Maintenance Underway” notice Tuesday, saying the site was temporarily unavailable. The notice did not identify a security incident or explain whether the outage was related to the hackers’ claims. An earlier version of the webpage appears to show a seizure notice posted by the group.

The language ShinyHunters wants removed appears in a May 15 FBI public service announcement issued after an attack disrupted an online learning management system used by educational institutions.

In the announcement, the FBI warned that ShinyHunters uses harassment to pressure victims, including threatening communications to victims and family members and, in some cases, swatting, the practice of calling in false emergency reports intended to trigger an armed police response at someone’s home. The alert also warned that attackers may exaggerate their access to personal information or falsely claim to possess compromising photographs or videos.

ShinyHunters denied those practices in its statement and gave the bureau one week to correct or remove the warning.

“The FBI is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating,” the bureau said in a statement after this story was published. Nextgov/FCW has also reached out to the FBI Agents Association, which advocates on behalf of active and retired FBI special agents.

If the claimed employee records are authentic, their exposure could give criminals or foreign intelligence services information useful for identifying, contacting or intimidating FBI personnel and their families.

The claims come as the FBI works to pursue a more coordinated campaign focused on dismantling hackers’ infrastructure and arresting cybercrime operatives. Its new cyber strategy released this month in part emphasizes disrupting criminal hackers even when those responsible remain beyond the immediate reach of U.S. law enforcement.

A ShinyHunters representative sent Nextgov/FCW a text file appearing to contain sensitive personal information on nearly 5,000 FBI employees, including their names, home addresses, phone numbers, and data about their spouses and siblings. Nextgov/FCW queried some of the listed peoples’ names online and found that they are employed with the FBI. The job postings in the data included employees designated as intelligence analysts, attorneys, student trainees and special agents, among other roles. The entire data set was not verified.

A representative told 404 Media, which earlier reported the incident Tuesday, that the hackers gained access Monday night through what they described as a previously unknown vulnerability in Oracle’s PeopleSoft software, then accessed servers in Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud environment. The representative claimed the group took between two and three terabytes of data.

The account of the intrusion has not been independently verified. Nextgov/FCW has asked Oracle and AWS for comment.

Cybersecurity specialists should focus on the group’s claims regarding an exploit in the PeopleSoft platform because it could be used more broadly to breach other systems, said Dan Calderone, the chief technology officer at cybersecurity and AI firm Suzu Labs.

“They also say this isn't financially motivated, but I’d take that with a grain of salt. I have a hard time believing terabytes of FBI personnel data just sit on a shelf,” Calderone said. “Foreign intelligence services would love to have it, and having the FBI on their resume makes every future extortion demand more believable, and if the PeopleSoft zero-day is real, the exploit may be worth more than the data.”

On top of that, FBI agents and their spouses “could have their home addresses posted publicly within a week if this threat is followed through,” he added.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to include a statement from the FBI, remarks from Dan Calderone and additional details about the data allegedly accessed by ShinyHunters.

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FAA administrator defends withholding part of ATC pay raise

Erich Wagner — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:49:00 -0400

Democrats on a House spending panel had pointed questions last week for Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford over his decision to withhold a portion of a pay raise for air traffic controllers that Congress enacted earlier this year.

Earlier this year, Congress set aside $140 million in appropriations to fund a 3.8% pay raise for federal air traffic controllers, enacted as part of the deal to end the 76-day shutdown of the Homeland Security Department. But to date, Bedford has only OKed the dispersion for a 1% pay raise, arguing that the workforce must adopt new efficiencies in order to “unlock” the rest.

Bedford has justified his position by noting that the funding law authorizing the 3.8% pay increase grants him “sole discretion” to implement the raise, subject to the implementation of improvements in “workforce scheduling, staffing utilization and other operational efficiencies.”

Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies pressed Bedford on that decision during an FAA oversight hearing last week.

“Part of the way we tried to address the staffing issues was with a 3.8% raise, but they’re getting 1%,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill. “This can’t supercharge the plan to dramatically increase [staffing], I would see it’s discouraged. For someone who wants to do this or currently does this, it shows a lack of concern about the stress they’re under, financial and otherwise. Why hasn’t it happened yet? Why haven’t we given them this pay raise that we voted for?”

Bedford noted that in addition to the 1% raise, air traffic controllers received a “contractual” 1.6% raise, an apparent reference to their union contract, and said he was following Congress’ instructions.

“Let’s be clear, I have the utmost respect for ATCs; I value the work they do, and as a pilot myself, I rely on them,” he said. “I’m grateful we have them up there and we are supercharging the hiring . . . I could quote the statute, but Congress asked me to look for ways to improve staffing efficiency. That’s what you asked me to do, and if we could get it, then we would do the 2.8% [raise] as part of that. But we have not been able to.”

At issue are statistics indicating that the average time an ATC is actively managing air traffic per shift has fallen from more than five hours per shift 15 years ago to roughly four hours per shift today, Bedford argued.

“That’s not to say that they aren’t doing work, we just don’t know exactly what that work is because we don’t punch time cards, per se,” Bedford said. “But we can tell with the data we have that 15 years ago we were operating many more hours ‘on desk’ than today . . . We’re asking questions and what we’re seeing are schedules that are very inefficient.”

But Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., said air traffic controllers are already stretched too thin. An irony of the FAA’s push to hire thousands more ATCs is that training those new hires adds even more to employees’ workloads, at least in the short term.

“Is it your contention that you don’t have operational efficiency while you have understaffed, overworked individuals who are responsible for the safety of air traffic,” she asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“I listen to the data,” Bedford said. “I know you’re listening to a lot of anecdotal information, but the data will tell something totally different.”

“You may look at data, but I listen to people,” Watson-Coleman said. “If I hear consistently that the people that we as Congress are supposed to protect are being negatively impacted, that the people responsible for the safety of our airways are depressed and overworked and have mental health issues that aren’t being addressed properly, I listen to that and I recognize it as more than just anecdotal.”

Later, Bedford touted the more than 4,000 new hires the agency has made in the last 18 months but expressed frustrations at improving staffing levels in the New York region.

“There’s a lot of work between hiring and then training someone before they can actually dispatch traffic,” he said. “There’s another fact of whether we can get them to New York. That’s the most difficult place in the national aviation system to staff. I’m not sure why, but we’ve got to figure that out.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., the panel’s ranking member, said he had a different recollection of Congress’ intent behind the pay raise language.

“I’ve been here three decades, but before that I spent three decades as a manager of governmental entities,” he said. “As I read the legislation on the pay raise, the intent was to put air traffic controllers on par with law enforcement. That was the intent of the 3.8%. The discretion that was given to you, I think, was with then improving the environment [they work in]. And I suspect that the reason you may be having trouble getting people to work up in New York is because of their pay.”

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Login.gov is now accepting mobile driver’s licenses

Christian Robles — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:36:00 -0400

Login.gov began widely accepting mobile driver’s licenses for digital identity verification services last month, providing protections against artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes and counterfeit identity documents, the General Services Administration announced Tuesday.

Users of the federal government’s identity verification platform can use an eligible mobile driver’s license from a digital wallet on their smartphone to share information required for identity proofing, according to the agency.

Login.gov currently supports mobile driver’s licenses stored in Google Wallet and Samsung Wallet but is in the process of adding support for other sources, GSA said.

The agency said the platform's implementation “is narrowly scoped to identity proofing for access to government services and gives users an additional, rather than mandatory, option.”

“The new process grants users greater control over their privacy, as they can preview and share only the specific attributes required for verification rather than their entire document,” GSA added.

Mobile driver’s licenses use cryptographic verification to confirm that a digital credential is valid and not altered. As of March 2026, 20 states and one territory offer mobile driver’s licenses, making them available to approximately 71.5 million drivers.

Agency officials previously said they planned to add mobile driver’s licenses to Login.gov by March of this year.

GSA said the new feature builds on a recent Office of Management and Budget directive mandating agencies to use Login.gov and other efforts to boost use of the service, such as lower pricing.

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Congress — not the president — should appoint the next GAO head, bipartisan coalition argues

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:55:49 -0400

A bipartisan coalition on Monday argued that lawmakers should enact reforms so that the next head of the Government Accountability Office is appointed without the president’s involvement.

“We urge Congress to resolve the institutional framework for selecting the next comptroller general before the next appointment is made,” according to the letter organized by the American Governance Institute. “Congress, and Congress alone, should choose its agency heads.”

The Institute is a fiscally sponsored project of the Fund for Constitutional Government nonprofit. More than 20 other individuals and organizations signed the letter, including nonprofits critical of the Trump administration such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Partnership for Public Service and the Project On Government Oversight as well as right-leaning groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the R Street Institute.

GAO is housed within the legislative branch and examines the effectiveness and efficiency of agency programs. For fiscal 2025, the agency reported that its work generated $62.7 billion in financial benefits for the federal government.

Under the current process, the comptroller general selection procedure begins with a commission of 10 senior House and Senate lawmakers from both parties that recommends individuals for the position to the president. Whoever the president selects is subject to Senate confirmation for one nonrenewable 15-year term.

The organizations behind the letter did not prescribe how the comptroller general should be chosen without the president’s involvement but also contended that the existing congressional review panel doesn’t need to be reinvented.

“Whatever structure Congress chooses, preserving GAO's independence, impartiality, professionalism and credibility across party lines is essential to its ability to serve Congress and hold the federal government accountable,” they wrote. “It is time to change the process by which the comptroller general is chosen so the next person to serve in that office is chosen solely by Congress.”

The comptroller general position opened up in December 2025 when Gene Dodaro retired. Orice Williams Brown, the agency’s chief operating officer, is currently leading GAO in an acting capacity.

If Congress acts on the letter’s suggestion, it would continue a trend of lawmakers claiming hiring and firing authority over legislative branch agency heads from the president.

The House in June passed, by voice vote, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act (H.R. 6028) that would require the librarian of Congress and director of the Government Publishing Office to be appointed by a bipartisan congressional commission. Currently, those positions are chosen by the president subject to Senate approval.

The librarian of Congress leads the more than 200-year-old cultural institution and overseer of copyright law, while the GPO distributes official government publications.

Trump in 2025 removed Carla Hayden as the librarian of Congress. Under the House measure, however, an official in either position could only be removed by a majority vote of the House and Senate majority and minority leaders.

Likewise, President Joe Biden in 2023 enacted a bill that authorized a bipartisan congressional commission to appoint or remove an architect of the Capitol, who leads the office that preserves and maintains the complex.

The Trump administration has criticized GAO, particularly over instances when the agency found that officials violated rules around impoundments, which is when the executive branch delays or withholds congressionally approved spending. Lawmakers also have accused agencies of not cooperating with and being slow to respond to GAO audits under the current president.

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Trump wants an ‘AI Force.’ What would that actually look like?

Edward Graham — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:06:51 -0400

President Donald Trump said over the weekend that he plans to create an ‘AI Force’ and appoint a new artificial intelligence lead to boost U.S. development of the emerging technologies, even as he continues to push back on calls for stronger regulations on more advanced models.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday morning, Trump blamed “Radical Left Dumocrats” for growing concerns about the number of data center deployments and the potential dangers of unchecked AI development, saying that “we will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry.”

He wrote, however, that his administration “will also be looking for BAD” and that “for this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term.” He added that he plans to soon appoint an AI czar to align with that effort.

The president’s announcement comes after weeks of high-profile warnings from leading tech executives about the potential harms that advanced AI models could cause unless officials step in to regulate the industry. Congressional lawmakers and state leaders have also floated proposals to institute so-called ‘kill switches’ to disable AI systems that go rogue. But Trump and others have pushed back on calls for across-the-board development slowdowns.

David Sacks, who served as Trump 2.0’s AI and crypto czar until March 2026, reshared Trump’s post on X and agreed that a pause on AI development “would not make America safer” and “would hand the frontier to China.”

Trump’s newest proposal is light on details about what role the AI Force would have in overseeing advanced models, or what additional responsibilities it would be handed. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the role of the AI Force or its primary mission.

Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, appeared on Fox News Sunday and said that Trump’s post describes “how important it is that we as an administration coordinate in order to make sure that this great technological innovation that’s transforming the country, that’s driving economic growth, continues to do so.”

He added that “these implications of AI spread across so many different agencies, so being able to have someone at the White House to be able to work on all those issues across the agencies is really critical.”

But stakeholders in the space have expressed confusion surrounding what, exactly, the AI Force would do.

“Poll after poll shows the American public is alarmed by recent warnings from AI developers and whistleblowers as well as the rogue AI incidents that took place this summer,” said a spokesperson for AI safety advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation. ”There’s pressure on the President to do something, and that’s what this announcement could be designed to address.”

Earlier this month, the Institute for Security and Technology released a survey of current and former national security officials which found that respondents believed there was a 10% chance or higher that an AI model will operate outside human control within the next decade.

Philip Reiner, the think tank’s CEO and co-founder, said Trump’s analogy of the new unit being like Space Force means “you get the shape of an answer, but without the substance.”

The military service branch was established during Trump’s first term and includes a focus on maintaining and protecting U.S. interests in space. As Reiner noted, that force was only created after passing Congress as part of the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act and being signed into law.

“Space Force works because Congress can give it a doctrine, a budget, a personnel system, but there's no equivalent for AI,” Reiner said. “It's a capability that cuts across every domain.”

He posited, however, that the AI Force might be akin to Space Force in terms of Pentagon oversight, saying that “this is more of an actual [Defense Department] lane, is the sense that you get.”

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IRS watchdog audits employee reassignments, as agency looks to extend some tours of duty

Jory Heckman — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:29:10 -0400

Updated Sept. 22 at 2:10 p.m.

An IRS watchdog is taking a closer look at the agency’s temporary reassignment of mid-career employees to frontline entry-level jobs many of them had no prior experience doing.

The audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration comes as the IRS is looking for employees currently serving in these temporary details to sign up for a third tour of duty.

The IRS in February put IT and human resources employees on 120-day details to work in taxpayer services. These employees were assigned entry-level roles answering inquiries from taxpayers and processing tax returns. The National Treasury Employees Union estimates that about 1,500 IRS employees have been placed on these details.

Most of the employees had no background in the work they were being asked to perform, but received months of training by the time IRS officials extended most of these details for another 120 days. IRS officials suggested in May that details could be extended for a third term, depending on how quickly employees cleared a “huge backlog” of amended tax returns.

The IRS cut tens of thousands of jobs last year — more than a quarter of its workforce — and fell short of its hiring goals for this year’s filing season.

IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano said the IRS carried out a successful filing season this year, despite losing more than 25,000 employees. He told the House Ways and Means Committee in March that “I feel good about the number of employees I have right now.”

An IRS spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that "employees detailed to Taxpayer Services functions receive training, coaching, and other resources to support this important work."

"These efforts are helping improve service for taxpayers," the spokesperson said, adding that the agency "is focused on providing the best possible experience for taxpayers and employees."

Employees placed on these involuntary details are doing jobs several pay grades below the work they were hired to perform, but continue to receive their regular paychecks. In practice, the IRS is paying them double or triple what a normal customer service representative or tax examiner would make.

TIGTA is reaching out to employees about their experience with their temporary reassignments, as part of a broader audit of the IRS workforce. In a “Strategic Staffing Survey” obtained by Government Executive, TIGTA asked impacted IRS employees if they volunteered for these details, or if they were “involuntarily assigned” to this work.

A TIGTA spokesperson said in a statement that the watchdog office is “conducting an audit on the IRS’s efforts to reshape its workforce,” and that as part of this review, TIGTA is surveying employees who have been “reassigned/detailed to other positions within the IRS.” According to the spokesperson, TIGTA expects to complete its report in May 2027.

The survey asks how qualified employees felt when they started the detail, what level of training they received for their new roles and whether they currently feel qualified for their new positions.

TIGTA also asked employees what communication — if any — they received from IRS management about the rationale for the detail, and if these details were “the most efficient way to accomplish the goal(s) or purpose(s) communicated to you.”

The watchdog office asked employees if they considered leaving the IRS for a new job, or applying for a new job within the IRS in order to get out of the detail.

Several impacted IRS employees told Government Executive that the initial details were involuntary, they have received insufficient training and support for this work, and they have no clear idea what work is available to them at the IRS if they leave these details.

According to two IRS employees currently on details, the agency is looking for volunteers to remain in taxpayer services for a third 120-day tour of duty. Employees who complete a third stint would be away from their day jobs for nearly a year. But these employees say the agency is giving them few alternatives. Both previously worked in IT roles at the agency, and have been told they cannot return to their former jobs.

“I decided to stay because there are no permanent jobs for us displaced IRS IT employees,” one detailed employee said. “They are still paying us at our primary grade, even though the position we have is at a lower grade.”

A second IRS employee confirmed that the agency “asked for volunteers to stay in the current detail for another 120 days.”

In May, IRS Chief Human Capital Officer Alex Kweskin acknowledged that some employees on temporary details were unhappy with their current arrangements, and encouraged them to apply for other roles within the agency. Employees, however, said they have applied for other 2210-classified IT positions at the IRS, only for those job announcements to be cancelled days later.

“Although we are displaced employees, we do not get any hiring preference. They just tell us to find a permanent job. Not internal support at all,” the first IRS employee said.

A third IRS employee placed on this detail said he has experienced “multiple technical issues that have affected my ability to perform my duties.” The employee said that for weeks, he’d been unable to access the Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS), a massive clearinghouse of taxpayer data at the IRS. After that issue was resolved, the employees said he was unable to log onto an internal portal needed to access amended tax returns.

“My inability to access the necessary systems has created challenges beyond my control,” he said.

The employee said he hasn’t been able to get timely feedback on the quality of his work, because the supervisor assigned to review it clocks in 30 minutes before the employee’s shift ends.

“This limited overlap makes it difficult to adequately review my cases, receive timely feedback, and understand any errors so that I can improve my performance,” the third employee said.

A fourth IRS employee on this detail said colleagues have raised concerns about “compressed training schedules and the volume of information required to be learned in a short period of time,” an expectation to “independently work taxpayer cases while still developing proficiency,” and a lack of timely feedback on errors in their work.

“Of particular concern is that multiple employees independently documented these issues in writing, requesting additional guidance, designated points of contact, feedback on errors, and greater access to technical support resources. These employees were not refusing work assignments. Rather, they were seeking the tools and support necessary to perform taxpayer work accurately and responsibly,” the fourth employee said.

Several IRS employees told Government Executive that they were involuntarily detailed to taxpayer services, but were later removed from the detail following medical emergencies. These employees remain in limbo. The IRS hasn’t assigned them to new roles, and have been repeatedly told they cannot return to their old jobs.

“I’ve essentially been isolated and placed on an island by myself,” a fifth IRS employee said. A sixth employee said they’re also waiting for a new assignment.

“According to leadership, all IT jobs are gone since the 2210 category is overmanned,” the sixth employee said.

This story was updated to include a statement from an IRS spokesperson

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Lawmakers call on leadership to override Trump’s planned pay freeze

Erich Wagner — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:56:57 -0400

More than 100 members of Congress urged House and Senate leaders last week to advance legislation rejecting President Trump’s planned pay freeze for most civilian federal workers next year.

Last month, Trump issued his alternative pay plan, which formally confirmed the White House’s proposal to freeze most civilian workers’ pay at 2026 levels. Trump separately instructed the Office of Personnel Management to prepare to issue a 3.8% raise to federal law enforcement officers, and he has proposed pay increases between 5% and 7% for military service members, depending on their rank.

In a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, sent last week but published Monday, a bipartisan group of 110 lawmakers led by Rep. James Walkishaw, D-Va., and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., warned that with inflation hovering over 3%, forcing federal workers to forgo a pay raise is “an effective pay cut.”

“The administration’s own proposal on federal pay increases demonstrates why such an increase is necessary,” they wrote. “President Trump has proposed that federal law enforcement personnel receive a 3.8% pay increase to improve recruitment and retention, and has proposed a 5-7% pay increase for service members given the critical support they provide our nation. The same rationale applies to all federal workers.”

The lawmakers said that a pay freeze risks exacerbating staffing shortages across government, including at the Veterans Affairs Department, Social Security Administration and the Food and Drug Administration. Unions and other federal employee organizations have similarly warned that a pay freeze would ultimately impact public service.

The letter cited Congress’ actions in early 2019 to override President Trump’s pay freeze for that year, implemented during the 35-day government shutdown, then instituting a 1.9% average pay increase retroactive to the beginning of that year. Lawmakers called on leadership to advance legislation that would “at minimum” reinstitute pay parity within the civilian federal workforce, extending the 3.8% raise to all feds.

“We strongly believe, however, that Congress should go further and provide the 4.1% increase called for in the [Fair Adjustment of Income Rates] Act, which would help federal pay keep pace with rising costs while ensuring the government can continue to attract and retain the workforce necessary to serve the American people,” they wrote.

When Congress has acted to codify federal employees’ annual pay increase in the past, it has traditionally done so through appropriations legislation. With the enactment last month of a continuing resolution keeping the government open until December, any action on this issue is unlikely prior to November’s midterm elections.

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OPM uses conservative influencers on college tour to recruit young workers

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:48:35 -0400

Updated at 11:10 a.m. ET Sept. 22

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor is in the midst of a college tour to recruit early-career workers into the federal government, which is one of his top priorities. The underrepresentation of younger people in the civil service is a longstanding issue that worsened over President Donald Trump’s first year in office, as many new agency staffers lost their jobs during the mass firing of employees who were still in their probationary periods.

Several of Kupor’s stops so far, however, have featured conservative figures who don’t have experience working for the government.

For example, on Thursday, Kupor is visiting the University of Austin in Texas. The college, which was founded by right-leaning individuals and started its first academic year in 2024, is not yet accredited; although, the state has authorized it to award bachelor’s degrees in liberal studies. According to its website, the school is completely donor-funded and does not charge tuition to its roughly 150 students.

Kupor will share the stage with Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire GOP donor who served as the first chairman of the University of Austin and co-founded several companies, including Palantir. The event is hosted by The David Network, which describes itself as “a community of over 5,000 conservative students, alumni and professionals who drive change in America’s leading institutions and industries.”

Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., co-chair and founder of the Federal Workforce Caucus, criticized Kupor’s college tour in a statement to Government Executive, particularly over Lonsdale’s planned appearance.

“The federal government and OPM desperately need to improve the recruitment and retention of early career talent,” he said. “Sadly, [Kupor is] more interested in hanging out with billionaire ideologues than he is in rebuilding the federal workforce that Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency have decimated.”

OPM spokeswoman Kiki Nyoh, on the other hand, said in response to a request for comment that: “This visit is about one thing: showing students that public service is an opportunity to serve their country, build a meaningful career, and help shape the future of government. We welcome the opportunity to have that conversation with students at UATX and campuses across the country.”

Kupor’s first stop on his college tour was at the University of Florida on Sept. 15, where he had a fireside chat with right-wing commentator Benny Johnson. In some of Johnson’s recent videos, he muses if Trump is using alien technology in Iran and bemoans the decreased percentage of white people in Texas.

The student newspaper for the school, which has more than 60,000 students, reported that about 60 people attended the event with Kupor and Johnson.

Director @skupor on the two key motivators for serving in the federal government @bennyjohnson pic.twitter.com/2QOVF13eJp
— U.S. Office of Personnel Management (@USOPM) September 18, 2026

Earlier this year, a video created as part of the launch of OPM’s Early Career Talent Network featured country singer Kid Rock, a Trump supporter whose peak popularity was in the 2000s.

Trump has removed civil service job protections for about 8,000 agency positions by placing them in a job category called Schedule Policy/Career. Critics contend that the new classification is an attempt to install more people in government based on alignment with the administration rather than merit.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Schedule P/C affects about 8,000 agency staffers. It affects about 8,000 federal positions.

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A second lawsuit challenges plans to put ICE agents near polling places

Ariana Figueroa, States Newsroom — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:43:43 -0400

A coalition of civil rights groups and union organizations Friday sued the Trump administration to prevent the deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations during November’s midterm elections.

The suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is the second this month, following comments from top Trump officials citing a federal policy to allow ICE officers to enter polling locations in certain circumstances to conduct immigration enforcement.

The groups argue the policy violates the federal law that prohibits “armed men” at election sites, and also causes voter intimidation, which is barred under the Voting Rights Act.

Under federal law, “troops” or “armed men” are allowed at polling locations only if “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” And the section of the Voting Rights Act the groups cite prohibits “intimidation,” “threats” or “coercion” against a person for voting or attempting to vote.

“The result is predictable: voters across the country — particularly Black, Latino and Asian voters, naturalized citizens, and members of mixed-status families — are afraid to vote, help others vote, and participate in civic life,” according to the suit.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin earlier this month noted that agents could conduct immigration enforcement at polling places. And before U.S. senators this week, FBI Director Kash Patel did not rule out sending FBI agents to polling locations, but said officers would “follow the law.”

The Department of Justice dismissed the idea that officers would be sent to polling locations.

“The DOJ has never said it would send federal law enforcement to polling locations,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement to States Newsroom. “Any suggestion otherwise is fearmongering.”

In a statement to States Newsroom, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said those “who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear.”

“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson said. “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”

The DHS spokesperson added that ICE was not planning any operations that targeted polling locations.

NAACP among groups suing

“We reject this administration’s attempt to desecrate our polling sites by converting them into militarized zones through the unlawful deployment of ICE or any other federal agent,” Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel, said in a statement.

NAACP is one of nine groups that filed suit. The rest are Mi Familia en Accion, Asian Pacific American Advocates, the National Urban League, Minnesota 8, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the International Union of Painters and the United Food and Commercial Workers International.

“Turning the fundamental right of exercising our vote into a high-stakes encounter with the militarized strong arm of the current administration isn't protection and it isn't oversight; it's disenfranchisement, period,” Clarke said. “The NAACP calls on the court to reject this blatant attempt by federal officials to obstruct our elections through tactics pulled straight from the Jim Crow playbook.”

The nine groups are represented by the Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the National Immigration Law Center, Protect Democracy and the Democracy Defenders Fund.

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NASA employees: EEOC committed ‘flagrant distortions’ to decertify class complaint

Erich Wagner — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:35:36 -0400

A group of National Aeronautics and Space Administration employees on Thursday challenged the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s decision last month to strip them of class-action status in a long-running discrimination case, accusing the commission’s Republican majority of committing “flagrant distortions” of the facts and law.

In 2013, NASA workers filed a class action complaint with EEOC, alleging that the agency’s performance appraisal system systematically advantaged white employees and disadvantaged Black and Asian-American workers. Due to delays on EEOC’s part, an administrative judge did not certify the class until 2022, over NASA’s objection.

But in a decision last month, the Republican majority atop the EEOC voted 2-1 to decertify the class and, in an unusual step, ruled in NASA’s favor on the merits of class agents’ individual complaints, rather than remand the case back to the administrative judge. Weeks later, EEOC officials cited it and other long-delayed cases as part of their argument for ending class action cases in the federal sector entirely and removing federal workers’ right to request a hearing before a judge in cases alleging discrimination.

On Thursday, complainants in the case filed a motion asking EEOC to reconsider its decision, a necessary step before appealing the decision in federal circuit court. Though they missed the 30-day deadline to make such a motion, they said that is because EEOC failed to inform them of its ruling.

The motion alleges that EEOC’s decision relied on a jaundiced view of both the underlying facts in the case and federal civil rights law.

“This type of radical change in established legal procedures, achieved partly through distorted depictions of the arguments and evidence in the case, undermines the rule of law, which is rooted in principles of stability, fairness and civil justice,” attorneys for the complainants wrote. “While reconsideration is rarely granted, it is imperative in this case.”

EEOC’s August decision summarizes the NASA employees’ complaint as alleging that judging employees’ performance based upon teamwork and communication creates a disparate impact negatively impacting Black and Asian-American employees’ performance ratings. The Trump administration has separately staked out the position that disparate impact liability is unconstitutional.

“Specifically, class agents allege the ‘communication’ and ‘collaboration and teamwork’ critical elements—which are included in every employee’s performance plan—led to disparate outcomes for African-American and Asian-American employees compared to their white peers,” EEOC wrote. “Class agents attribute these disparate outcomes to the fact that the performance system relies extensively on a frontline supervisor’s subjective discretion to score these elements.”

But the complainants said that was just one of six interrelated flaws in the performance appraisal system, and EEOC declined to address the others.

“Class agents in no way elevated the fourth [Employee Performance Communication System] flaw as more important than the other five,” the NASA workers’ motion states. “Yet the ‘Facts’ section of the decision misleadingly singles it out . . . Then the discussion of EPCS in the analysis section again focuses on the standards for communication and teamwork. The decision briefly mentions only one of the other six identified flaws; it entirely ignores the other four.”

They also took issue with the commission’s decision to decide the underlying merits of the case, despite not providing the parties with an opportunity to submit legal briefs.

“Without input from the parties, the commission erroneously concludes that ‘the agency’s practices are undisputedly job-related and consistent with business necessity’ and that ‘class members have not, and cannot, demonstrate a viable alternative to the challenged employment practice,’” the complainants wrote. “[But] class agents do not challenge that supervisory discretion is necessary and appropriate in EPCS. Instead, they challenge the level of discretion that NASA gives supervisors and contend that viable alternatives would reduce that discretion while meeting NASA’s need to evaluate and improve performance.”

For example, while NASA advises supervisors to write “standards” for employees at the start of the year that are “SMART”—specific, measurable, aggressive yet achievable, results-oriented, and time-based—examples that NASA provides to supervisors are not in that format. The complainants argued the agency could correct this by changing the examples it provides to supervisors, improving training more broadly, or engaging in targeted training for supervisors whose standards write-ups are not in SMART format.

In a statement last month, the EEOC’s lone Democratically appointed commissioner, Kalpana Kotagal decried her colleagues’ decision to decertify classes in this case and two others and suggested they were pretextual in nature.

“These decisions break with these longstanding agency goals by making it harder for federal employees to pursue class claims and get relief in the class complaint process,” Kotagal said. “Shockingly, the commission goes out of its way to decertify classes in decades-old cases, or to resolve questions not before the agency. Unfortunately, the outcome of these decisions feels predetermined: to make it harder for workers to challenge systemic discrimination and vindicate their civil rights.”

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Labor’s disability accommodation delays under scrutiny by House lawmakers

Jory Heckman — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:18:28 -0400

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers is pressing the Labor Department for answers about delays in processing accommodation requests for its employees with disabilities and medical conditions.

Labor Department employees told Government Executive last month that the agency is facing a backlog of hundreds of reasonable accommodation requests, and that they have waited months or longer for the agency to address their cases. Faced with this backlog, the department is looking to roll out artificial intelligence tools to help triage its workload.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., spearheaded a letter signed by 40 of their House colleagues, asking acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling about the backlog in RA cases.

Lawmakers say their offices are hearing from employees that the Labor Department is “failing to provide qualified employees with disabilities with timely, consistent, and effective reasonable accommodations,” and that it may not be fulfilling its legal obligations under the 1973 Rehabilitation Act.

“Delays in providing accommodations may prevent employees from fully performing their official duties, reduce productivity, negatively affect employee morale and retention, and increase the Department's exposure to Equal Employment Opportunity complaints, grievances, and litigation,” they wrote.

Agencies are required to provide RAs to workers with disabilities, unless doing so would result in “undue hardship.”

Employees have complained about similar delays at several other federal agencies. Those complaints have led to multiple lawsuits. But Labor Department employees say the delays they're experiencing are unusual for an agency charged with protecting the workplace rights of workers with disabilities.

“The Department of Labor serves as the federal government's principal agency responsible for protecting workers' rights and enforcing federal workplace laws. Accordingly, the Department should serve as a model employer by ensuring its own employees receive prompt, transparent, individualized, and legally compliant consideration of reasonable accommodation requests,” the lawmakers wrote.

Lawmakers wrote that interim accommodations “are infrequently considered while requests remain pending,” contrary to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance, and that staffing shortages have contributed to significant processing delays and growing backlogs.

Several employees told Government Executive that they were hired for fully remote positions, or only had to report to the office twice per two-week pay period, but were instructed to return to the office full-time under the Trump administration. President Donald Trump’s first-day memo required most federal employees to work onsite — but exempted employees with disabilities.

The department saw a surge in reasonable accommodation requests following Trump's return-to-office mandate, but its human resources workforce has been decimated by voluntary separation incentives, and has been unable to keep up.

“If accurate, these staffing challenges raise serious questions regarding the Department's ability to satisfy its obligations under the Rehabilitation Act and provide employees with equal employment opportunity,” the lawmakers wrote.

One Labor Department employee told Government Executive that his RA request to work from home about half of the time was approved in February, but that he is still waiting for the agency to order an ergonomic chair and standing desk that was also part of his accommodation request.

Lawmakers say they’ve also heard reports of “prolonged delays” in employees receiving ergonomic equipment, assistive technology, software, and other accommodations necessary to do their jobs.

“In many instances, employees report receiving little or no communication regarding the status of their requests, leaving them uncertain whether required,” they wrote.

Lawmakers say they are “particularly concerned” by delays reported by employees seeking telework as a reasonable accommodation. EEOC and the Office of Personnel Management told agencies in February that they should not take a “blanket approach” to rescinding or denying telework accommodations.

OPM Director Scott Kupor estimated in a January blog post that about 10% of federal employees have received exemptions from Trump’s return-to-office orders.

“Returning to in-person work and upholding disability rights are not mutually exclusive,” Kupor said in a Feb. 11 press release.

Among their questions, lawmakers are asking Sonderling to provide current processing times for RA requests, how many requests are still pending, and what “oversight mechanisms exist to ensure consistent application of reasonable accommodation policies across all Department agencies and offices.” Lawmakers are seeking a response no later than Oct. 16.

Meanwhile, thousands of Labor Department employees’ sensitive personal and medical information was improperly shared to someone’s personal email account, according to an internal memo about the incident.

The Labor Department recently notified more than 3,000 employees about an “internal incident” on July 22, in which an email containing a spreadsheet of personally identifiable information related to employees' reasonable accommodations requests was sent to an “individual's personal email address outside of the DOL domain.”

Following an initial investigation, the department “discovered that more than one email" containing PII or protected health information (PHI) was sent to the same personal email address outside of the DOL domain.

According to the Labor Department, the individual “had authorized access to the information in the performance of their DOL duties,” but did not have the authority to send the information to a personal email address.

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Space Force braces for stalled progress amid lack of full funding

Lauren C. Williams — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:26:15 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Space Force modernization efforts could slow if Congress doesn’t pass a full budget at the end of the year, the service’s leaders said.

“We're on this ramp-up, right, consistent with our overall strategy and the recognition that the space domain is a critical domain, in and of itself, but also for the joint force,” Erich Hernandez-Baquero, the Space Force’s top buyer, told reporters Tuesday. “Now we're going to run into [fiscal year 2027]—and you saw that our budget request was to continue on that—and this [continuing resolution] is definitely going to put the brakes on that for a time period.”

The Space Force has requested $71.1 billion for 2027, including $19.1 billion for procurement. But with little time remaining before fiscal 2027 begins on Oct. 1, Congress has passed stopgap legislation—a continuing resolution—to keep funding the Pentagon at 2026 levels through Dec. 11. The CR permits no new programs to begin.

“We certainly appreciate at least not being shut down. So…that's a good thing, but on the CR, it really does pace us at a time where we really need to go faster. So we are obviously encouraging Congress to do what they can to help support the president's budget on that,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “In the meantime, we'll just do what we always do: prioritize the things that will yield the most mission capability soonest, and make sure we're executing on those.”

Hernandez-Baquero, who was sworn into the chief space acquisition role last month, declined to specify which priorities could be most affected by a continuing resolution because things were “pre-decision at this point.”

Gen. Doug Schiess, the chief of space operations, said about 10 percent of the service’s programs could be slowed down due continuing resolution.

“About 90 percent of the programs we have are programs from last year—so we can still get after those,” but there’s a remaining 10 percent of programs that require full budget funding, Schiess said. “It's going to slow us down, and the threat is not slowing down.”

Amid a broader push for acquisition reform, Hernandez-Baquero said he’s focused on streamlining and speeding up military purchasing. And when it comes to technology initiatives, there will be a new senior leadership role dedicated to it.

The Air Force’s new program acquisition executives, or PAEs, are “establishing those pathways for onboarding new technology, but I'm just conscious that that by itself is not going to support drawing in the right technologies,” he said. “I want somebody that's focused—100 percent—on looking at the most promising tech and driving the prototyping initiatives that are going to help mature it to the level where a PAE can say, ‘Ah, it meets my criteria for this onboard path, and I can go do that’.”

That person is a technology portfolio executive, who “will have the most promising technology coming out of the [research and development] side, and…will work with industry to ensure that we have the right pathways to do that. Conceptually, there would be prototype efforts that get executed out of that to support the mission areas.”

The technology portfolio executive office already exists but the role hasn’t yet been filled, he said.

“When I designate a TPE, for example, that person is going to report directly to me and represent my authority when it comes to the technology transition,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “I cannot do this without the buy-in of the PAEs that are executing the mission areas, and so my charter to them is going to be not only to deliver on those missionaries, but be part of the enterprise team that's going to deliver on those cross-cutting capabilities.”

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The FDA requires follow-up studies for drugs and devices. Years later, many still aren’t done

David Hilzenrath, KFF Health News — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:23:11 -0400

When the FDA was deciding whether to approve the drug Tavneos several years ago to treat a set of rare autoimmune diseases, agency experts argued that would be a mistake, according to FDA records.

One problem cited: The manufacturer had provided only “limited safety data.”

As it often does, the FDA in 2021 approved the drug with a proviso: It required the manufacturer to conduct an additional years-long safety study once the drug was on the market.

Today, like many similar “postmarket” studies mandated by the FDA, that additional study is delayed, according to a federal database. As of last fall, only 21 of the planned 300 patients had been enrolled, the FDA said in an April letter and regulatory posting.

Meanwhile, the FDA has identified dozens of cases of liver damage “possibly” or “probably causally associated” with the drug. That was one of the potential side effects the postmarket study was meant to evaluate.

Tavneos illustrates the perils of the FDA’s approach to many drugs and medical devices — and the frequent lapses in follow-through.

A KFF Health News analysis of Food and Drug Administration data found hundreds of postmarket studies listed as delayed. In some cases, the work was delayed by more than a decade or the manufacturer was still developing a plan for the study.

As a result of delays, patients, doctors, and others could be left in a fog about the risks and benefits of the drugs or devices, even as they stake their money, their health, or their lives on the products.

Postmarket study requirements “have often proven toothless,” said cardiologist Sanket Dhruva, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco who has published related research.

The FDA’s reliance on postmarket studies reflects a balancing act.

Making new treatments available faster can save or improve lives, especially when patients with grim prognoses and no good options have little to lose. The full risks and benefits may be revealed only over the long term, and when therapies are used by far more people than even large clinical trials enroll.

But relying on post-approval studies to resolve questions risks exposing patients to products that do more harm than good. Whoever is paying the bills — patients, insurance companies, employers, or government health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid — can end up wasting money and rewarding manufacturers for useless or risky products.

“Doctors rely on this evidence, patients rely on this evidence, and if that evidence is not there, it’s going to lead to a lot of uncertainty,” Dhruva said.

Trump administration policy changes designed to hasten drugs through FDA review could leave more riding on postmarket studies, medical researchers say.

For example, in February, FDA leaders announced that “the default requirement” for agency approvals will be one clinical trial instead of two.

Reducing pre-approval testing “will inevitably put a lot of pressure on the post-approval system,” said Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has analyzed postmarket studies.

FDA officials said the new policy would “substantially reduce costs” for manufacturers and “speed drugs to market.” Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, they denied the change would compromise safety or efficacy, saying that “erroneous conclusions may be reached even with two, three, or four studies.”

In response to questions for this article, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, said postmarket studies can experience delays for legitimate reasons. “Assessing the significance of any delay requires a case-specific review,” said the spokesperson, Emily Hilliard.

The fact that a study is delayed “should not be treated as evidence that a product has an unresolved safety or effectiveness issue,” Hilliard said.

Amgen, the company that makes Tavneos, is still working on the postmarket research the FDA mandated, company spokesperson Alison Chartan said, adding, “We remain committed to completing this important study.”

Behind Schedule

An FDA database downloaded by KFF Health News in August tracks the progress of postmarket studies that makers of drugs or biologics — such as vaccines and gene therapies — were required to perform or promised to perform.

The database showed almost 600 were running behind schedule.

Of those, more than 250 originally had final reports due before July 31, 2026 — the date that, according to an FDA webpage, the database last had been updated.

About a third of ongoing studies were listed as delayed.

In some cases, the FDA has granted extensions. In others, it has denied them. And in rare instances, the products were discontinued before the studies ran their course.

Postmarket studies can involve clinical trials or other analyses of patient data. They can look at safety or efficacy. A product can be the subject of more than one postmarket study.

The nearly 600 delayed studies involved almost 350 products, KFF Health News found.

The FDA has defined delayed as behind the original schedule. That can mean off track or overdue.

As of August, other FDA databases tracking medical devices listed dozens of postmarket studies as behind schedule.

Products included:

The CustomFlex Artificial Iris, a prosthesis implanted in the eye in place of damaged, defective, or congenitally missing irises. The protocol for a study in children was accepted in 2019, the database said. The study was meant to follow patients for five years. According to an FDA page downloaded in August, zero patients were enrolled.

Barbara Fant of Clinical Research Consultants, to whom the FDA’s 2018 letter approving the product was addressed, said the rarity of an eye disease called aniridia poses challenges for post-approval studies. The German manufacturer, the U.S. distributor, and Clinical Research Consultants are working with the FDA to identify alternative ways to fulfill the postmarket requirements, Fant said.

“Confirming the long-term safety of the device remains a top priority for both the study team and FDA,” Fant said.

Paxlovid, a treatment for covid. A study to assess its safety in pregnant women was originally to be completed by the end of 2024, the FDA database said. “The trial completion and final report milestones were missed,” the database said.

Pfizer, the manufacturer, is working with the FDA and remains committed to “submitting results as soon as practicable,” Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts said.

The Scandinavian Total Ankle Replacement system. The device and the original protocol for the clinical trial were approved in 2009. The study was meant to include a minimum of 500 subjects, the database said, but the actual number enrolled was 142. Almost half those patients had one or more adverse events, with dozens of “reoperations,” “revisions,” or “removals,” the database said.

Rachel Colloff and Cristina Pasquino — spokespeople for Enovis, which markets STAR Ankle — did not respond to multiple inquiries. Jenny Braga, a spokesperson for Stryker, which previously sold the product, did not answer questions about the postmarket study.

Oxaydo (originally named Oxecta), a form of the potentially addictive opioid painkiller oxycodone touted as designed to deter abuse. When the FDA approved it in 2011, it required the manufacturer, part of Pfizer, to conduct a postmarket study to assess whether it reduces “misuse and abuse, and their consequences: overdose, death and addiction.” The final report was originally scheduled to be submitted in 2016.

The FDA database listing the study as delayed said the agency “issued a failure to respond letter” in 2022.

Today the issue may be all but moot.

Control of the product passed from company to company over the years until 2023, when Acura Pharmaceuticals said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that patents on Oxaydo would begin expiring that year and it didn’t intend to continue marketing the drug.

According to another FDA database, Oxaydo has been discontinued.

The FDA has enforcement powers and uses them “where appropriate,” HHS’ Hilliard said. She did not provide requested details, and she did not answer questions about the studies listed above.

Delay Can Pay

For manufacturers, delay can pay, Harvard’s Kesselheim said. While postmarket studies are ongoing, companies can continue to sell the products.

“Medicare and Medicaid spent more than $18 billion from 2018 to 2021 for accelerated approval drugs with incomplete confirmatory trials past their original planned completion dates,” the HHS Office of Inspector General estimated in 2022.

The FDA can demand postmarket studies for a variety of reasons, including to address concerns that arise after a product has been approved. Some look at uses not covered by the original approval, and some are meant to shed light on serious risks that are already known.

In April, when it approved Foundayo, a weight loss drug made by Eli Lilly, the FDA required the company to conduct additional research to assess a variety of concerns, including “retained gastric contents,” “major adverse cardiovascular events,” and “drug-induced liver injury,” as well as effects of exposure during pregnancy, such as “major congenital malformations,” “spontaneous abortions,” and “stillbirths.”

The FDA said it approved the drug under the new Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program, intended for products that “address critical national health priorities.” The program strives for an “ultra-fast” review, the FDA has said — one to two months, instead of six months or more with other expedited pathways.

“Postmarketing requirements and enhanced safety monitoring are a routine part of the FDA’s approach to evaluating newly approved medicines,” Eli Lilly spokesperson Kristiane Silva Bello said, “including ongoing monitoring in areas identified during clinical development.”

‘False Hope’

The FDA waded into a world of uncertainty in 2016 when it granted accelerated approval to a drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that primarily affects boys, disabling them at a young age and ultimately killing them.

Agency scientists had found that the drug, Exondys 51, was unproven and argued against greenlighting it.

Ellis Unger, then a senior drug evaluation official at the FDA, wrote in an internal memo that “thousands of patients and their families would be given false hope in exchange for hardship and risk.”

The manufacturer, Sarepta Therapeutics, conceded the uncertainty. “A clinical benefit of EXONDYS 51 has not been established,” it said when the drug, also known by the generic name eteplirsen, was approved.

The drug, the first FDA-approved treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, targeted a subset of patients with the disease.

The FDA required Sarepta to conduct further studies and warned that it could withdraw approval if postmarket trials failed to verify a clinical benefit or were “not conducted with due diligence.”

Unger issued a warning of his own: “FDA has not succeeded in withdrawing the marketing of a single drug for lack of verification of clinical benefit following accelerated approval. The reality is that if eteplirsen is given accelerated approval, it is highly likely to remain on the market indefinitely, irrespective of whether or not efficacy is verified.”

Sarepta was originally required to submit a final report on a postmarket study by a May 2021 deadline, according to an FDA database and a 2016 FDA letter to the company.

Almost a decade after the drug was approved, and more than five years after that deadline, the study was listed in an FDA database as delayed.

“The final report milestone was missed, because the sponsor requested milestone extensions due to study delays,” the database said.

Meanwhile, in 2022 the website Pharmaceutical Technology ranked Exondys 51 as the second-most expensive drug in the U.S., at an annual cost of $750,000 to $1.5 million.

Last year, the drug generated $538 million in sales for Sarepta, according to a company presentation to investors.

Sarepta found it difficult to recruit patients for the postmarket clinical trial, company spokesperson Tracy Sorrentino said. The target population is small, patients were hesitant to enroll, and Sarepta was competing with other clinical trials for participants, Sorrentino said.

The study has been fully enrolled since 2023, Sorrentino said, and the company plans to provide an initial look at the data late this year.

‘Manipulated’

Amgen has cited similar challenges, even as Tavneos generated $459 million in global sales last year.

When an approved treatment is available, patients may be reluctant to enroll in a study in which they could be given a placebo, Amgen’s Chartan said.

The clinical trial was originally supposed to be done by the end of 2030. As of July 24, just 49 patients had been enrolled, Chartan said.

The FDA has said the study was to include 300 patients, and each patient enrolled must be followed for five years, said Hilliard, the HHS spokesperson.

Tavneos was approved to treat severe cases of a group of diseases — known by the shorthand ANCA-associated vasculitis — in which, as the Cleveland Clinic explains, the immune system inflicts potentially fatal damage on blood vessels and organs.

“As of January 2026, estimated real-world exposure” to Tavneos “exceeds 25,000 patient-years globally, consisting of over 6,500 in the United States and 19,000 abroad,” Amgen has said. (For context, one patient taking a drug for five years would amount to five “patient-years.”)

A clinical trial sponsored by ChemoCentryx to secure approval of Tavneos failed to prove it was effective, the FDA now alleges. Instead of disclosing that outcome to the FDA, company personnel “manipulated” the results, the FDA alleged in an April letter to Amgen.

Amgen, the parent company of ChemoCentryx, has denied the results were manipulated and has said the data “remain valid.”

Nonetheless, the European Union recently revoked its approval of Tavneos.

The FDA is trying to pull Tavneos from the market, and Amgen is fighting that effort.

The company has a lot riding on the outcome. Tavneos can cost more than $220,000 per year, according to the drug discount website GoodRx, and when Amgen acquired ChemoCentryx in 2022 for $3.7 billion, Tavneos was the only drug ChemoCentryx had brought to market.

In a June letter to the FDA, Amgen said the benefits of Tavneos outweigh the risks.

The FDA disagrees.

The FDA “can no longer conclude that there is, or has ever been, a valid demonstration of substantial evidence of effectiveness for TAVNEOS,” the agency wrote.

Citing 76 cases of DILI — drug-induced liver injury — the agency said it was “increasingly concerned about the safety profile of TAVNEOS.” Without proof of effectiveness, at least for its approved use, “the drug’s benefits cannot outweigh its known risks,” the FDA wrote.

Data reporter Maia Rosenfeld contributed to this report.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Inside Commerce efforts to break data siloes and improve integrity

Christian Robles — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:30:04 -0400

The Commerce Department is building a “stronger database” of administrative records from agencies like the Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Affairs Department, Health and Human Services Department and Social Security Administration, according to Joyce Meyer, undersecretary of Commerce for economic affairs.

“This will allow us to rely more on existing federal agency data and rely less on collecting data,” Meyer said at the Data Foundation’s govDATAx conference Tuesday. “It also allows us to reduce the burden on taxpayers to respond to these lengthy surveys.”

One such combined setup, the Annual Integrated Economic Survey, or AIES, brought seven annual business surveys into one in 2023, Meyer noted.

“It’s a start, but it’s not enough,” Meyer said of the AIES.

A Commerce spokesperson did not return a request for comment on the agency’s efforts to obtain administrative records by the time of publication. Commerce maintains a list of restricted-use administrative datasets available to external researchers at Federal Statistical Research Data Centers that was last updated in September 2023.

An executive order on fraud, waste and abuse signed by President Donald Trump in March 2025 is pushing the Commerce Department to find ways to break down data silos, according to Meyer.

She said the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis have agreed to share more data with each other, including “census microdata” to inform the latter’s work on gross domestic product estimates. Before the enhanced data sharing, the Bureau of Economic Analysis had to rely on publicly available census data to guide analysis of economic indicators.

Data integrity and accuracy measures

The Commerce Department will boost the integrity and accuracy of its data by breaking down data silos, in addition to other initiatives, according to Meyer.

For example, the Census Bureau is working with the U.S. Postal Service ahead of the 2030 Census to further increase data integrity and accuracy, Meyer noted.

Under the partnership, specially trained postal workers visited households in Alabama and South Carolina that did not respond to a 2026 Census Test, according to a press release. Americans are more likely to trust postal workers than unfamiliar Census takers, making them more likely to respond to the Census and increase the accuracy of the count, Meyer argued.

But there are still data collection issues that Meyer says her agency has to address. She signaled that differential privacy — a mathematical framework that is designed to make it impossible to determine whether a particular person’s information is included in a given dataset and showed some people living in lakes in 2020 Census data — is an example of a subpar practice the Commerce Department wants to address.

“It’s yet another example of why we are implementing the president’s gold standard [science] executive order,” Meyer said.

Last week, Commerce proposed a rule that would transform how the census counts people and eliminate questions about race and ethnicity on short-form census documents and other questionnaires.

The proposal specifically says undocumented immigrants and immigrants who are legally in the U.S. but not lawful permanent residents would no longer count toward the apportionment of seats for the House of Representatives. Advocacy groups, such as the liberal Center for American Progress, have critiqued the draft rule as an effort to manipulate voting maps.

Meyer declined to comment on the proposal, stating “I encourage people to participate in the comment process that’s underway and share their perspectives.”

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VA disputes arbitration fees split with union it’s fighting to no longer recognize

Jory Heckman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:09:37 -0400

The Veterans Affairs Department is disputing what it owes to a third-party arbitrator who recently settled a dispute between the VA and a union it is fighting to no longer recognize.

Arbitrator James M. Cooney determined in April that the VA violated its 2023 master agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees when it refused to grant official time to representatives AFGE Local 0025, which is based in Hagerstown, Md.

Cooney ordered the VA to “cease and desist from refusing to recognize the Union.” He also ordered the agency to provide back pay with interest, and restore leave time to union representatives who were improperly denied official time.

Official time is a practice in which union officials at federal agencies may be compensated for representational work, including contract negotiations and representing employees in grievance proceedings and internal investigations.

VA terminated most of its union contracts on Aug. 6, 2025. But a federal judge in Rhode Island granted a preliminary injunction on March 13, 2026 that required the VA to reinstate its contract with AFGE. The agency has attempted to re-terminate its contract with AFGE following the preliminary injunction, but has been rejected each time by U.S. District Court Judge Melissa DuBose.

This legal battle traces back to President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order that banned collective bargaining at the VA and many other federal agencies under the auspices of national security.

VA officials, however, are contesting what it owes the arbitrator in this case, arguing that it isn’t obligated to pay for services rendered when the agency did not recognize AFGE.

In emails obtained by Government Executive, Christopher Richins, an attorney with the VA’s Office of General, told the arbitrator that “the Agency may pay only for services rendered before August 6, 2025, and after the effective date of the preliminary injunction,” adding that the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island “did not order any retroactive relief” to the union when it granted the injunction.

Richins wrote that the VA will pay a “portion” of what the arbitrator has charged the agency, but “is unable to pay” for services billed in August 2025, September 2025 and January 2026.

Cooney told Richins in an email last month that “I still do not understand the Agency's logic or rationale for avoiding its obligations, especially given the Agency's active participation in the case.”

“It was my expectation that if the Agency actively participated in the arbitration process (which it ultimately did), it would honor an arbitrator's invoice for work performed, rather than designate that such services be rendered on a pro bono basis,” Cooney wrote in a subsequent email.

Cooney wrote in an email this Thursday that “the VA has initiated the payment process.” A VA spokesperson declined to comment.

AFGE Local 0025 President Darren Petite wrote in a grievance filed in August that VA should “bear equally the expenses of the negotiated arbitration process,” and that the agency “should not be permitted to accept and utilize the benefits of the arbitration process while disclaiming the corresponding financial obligations.”

Petite wrote that the union “does not presently assert retaliatory motive” to the VA for disputing payment to an arbitrator who ruled in favor of the union, but that “the timing and circumstances surrounding the Agency's refusal to honor its contractual payment obligation reasonably raise that concern.”

“Allowing a party to withhold contractually required compensation from a neutral arbitrator following an adverse decision would create, at minimum, the appearance that an arbitrator's compensation may depend upon the outcome of the case,” he wrote.

Petite added that this situation “may discourage neutral arbitrators from accepting future cases” involving the VA.

Timothy Bailey, the acting assistant director of VA’s Decision Review Operations Center, denied the union’s grievance in a Sept. 1 memo.

Language in AFGE’s master agreement with VA states that arbitrator fees and expenses are generally split between both parties. However, Bailey wrote that provision "does not independently authorize the expenditure of appropriated funds for arbitration services performed during a period in which the Agency was prohibited from recognizing or administering the collective bargaining agreement.”

“With respect to the arbitrator’s fees, the Agency is unable to pay any portion of the fees attributable to services performed between August 6, 2025, when the Agency ceased recognition of the Union and the collective bargaining agreement was no longer being administered, and March 27, 2026, when the preliminary injunction became effective,” Bailey wrote.

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ICE chief nominee’s path to Senate confirmation ends abruptly

Ariana Figueroa, States Newsroom — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:30:35 -0400

The White House Thursday withdrew the nomination of Richard “Lance” Schroyer to lead the agency the president tasked with carrying out his mass deportation campaign, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, had yet to have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The chair of the committee, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., had no objections to Schroyer’s nomination, his office said in an email to States Newsroom.

The White House did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. The withdrawal was announced in a brief statement on the White House website along with those of several other nominees.

The Trump administration nominated Schroyer on June 27. He worked to establish Oklahoma’s law enforcement partnership with the federal government to assist with immigration enforcement in the 287g program, and is a close ally of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who previously served as Oklahoma’s U.S. senator.

Schroyer also worked in law enforcement for nearly 30 years.

The current acting director of ICE is David Venturella, a longtime federal immigration official and former vice president of the private prison company GEO that rakes in billions through federal contracts by detaining immigrants at its facilities across the country.

He took over in May after former acting ICE director Todd Lyons stepped down, following the shooting of two U.S. citizens by immigration officials in Minneapolis earlier this year.

The White House has not announced a replacement for Schroyer. The last time the Senate confirmed someone to lead ICE was 11 years ago.

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