Government Executive - Management

Judge considers temporary pause in USDA relocations in new lawsuit

Jory Heckman — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:34:04 -0400

A federal judge in San Francisco is considering a temporary pause of the Agriculture Department’s imminent plans to relocate employees across the country.

U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria told attorneys in a hearing Thursday that he may need to issue a “brief administrative stay” in order to get up to speed on the facts of the case.

A coalition of federal employee labor unions, nonprofits and local governments initially challenged USDA’s relocation plans in July, as part of an ongoing lawsuit over the Trump administration’s mass downsizing of the federal workforce.

But U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, in a ruling last week, allowed USDA to proceed with its relocation plans and urged plaintiffs to file a new lawsuit if they wanted to keep challenging the agency’s reorganization. Plaintiffs filed a new lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California this week.

Chhabria said he plans on issuing an administrative stay that would block USDA from moving forward with its relocation plans until Oct. 2.

"Only if I extend it beyond that will it go beyond that," he said.

The court’s next hearing in this case is currently slated for Sept. 29.

Chhabria said an administrative stay “doesn't say anything about the merits,” or “whether it's a strong or weak case or anything,” but would give him more time to “adjudicate this properly.”

“I don't have a problem with slowing down the schedule. In fact, I think it would be better for everybody involved. Because like I said, these issues appear to be very complicated and Judge Illston's been dealing with them for a long time, but I haven't had to deal with anything remotely like this before,” he said.

Corrine Johnson, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said management-directed reassignment letters have gone out to eight USDA components so far. Johnson said about 200 USDA employees have been instructed to report to new offices across the country starting Sept. 21, while others have been instructed to report by Oct. 5.

USDA officials told the court in late August that about 725 employees have received MDR letters so far, and that 64% of them have accepted reassignment.

Employees and union officials, however, say USDA’s acceptance rate is “inflated.” They claim that some workers have accepted relocation notices because that is the only way they can proceed with a request for a hardship or medical exemption. Others say they have nominally agreed to relocate, but are still applying for other jobs. If that those plans fall through, they may quit rather than move.

Justice Department attorney Taylor Pitz told the judge that the government would object to such an administrative stay, and that USDA’s reorganization “has already been well underway” for over a year.

“There's been plenty of interim planning development in the meantime, and this is certainly not the first step of the reorganization. Our understanding is there's already been employees who have needed to vacate certain buildings, so this is just another in many steps that have already been well underway,” Pitz said.

Chhabria said an administrative stay in this case would be “as limited as possible.”

“If somebody has a deadline of like Dec. 1, there's no need for me to stay that, because we're going to have the P.I. motion adjudicated long before that,” he said, referring to the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction.

USDA expects no more than 2,000 of the 4,600 employees currently working in the national capital region will remain there after moving staff to five regional hubs being stood up across the country.

Plaintiffs argue that the relocations are a veiled attempt for USDA to further shrink its workforce. Lawmakers included a provision in the fiscal 2026 appropriations bill for USDA that blocked officials from reorganizing or relocating offices or employees without congressional authorization.

Department officials pushed back on plaintiffs’ claims that its relocation plans are a reduction in force in disguise, but DOJ attorneys told the court that the “reorganization plans include workforce optimization measures, including downsizing.”

DOJ attorneys told the court this summer that USDA hadn’t conducted any attrition analysis on its reorganization plans yet, but will do so, "in conjunction with hiring and facilities planning at relocation sites as it finalizes relocation plans on an agency-by-agency basis."

The Government Accountability Office found the vast majority of employees at the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture quit rather than relocate to Kansas City in 2019.

GAO found that ERS and NIFA dealt with major staffing losses and saw substantial decreases in productivity. According to GAO, it took both agencies about two years to recover from those staffing losses. Even then, the watchdog agency says ERS and NIFA staff are now less experienced and less diverse.

USDA plans to hire 16,000 employees, but senior officials expect these hires will mostly “offset expected attrition," driven by its reorganization plans.

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USPS workers most impacted by mail-in ballot EO haven’t been trained yet, union warns

Jory Heckman — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:49:51 -0400

The Postal Service’s top executive says the agency stands in the middle of a legal battle over mail-in ballots that is largely out of its control.

The head of the American Postal Workers Union says its frontline employees are being put in a similar situation.

In the lead up to this year’s midterm election, federal lawsuits are challenging the Trump administration’s executive order imposing new rules on mail-in voting. Those cases are once again before the Supreme Court.

APWU President Jonathan Smith told Government Executive that bargaining unit employees haven’t gotten training on the changes outlined in the Trump administration’s executive order. USPS, he added, is contractually required to meet with the union before making any significant changes to the work that bargaining unit employees are expected to perform.

“They’re going outside of the normal measures that we go through. In the contract, they're required, when there's a serious change in the duty assignment, to sit down with the union and explain to the union what you're asking the people that I represent to do. None of that has happened. They have not been trained,” Smith said.

In a final rule USPS released in August, any state that plans to use mail-in or absentee ballots must provide USPS with a list of participating voters. The final rule also establishes new barcode and envelope-formatting requirements. USPS provided nonbinding guidance to states in previous elections, but now says it will reject ballots that don’t meet its standards.

APWU raised its concerns to the Supreme Court in an amicus curiae brief filed on Wednesday.

"The Final Rule would likely cause catastrophic wholesale non-delivery of mail to hundreds of thousands of voters. An enormous number of postal clerks in facilities nationwide would be needed to implement the Final Rule’s restrictions on mail ballot acceptance," the union wrote. "These postal clerks cannot realistically be trained in the operation of the Ballot Portal in the short time before the November elections. The hurried launch of this unprecedented system, at odds with the normal workflow of the Postal Service, will inevitably grind the operation of the postal system to a halt, delaying or preventing timely delivery of mail ballots."

APWU represents the frontline Business Mail Entry Unit (BMEU) clerks who accept large batches of mail-in ballots to be delivered to voters. According to a USPS whistleblower, these clerks will scan a sample of each batch to confirm the voter information on individual ballots matches the information states uploaded to an online portal. APWU also represents the IT workers tasked with creating that online portal.

The whistleblower claims that if clerks identify any errors in the sample, USPS will refuse to accept the entire batch - in many cases, tens of thousands of ballots - until election officials resolve these errors.

“We have the best postal system in the world because we are great at doing what we are trained to do. We are not great at doing what we're not trained to do," Smith said.

Last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction barring USPS from taking further steps to implement key provisions of its final rule. The Trump administration quickly appealed that ruling and the Supreme Court will soon have the final word on the legality of the executive order.

If the Supreme Court clears the way for USPS to implement the executive order, Smith said frontline employees represented by APWU will have little time to prepare for these changes. North Carolina began mailing ballots last week, and more states are expected to mail theirs in the coming weeks.

USPS conferred with APWU the last time the mail agency was tasked with carrying out new, complex work in a short amount of time – working with the Biden administration to mail millions of COVID-19 tests to households.

APWU signed a memorandum of understanding with USPS in 2022 that allowed postal clerks covered under its collective bargaining agreement to package and label parcels that contained free COVID tests. The memo stated this was “new work” that postal clerks were ordinarily not expected to perform.

“It addresses a problem that does not exist,” Smith said about the mail-in ballot executive order. “It’s to create chaos and put doubt in the American people's minds about voting by mail.”

Smith said he’s concerned the public will blame frontline USPS workers if they run into problems receiving a mail-in ballot this fall. He said the Trump administration is “giving the false impression that postal workers should determine who gets a ballot and who doesn't get a ballot.”

“When a customer does not receive their ballot, they're not going back to the White House. They're not going back to upper-echelon postal officials. They're coming to that poor frontline clerk, angry and upset,” Smith said. “We never should put our employees in that position. It's a dangerous position to take, and no one is talking about the safety and the security of the clerk who's just doing their job, doing what they’re told when they have no choice.”

Smith said that USPS employees are well-versed in carrying out “extraordinary measures” for mail-in ballots in the run-up to elections. Those include extra deliveries and collections, special pickups, expanded hours at processing plants, Sunday collections and visual checks of various points for ballots.

Postmaster General David Steiner told Government Executive in an interview last month that USPS will continue to carry out these extraordinary measures. But Smith said the steps USPS is expected to take under the executive order will make it harder to carry out those extraordinary measures.

“We're going to do what we have always done,” Smith said. “We are going to deliver, and we are going to do the best possible job we can do, but do not put us in a position to fail, is what we're saying, and that's what's happening right here.”

Steiner said USPS “is not a political organization,” and is prepared to carry out its end of the executive order if the Supreme Court ultimately rules in favor of the administration, or comply if the court decides to permanently block the EO’s implementation.

Steiner said implementation of the executive order is “really not dramatically different than what we've been doing for years.” Smith, however, said many of the employees he represents feel unprepared for changes that may be coming.

“Talking to the people I represent, they don't even want to do this. They're not comfortable doing this. The postmaster general says this is not much different than what we regularly do … This is totally different,” Smith said. “What other mail do we verify who can get it and who can't get it? Don't tell me it's nothing different than what we've ever done before. It's totally different. It's not our job to determine who can receive mail. It's our job to deliver the mail. The blame is already being laid where it doesn't belong.”

USPS is tasked under the executive order with launching a Federal Mail Ballot Portal for states to upload their voter lists. Steiner told Government Executive interview that creating the portal “did take a little bit of IT time, but not a dramatic amount.”

“We create the portal, and then all we have to do is compare that manifest to the ballots that get mailed out to make sure that all the ballots were mailed to the right person. It's what we do every day,” Steiner said in the interview in August.

Smith said USPS is putting together the portal under an accelerated timeline with insufficient time for testing.

“They're asking them what would normally take more than a year to do in a matter of three months. That's a recipe for disaster,” Smith said. “They're prepared to release something this critical, knowing it's impossible to get all the bugs out of the portal.”

A USPS whistleblower recently claimed that the agency has rushed to complete work on the portal, and hasn’t followed “standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch.”

Steiner said in a statement last Friday the USPS “takes these concerns seriously,” and those concerns have been “promptly escalated to the appropriate decision-makers.”

USPS Chief Customer and Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President Steven Monteith told the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts last week that the portal should be “available to users for voluntary use” sometime this week.

“If you're saying ‘ready’ is, ‘We’ve got an acceptable amount of bugs in the system, where it will only reject about 10% of the ballots,’ then we're going away from our oath that everybody has a right to a vote, and everybody has a right to a ballot. That's unacceptable,” Smith said.

In his statement last Friday, Steiner said that although USPS developed the portal on an accelerated schedule, "our standards for quality, security, and system integrity were not compromised.”

“Testing and validation have been continuous throughout the development lifecycle, and our process requires that deployment be delayed whenever significant defects or security vulnerabilities are identified, until those issues are appropriately resolved,” he said.

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Trump is staffing up agencies with political appointees. They’re not sticking around, new analysis finds

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:12:25 -0400

While Trump officials are installing a historically high number of political appointees in the federal government, those individuals are leaving their positions at higher rates than other recent presidential administrations, according to an analysis published Wednesday.

“The turnover among non-Senate-confirmed appointees stands out across every measure — in its scale, in its spread across agencies and in the speed with which appointees have left,” wrote Chris Piper, a researcher for the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit, which has been critical of the Trump administration’s cuts to the civil service.

During the first 18 months of Trump’s second term, more than 930 non-career members of the Senior Executive Service and Schedule C political appointees have left the federal government. That’s higher than the number who departed within the same timeframe under the presidencies of Barack Obama (426), Trump’s first term (592) and Joe Biden (432).

In response, the administration has brought on a higher-than-usual number of new appointees, according to the Partnership. Trump since January has made roughly 160 non-Senate-confirmed appointments per month compared with an average of about 70 under Obama, Trump’s first term and Biden during the same period.

As a percentage, nearly a quarter (24.6%) of the political appointees who were hired during the first 18 months of Trump’s second term have exited government, which is a higher rate than at the same point during the Obama (20.4%) and Biden (18.4%) administrations but lower than the share during Trump’s first term (28.3%).

“High turnover among political appointees is not an anomaly of the second Trump administration so much as a pattern across both of his terms,” Piper wrote.

Researchers wrote that the “steepest” losses have occurred at the Homeland Security Department, where 97 non-Senate-confirmed appointees have departed. DHS, which has received billions in additional dollars for immigration enforcement, also experienced turnover at the very top with Secretary Markwayne Mullin in the spring replacing Kristi Noem.

Additionally, the Partnership found that nearly 45% of the departing political appointees served for less than a year, and more than a quarter stayed with the government for six months or less. The researchers noted, however, that the percentages are likely higher because the Office of Personnel Management doesn’t record how long a political appointee stays in a given role but rather their total amount of time in government, which can include work under a different administration.

“The share who served less than a year, and less than six months, include…appointees who came in with prior federal service. Their recorded totals reflect earlier government work on top of their time in this administration,” Piper wrote. “Strip that earlier service out and the share of appointees who spent less than a year, or less than six months, in the second Trump administration would be higher still.”

In July, the Partnership similarly found that Senate-confirmed officials in the second Trump administration were leaving their positions at record rates. The nonprofit also reported in the spring that, under the current president, the federal political appointee workforce was at its largest size in decades while the number of career employees in the Senior Executive Service, the highest-ranking career staffers, had decreased by 30%.

The organization warned that high turnover among political appointees paired with fewer senior career leaders could make it more difficult for agencies to operate effectively.

“The second Trump administration has pushed a familiar pattern to a new high, losing more of these appointees, and losing them faster, than any recent president,” Piper wrote. “When churn at that level meets a career leadership already thinned by heavy attrition, agencies have less continuity to fall back on.”

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CDC, after months of delays, gives employees 20 days to resubmit disability accommodation documentation

Jory Heckman — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:45:50 -0400

Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention waiting for the agency to process their accommodation requests for disabilities and medical conditions are facing an imminent deadline to submit supporting medical documentation – even if they have already done so.

CDC, in an email sent on Aug. 20, told employees with pending reasonable accommodation requests that they must resubmit their supporting medical documentation within 20 calendar days. That deadline is Sept. 9.

In the email obtained by Government Executive from two sources, CDC states that if employees don’t receive the requested documents within that timeframe, “your case will be administratively closed.” The email also tells employees that any interim accommodations “will also cease upon administrative closure of the case.”

“As part of the ongoing reconciliation of Reasonable Accommodation Program records, we need to ensure that the medical documentation supporting your request is available for review,” the email states.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ updated reasonable accommodation policy states employees have 20 calendar days to submit their medical documentation once requested by their agency, “though reasonable extensions may be granted.” If a reasonable accommodation coordinator finds an individual’s medical documentation is insufficient, they may get the opportunity to provide additional documentation.

CDC’s instructions go beyond what’s stated in the department’s policy. The agency is directing employees who have already provided supporting medical documentation to update or resubmit their medical documentation. According to the memo, the agency is seeking this paperwork from employees in the following circumstances:

“If you previously submitted medical documentation, please forward or resend a copy so that it can be associated with your current case.”
“If your previously submitted documentation is no longer current (i.e. older than 6 months) or your circumstances have changed, please provide updated medical documentation.”
“If you have not previously submitted medical documentation in support of this request, please provide the initial supporting medical documentation.”

CDC employees and their union, as well as a reasonable accommodation expert, say these instructions are unusual, and raise new hurdles for workers who have already waited months or longer for the agency to process their paperwork.

CDC faces a backlog of about 3,000 reasonable accommodation requests that it expects will take six-to-eight months to process. HHS overall is dealing with a backlog of about 9,000 reasonable accommodation requests.

When asked why CDC employees are being asked to resubmit or update their supporting medical documentation, an HHS spokesperson said in a statement that “this reflects a misunderstanding of the documentation process.”

“When an employee submits a reasonable accommodation request, they explain the accommodation they are requesting. Someone then follows up with the employee to determine whether medical documentation is needed to support the request. If documentation is required, the employee has 20 days to provide it. If they do not provide it within that timeframe, the request may be closed,” the HHS spokesperson said. “The employee may also let us know that they no longer need an accommodation.”

Jodi Hershey, a former reasonable accommodation specialist at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the founder of the workplace accommodation firm EASE, LLC, said CDC is “ignoring a basic principle” that “an agency shouldn't demand more medical documentation than it actually needs.”

HHS's policy states that once an employee submits medical documentation establishing a disability and describing functional limitations, the case moves to a decision. The policy states that component agencies may not request more medical information from employees once they have provided “sufficient information to document the existence of a disability and their functional limitations related to the request.”

“For employees who already submitted sufficient documentation, a blanket demand to resend or refresh it isn't just unnecessary. It runs against what the policy instructs,” Hershey said.

One CDC employee, who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation, said they have now submitted three different reasonable accommodation requests for telework and have never gotten a decision back on any of them.

The employee sent the first one in summer 2025 and didn’t receive a response until an official sent an acknowledgement of receipt in December 2025. Despite following up with the official, the employee said they never heard from them again.

The employee submitted another telework reasonable accommodation request in the spring through a new HHS form. Shortly thereafter, however, the individual was diagnosed with a new condition that necessitated them to send in another request in July, which they have not received a response to besides an automated confirmation of receipt.

“Nobody knows what's happening. There's no guidance. There's no clear communication,” the employee said.

The employee’s supervisor has permitted them to telework some days throughout this process, but the individual said they’ve still had to use sick leave and that their health has “declined rapidly.”

“I went from having my chronic illness completely managed to it having gone totally out of control,” they said. “There's no proof that the stress of all this caused the new diagnosis, but that is very likely a contributor to how it got so bad.”

A second CDC employee told Government Executive that staff seeking reasonable accommodations are frustrated “because it’s taken over a year, in many cases, or longer, and suddenly we have a strict deadline or lose our accommodations.”

After months of delays and related issues that have contributed to declining morale, the CDC employee said they’re planning to leave the agency for work outside the federal government.

“I feel guilty because I have very specialized expertise in my subject and this will leave a critical gap in my team’s ability to function, but I ultimately need to care for myself and my family,” the CDC employee said.

Hershey said “it's possible the department is sincerely trying to clean up files that got disorganized,” but said a “cleanup shouldn't punish the people already stuck in this quagmire.”

“If the agency lost track of documentation it was given, the burden of fixing that belongs with the agency, not with the employee, and certainly not under threat of case closure and the loss of an accommodation they're relying on right now,” she said.

A former CDC employee said the agency is spending months, if not a year or longer, to process reasonable accommodation requests because HHS-wide layoffs and separation incentives targeted the department’s human resources and equal employment opportunity offices.

The former CDC employee said the agency’s restrictions on reasonable accommodations are “decimating the most vulnerable employees not only at CDC, or HHS, but in the federal government.”

AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said in a statement “HHS’s new blanket changes to its Reasonable Accommodations Program once again leaves workers in the dark.”

“This is yet another tactic by HHS leadership to deny reasonable accommodations to its workers, all while trying to give the appearance that they’re properly working through and responding to the backlog of thousands of unresolved accommodation requests,” Jacobs said, adding that some CDC employees may not be able to get updated documentation from a medical provider within the 20-day timeline.

Jacobs wrote in a letter to CDC leadership in March that employees are waiting months for the agency to approve their reasonable accommodation requests, and that the estimated cost of resolving hundreds of disability discrimination complaints exceeds $200 million.

Hershey said the 20-day deadline in the HHS reasonable accommodation policy allows component agencies to close out requests for employees who never submitted documentation, or who stopped responding altogether.

“Aiming that closure clock at employees who already provided what was asked repurposes a mechanism meant for abandoned or unsupported cases. The practical effect is that cases can be closed, and quietly dropped from the backlog count, over a records problem the agency created,” she said.

The upcoming closeout of interim accommodations, Hershey added, “carries the most immediate human cost.”

“An interim accommodation exists for one purpose: to protect an employee while the request is pending. Taking it away because the agency is reconciling its own records strips that protection from someone who did nothing wrong,” she said.

Sean Michael Newhouse contributed to this report.

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FEMA’s future looks clearer. Disaster aid is still uncertain

Alex Brown, Stateline — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400

State leaders are breathing a sigh of relief that the Trump administration’s threats to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency have subsided.

But experts say there’s still confusion about President Donald Trump’s decisions to approve or deny disaster declarations, leaving states with uncertainty about whether they can expect federal recovery funds.

“The foundation (at FEMA) seems stronger than it did six months ago, but this is an unreliable administration when it comes to the fair and equitable distribution of disaster funds,” said Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a former Obama administration official.

Trump has long called on states to take on a larger role in responding to disasters, and suggested early in his second term that FEMA might “go away” entirely. Kristi Noem, who served as Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security until she was fired in March, pledged at one point to “eliminate” FEMA, and slashed the agency’s spending and staffing during her tenure.

Last month, the Senate confirmed Cameron Hamilton to serve as FEMA’s administrator, making him the first permanent agency leader during Trump’s second term. Hamilton, once a FEMA critic, had previously served as acting administrator, but was fired in May 2025 after saying he had become convinced the agency should not be eliminated.

Experts say Hamilton’s return and Noem’s departure are signs of stability for FEMA.

“It’s basically a return to regular order,” said Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA’s administrator under President Barack Obama. “They’re filling positions and reestablishing programs that got cut during the purge.”

State emergency managers say the leadership changes are welcome developments.

“(Hamilton) he has the right attitude as far as supporting his employees and supporting the states,” said Lynn Budd, director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security. “I have a positive feel for that.”

Budd also serves as president of the National Emergency Management Association, a nonprofit comprising state and territorial emergency officials.

The foundation (at FEMA) seems stronger than it did six months ago, but this is an unreliable administration when it comes to the fair and equitable distribution of disaster funds.

– Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government

While FEMA appears to be safe from the most drastic threats, states still face uncertainty over some agency programs they have long relied on. The agency has said that states must comply with Trump’s voting and immigration policies in order to qualify for Homeland Security Grant Program funding. A coalition of states and municipalities have sued, saying they stand to lose out on millions of dollars they need to prepare for terrorist and other security threats.

The White House press office did not respond to a Stateline interview request.

Trump decisions

Experts say the biggest challenge for emergency managers is the lack of clarity around Trump’s disaster approvals. While FEMA has clear thresholds that determine which disasters qualify for federal aid, the president has full discretion to approve or deny those requests for help.

Trump has been far more willing to grant disaster declarations for Republican-led states, at 89%, while Democratic-led states have seen only 23% of their requests approved, a Politico analysis found in March.

Trump overruled the recommendations of his own agencies when he rejected federal aid for four Democratic-led states in July, Politico reported.

“The bad news is you have a very unreliable administration and a very political president,” said Kayyem, of Harvard. “When it comes to states’ expectations, we can’t know what this White House will do.”

But some emergency management veterans said the denials aren’t a clear-cut case of political retribution. Fugate, the former FEMA administrator under Obama, noted that many of the disaster requests Trump rejected were snow-related. Trump’s administration has pushed to eliminate snow assistance from FEMA disaster aid, arguing that states should not receive federal reimbursement for plowing their own roads. Many of the northern states that have experienced snow disasters are represented by Democrats.

For other disasters, Fugate said, Trump has a higher bar for granting federal recovery funds.

“The administration’s been very clear they’re wanting to raise thresholds, even if they haven’t formally changed the numbers,” he said. “I’ve not seen them deny catastrophic disasters, major disasters. It’s the smaller marginal disasters that are really judgment calls.”

While saying he “ain’t a big fan” of the Trump administration, Fugate said shifting the financial burden for disaster relief from the feds back to the states has been a longtime discussion among both parties.

Still, emergency managers said the White House should provide more clarity about what the new thresholds are and give states time to prepare for a bigger role.

“There’s really never been feedback about why a disaster was denied,” said Budd, the Wyoming official. “That’s something I would hope to see in the future, creating more clarity in what exactly are we looking at when we go through the process of trying to request a major disaster declaration.”

State money

Some states have begun preparing for a drawback of FEMA support. Tennessee lawmakers established a statewide recovery fund intended to help communities hit by disasters that don’t qualify for federal aid. While Republican Gov. Bill Lee requested $100 million to create the fund, lawmakers ultimately approved $44.2 million earlier this year. Some legislators fear that won’t go very far.

“Cutting it by more than half shows the State can’t afford for FEMA to cut back its support, much less to stop supporting states altogether,” state Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat, told the Tennessee Lookout in a statement. “Funded at its current level, this fund can only really fill a few gaps where FEMA is too slow or too rigid.”

Budd, the president of the emergency managers’ group, said other states are considering similar funds.

“These are the types of programs that we as states need to look at, and something that I will have conversations about with our legislators in the future,” she said.

But as states look at making those investments, Budd called on the White House to give them more time.

“The very hard part about saying states need to do more is that it cannot happen overnight,” she said. “It will take time for states and lawmakers to build that.”

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

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USDA employees dispute ‘inflated’ claim that most staff asked to relocate will do so

Jory Heckman — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:20:51 -0400

Updated at 12:00 p.m. ET on Sept. 4

The Agriculture Department is telling a federal court that a majority of employees who received relocation notices so far have agreed to relocate – a higher acceptance rate than what the department experienced with a smaller-scale relocation under the first Trump administration.

In an Aug. 28 court filing, Mary Pletcher Rice, USDA’s acting principal deputy assistant secretary for administration, told a federal judge in San Francisco that 725 USDA employees have received management directed reassignment (MDR) letters so far, and that 64% of them have accepted reassignment.

USDA agencies saw major staffing losses when it relocated hundreds of D.C.-based employees to Kansas City, Mo., under the first Trump administration — a much smaller-scale plan than what USDA is proposing under the second Trump term. The Government Accountability Office found the vast majority of employees at the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture quit rather than relocate to Kansas City in 2019.

USDA employees who currently face relocation and the unions representing them say the department’s figures don’t reflect the number of employees who will actually move across the country to keep their jobs. The department has sent relocation notices to less than a third of the approximately 2,500 employees expected to receive them. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

USDA so far has sent relocation notices to employees at ERS, NIFA, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the Foreign Agricultural Service and the Office of General Counsel. Employees at other components facing relocation have yet to receive notices.

USDA expects no more than 2,000 of the 4,600 employees currently working in the national capital region will remain there after moving staff to five regional hubs being stood up across the country.

Some employees say they’ve accepted relocation notices because that is the only way they can proceed with a request for a hardship or medical exemption. Others say they have nominally agreed to relocate, but are still applying for other jobs. If that plan doesn’t work out, they may quit rather than move.

A Natural Resources Conservation Service employee told Government Executive that he accepted relocation, but only so that he has more time to look for another USDA job within the D.C. metro area.

“My intention is to stay in the D.C., Maryland, Delaware, Virginia area. That's my intention. And whatever I need to do to do that is what I want to do. I'm just trying to buy myself some time where I can make that happen,” the NRCS employee said.

NRCS is USDA’s second-largest component, and helps farmers and other agricultural producers protect and conserve private lands. The agency has shed more than 20% of its workforce so far under the Trump administration. Government Executive reported last summer that NRCS is looking to backfill critical vacancies through lateral transfers.

“If I see a position that suits me and that I’m interested in, I can apply for that. However, it’s either going to be at an equal grade or lesser,” the NRCS employee said. “That’s one way of forcing people to take a voluntary downgrade.”

More than 28,000 employees have separated from USDA, largely through voluntary separation incentives, since the start of the second Trump administration. Factoring in hiring, the department has seen a net decrease of nearly 16,000 employees. USDA officials told the court on July 24 that the department is planning to hire nearly 16,000 employees this year to “offset expected attrition.”

A NIFA employee who opted to relocate said USDA’s claim that 64% of employees have opted to relocate is “highly inflated,” because colleagues are applying for exemptions or applying for local jobs.

“I know people who have accepted the MDR, but only accepted so they could try to stay employed, apply for other jobs in their area, and keep their jobs in case of an injunction,” the NIFA employee said. “I know a number of people who accepted because they needed to apply for hardships or reasonable accommodations, and the agency required you hit ‘accept’ in order to apply for those. These people will not move if they don't get their hardship or RAs.”

The NRCS employee said staff have nothing to lose by telling USDA they plan to relocate, even if they have no intention of moving, or are only considering it as a last resort.

“If I had said ‘no’ to the letter, the position that I'm assigned to, it goes away. There's no benefit to me to say ‘no.’ You’re almost pushed in a position of saying ‘yes’ to the letter," the NRCS employee said. “If you say no to the reassignment, ultimately you’re going to get removal. If your answer is anything other than, ‘Yes, I’m going to move, and yes, I”m going to show up on this date,’ the ultimate path is that you’re going to be removed."

Keywan Johnson, a labor relations specialist with the American Federation of Government Employees, told the court that USDA’s figures are “inflated,” because they must accept relocation in order to request hardship exemptions or reasonable accommodations.

"Due to their personal circumstances, many of those employees will not be able to relocate if their requests are denied,” Johnson wrote.

In some cases, USDA employees said they cannot relocate because their spouse’s job requires them to remain in the area, or because they are the sole caregivers for elderly parents. Union leaders told reporters in July that internal polling indicates that women, people of color, older workers and workers with disabilities are disproportionately being asked to relocate.

“They’re overwhelmingly the group of individuals that are being moved and relocated and put in positions of lesser responsibility than what they were before,” the NRCS employee said. “By targeting these individuals, you’re looking at reducing your overhead through salaries and benefits because you’re getting these higher-cost employees off the books, and by having such a secretive process, then you’re able to do this, and cherry-pick individuals to stay in place that you have more of an affinity to.”

A coalition of federal employee labor unions, nonprofits and local governments is asking a federal judge in San Francisco to stop USDA’s relocation plans arguing that the move is an attempt to downsize its workforce without congressional approval.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, in a ruling Wednesday, allowed USDA to proceed with its relocation plans for now. Illston told plaintiffs challenging the USDA reorganization, via a lawsuit filed in April 2025 to challenge the Trump administration’s widespread federal workforce layoffs, that their latest claims “do not belong in this case,” and should be brought up in a separate lawsuit.

"The Court concludes that the claims plaintiffs seek to bring regarding the USDA reorganization involve new and distinct causes of action that should be the subject of a separate lawsuit,” she wrote.

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OPM taps new healthcare and insurance chief ahead of Open Season

Jory Heckman — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:06:38 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management’s healthcare and insurance division, following recent staffing reductions, is getting new leadership ahead of its busy Open Season.

Matthew Kiley, a former Department of Health and Human Services official under the first Trump administration, will serve as the associate director of OPM’s healthcare and insurance division, starting Sept. 8, according to an internal memo obtained by Government Executive.

A copy of Kiley’s resume shared with OPM employees and partially viewed by GovExec shows Kiley is the founder and former president of the Weyhill Group, a boutique management consulting firm in the greater Philadelphia area that serves clients in financial services, insurance and healthcare.

According to Kiley’s LinkedIn page, he also led the Office of Health Policy within HHS’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) between November 2019 and and January 2021.

Kiley wrote that during his tenure at HHS, he “helped the department make significant progress in improving the health of all Americans and moving toward a more patient-centered and sustainable system.” Projects he worked on include eliminating surprise billing for patients, lowering “excessive drug prices" and addressing rural health issues.

Kiley was also involved in the administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing information used to allocate ventilators and relief funds. Earlier in his career, Kiley was a senior executive with Aramark, a consultant for McKinsey and an underwriter for Berkshire Hathaway's Insurance Group.

Kiley will take over for Shane Stevens, who announced in May that he was voluntarily stepping down. Kiley and OPM did not respond to requests for comment.

OPM shrank its total headcount by 35% between December 2024 and March 2026, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. GAO found that more than half of OPM employees who left during this period had 11 or more years of service.

Nearly 60% of OPM employees who have left under the second Trump administration did so through the deferred resignation program. GAO wrote staffing reductions “have reduced institutional knowledge and operational capacity at the agency.”

OPM recently carried out further workforce cuts. The agency announced in June that it would give employees in its healthcare and insurance division another shot at opting into the deferred resignation program, before rolling out an “organizational change.”

OPM H&I employees accepted into this round of the DRP went on paid administrative leave at the end of August, and will officially separate from the agency in March 2027. The agency is shrinking its healthcare and insurance workforce a few months before OPM’s busy Open Season, a one-month period in which federal and Postal Service employees can make changes to their healthcare plans.

Open Season starts in November and ends in December. Health plan changes made during this period go into effect in January. An OPM spokesperson told Government Executive in July that “we feel very confident in our staffing levels and OPM’s ability to deliver on a successful open season.”

Earlier this year, OPM called on federal health carriers to reduce costs while promoting a “well care” model in the federal insurance marketplace. In its March 31 call letter, OPM emphasized that members of Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits plans should take a more active role in their health.

Health plan participants have faced significant premium hikes in recent years. For 2026, enrollees in FEHB and PSHB paid an average of 12.3% and 11.3% more, respectively, toward their health insurance premiums.

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Scammers are making the government harder to trust

Caroline Melear — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400

“Your vehicle has an unpaid toll. Pay now to avoid late fees and legal action.” Countless Americans have received some form of this text in recent years. Unfortunately, it is part of a pattern.

In 2025, there was an 87% increase in government impersonation scams reported to the FBI. Americans lost about $920 million that year to criminals posing as government agencies, up from $789 million in 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

And now, scammers are impersonating FBI employees to target former scam victims. In the long run, without firm enforcement, these scams will further erode trust in government, making it harder for agencies to do their jobs.

Scams targeting Americans have exploded since 2020, but imposter scams are among the most worrying. Scammers exploiting the authority of the government are eroding the trust necessary for legitimate government communication.

A call or text claiming to be the IRS or a state toll authority can cause a victim to act impulsively, fearing penalties or legal action. But after repeated communication attempts from multiple scammers, Americans may no longer trust legitimate government communication.

The FBI has also warned about scammers using AI-generated voice messages to impersonate senior U.S. officials, a capability that will only become cheaper and more convincing over time.

Meanwhile, a new survey confirms that federal complaint data captures only a fraction of the problem. Gallup estimates 15 million Americans, or roughly 6% of adults, were personally scammed in 2025, for a total toll of about $68 billion, across all types of scams.

That is more than four times the amount reported to the FTC for the same year. Only around 13% of victims reported their scam to a federal authority, and nearly two-thirds said they would not know where to report a scam.

Many who stayed silent did not think reporting would help them get their money back, reflecting a lack of confidence in the reporting process. After all, 82% of Americans surveyed said the government is doing too little to prevent scams.

Yet despite public sentiment, it would be unfair to claim the government has been only a bystander in solving scams. The FTC’s Government and Business Impersonation Rule gives the agency authority to sue impersonators and seek civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation.

In the two years since the rule was finalized, the FTC has brought a dozen enforcement actions and recovered more than $70 million for consumers, including cases against fake tax-debt-relief operations posing as the IRS.

This is just one of many government-led initiatives to stem the tide of scams, like those from the Treasury Department, Justice Department and the White House.

Beyond enforcement, Health and Human Services started a public-private partnership aimed at America’s seniors.

The “Never Ever” campaign informs them that the government will never demand payment via a payment app, cryptocurrency, wire transfer or gift card, and it will never threaten to suspend benefits unless someone pays immediately. This solution at least attempts to head off scammers instead of relying on retroactive enforcement.

But whack-a-mole and after-the-fact solutions are poorly suited to reducing the threat or rebuilding Americans’ trust.

A more durable solution starts with the federal government bringing its full weight to bear on scam operations themselves and allowing agencies to leverage the same AI tools that are used against victims. It also means holding accountable the communication channels where scams most frequently reach Americans, including phone calls, text messages and social media, and incentivizing them to block scam communications from ever occurring in the first place.

This may include introducing stronger digital ad verification standards at the platform level and greater legal responsibility for the telecom middlemen who allow scam callers to connect to consumer-facing carriers.

Finally, Americans are clearly lost when it comes to reporting. This is why a single, consumer-friendly system is vital for reporting, tracking and possible restitution, both for Americans and policymakers who need accurate data to properly address the problem.

None of these fixes work in isolation, nor are the solutions an exhaustive fix. Each chips away at the problem while scammers find whatever gap is left open.

What’s needed is a comprehensive response that connects enforcement, communications accountability and consumer protections into a single coordinated strategy, rather than a patchwork of agencies each managing their own slice of it.

Every unanswered official text and ignored call is a sign that Americans are starting to tune out the government itself, including the notices that are real. If people can no longer tell a legitimate IRS message from a scam, many will stop responding, period, and no FTC fine will be able to buy that trust back.

Caroline Melear is a Resident Fellow for Finance, Insurance and Trade with the R Street Institute.

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Inspector general fired by Trump talks leadership, OIG independence and his new memoir

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:55:51 -0400

Across his decades-long career in government, Larry Turner served in the Army, in senior positions at the Defense Department’s inspector general office and, ultimately, as the IG for the Labor Department. He was fired by the president, along with 16 other federal agency watchdogs, in January 2025.

Since his departure from government, Turner wrote a book recounting his abrupt firing as well as lessons in leadership that he’s learned throughout his life — tracing his path from being an introverted kid to heading a government oversight office.

In an interview with Government Executive, Turner discusses how IG staffers serve as a check on their boss, how he would strengthen the Trump administration’s anti-fraud initiatives and what he’d say to the president in order to change his mind about diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Editor’s note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Q. It's clear from reading the book that you really loved being an IG and being in the IG community — so much so that you coined the phrase, "It's a great day to be in the OIG.” So my first question for you is, what do you miss most about being an IG?

A. I actually miss the staff. Going through the military and going through the government and a couple years as a contractor, one of the things that I realized was my strength was leadership. When I say that, that sounds like a nice, corny thing to say. But after working for several different managers over my career, I know the importance of getting the best out of your staff and how you can get the best out of your staff.

When I would hire people or interview people for our jobs, I was really wanting to measure their passion about their work. We were a small OIG. We were about 350 employees. I would bring executives in and I would let them know that “Hey, unlike some places where you may be in this ivory tower, here you got to roll your sleeves up and actually go to work and manage people.”

I want people that are gonna get outside their office and go talk to the staff. That was how it was for me. That's why I love managing staff so much. When I left the government, all of a sudden, I found myself at home every day. I see my wife and talk to a few friends and colleagues on the phone, but I don’t have the daily interaction that I had with staff, which I just loved.

Q. In your book, you talk about the importance of IG independence. While IGs are supposed to be appointed “without regard to political affiliation,” most of the IGs who have been confirmed since the start of Trump's second term worked in the president's first or second administration. Your successor, Anthony D’Esposito, is a former GOP lawmaker who recently spoke at a Trump political rally. Considering all of this, do you feel you will be able to trust the findings of DOL OIG audits and investigations moving forward?

A. I would say with any OIG there's a possible perception that you may favor the administration or the secretary. People may question your findings. Was it independent? Was it nonpartisan? So that's the problem you run into, even if you were not trying to. Some of the criticism I see of some of the newer IGs, including my replacement, is because they, in some cases, have not stayed away from that. One of the things that you learn as an inspector general is that you have got to give the appearance of being independent and not influenced by the administration.

The other part about that is you don't know your staff’s political affiliation. I think our staff are just a slice of the American public, and so they are the ones that help you hold your feet to the fire. If they feel that you are siding with the administration, your employees could write a whistleblower complaint, somebody could go to the media or they could even turn you into the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.

(Editor’s note: CIGIE oversees investigations into senior watchdog officials. Last year, the Trump administration prevented the group from receiving funding for about a month-and-a-half, but backtracked following objections from some Senate Republicans.)

That's one of those things where we police ourselves up. That's why I think it's so important to provide that independence. IGs are intentional about that because you make sure that you avoid meetings with the secretary that may have a certain slant in terms of what the administration is doing. IGs try to stay away from that, and the secretaries know that because sometimes they won't invite us to certain meetings, or we will opt out and they understand and agree with that.

Q. Could you provide an example of a meeting that you purposefully skipped while you were an IG at Labor?

A. Once a week there were certain internal-level meetings that the secretary or the deputy secretary would have. When you get a new secretary, a time or two, you may attend those until you realize that this was really based on administrative guidance. So those were meetings where you felt like, “OK, I don't need to be at this meeting.” You would let the secretary or the deputy know that, and they would say, “Oh, not a problem Mr. IG. I understand that, and we don't want to compromise your position.”

Q. You write in your book about growing up in a segregated town, attending a segregated school and being one of the only Black officers at your first assignment in the Army. You write openly about racism you experienced in your personal and professional life. Something that stood out to me was when you had a new colonel, and he would only say good morning to white staff members and not Black ones. You also describe yourself as a supporter of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In contrast, the Trump administration has sought to remove DEI from the federal government. If you had an opportunity to meet with the president, what would you say to him to try and convince him to change his anti-DEI stance?

A. I would say that if your goal is to hire the best people, then you have to open up the hiring process. If you only look at people that know you or that look like you, then you limit yourself. I am greedy. I want the best people working for me. Why would I want anything else than that?

If I were talking to the president, that's what I would tell him. If you really are serious about hiring the best people, then you have to open up the gates for everybody to apply. And from that application process, it'll give you a chance to look at more people. One of the reasons I pushed DEI was because I understood that there were a lot of qualified people that have been working all their lives to qualify for certain jobs. If you shut that down, then you don't give them a chance to compete.

I would like to be interviewing the top three or four people that are really good. You want your best choices. You don't want to have one person that stands out and two or three that are just really bad. That was the thing that I always impressed upon my managers and senior execs. At the end of the day, I considered success as getting the best employee available.

There were times that I had to have like a teach-and-train moment with my execs because they had a candidate or two that was African American, and they were afraid to hire somebody white because “I'm worried about stepping on the boss’ toes.” But they misunderstood what I was saying that, at the end of the day, it's about hiring the best people.

Sometimes that can mean you may have more white staff members. Sometimes you may have more Asians. Sometimes you may have more African Americans. But when you go through that process, and the top person that rises to the level is whatever race, it just happens that way. But I think it's unfair to anybody, and takes away from your credibility, when you just hire somebody that you know, or some friend, or somebody else’s friend or family member, or something like that.

Q. You were one of the first officials to warn about the prevalence of fraud in pandemic financial assistance programs, and the issue became personal for you when someone stole your identity to file a false unemployment claim. The Trump administration has prioritized combating fraud in federal programs. Given your experience, what suggestions would you give to the Trump administration to improve their anti-fraud initiatives?

A. Let your staff go after the top fraudsters. When you're going and looking for fraud, you want to be able to open up all gates. You can't pick a certain group to look at. If you're seriously interested in fraud, you want to go to those places where you can identify the fraudsters and prosecute them.

The other part about that, and this is why I feel the current administration has missed out a little bit, is that you gotta have the staff and resources to do that. My last two years as the IG, we were in a hiring freeze because we didn't have the budget. Under the Biden administration, they were trying to get us another $100 million. And even under the Trump administration, I was scheduled to testify like a week before I got fired because they were trying to get us additional resources.

I think it starts with resources, and you can't really be serious about fraud if you are continuing to reduce the staff or your auditors or investigators — the people that do the job. It's like you're talking out both sides of your mouth. On one hand, you're saying we want to really go after the fraud. But on the other hand, you're saying we're going to cut your staff by 50%. So which is it? You can't have it both ways.

(Editor’s note: The Partnership for Public Service nonprofit reported that, as of May 31, the average Cabinet OIG workforce is 19% smaller than it was in December 2024. Federal workforce data shows that Labor OIG has gone from 315 employees in 2024 to nearly 250 currently.)

The other part about it is you’ve got to want IGs who are aggressive in going after fraud. I think there's a feeling right now that that is not really the mandate that has been given to IGs and their staff. I think there is a sense right now that some staffers are concerned about their jobs being at risk by going after certain fraudulent groups. I think that's the biggest challenge.

Q. Can you be more specific about staffers feeling that their jobs are at risk if they go after certain groups or individuals?

A. When 17 IGs were illegally fired, including myself, that was a terrible message to send to the IG community. If you were getting rid of IGs that were ineffective or were not doing their job, you could justify that and say, “Hey, this is why we're getting rid of them.” I think that would have went a long way with people accepting that. But when you didn't do that, then it got people saying, “Okay. They did their jobs and they got released.” So now, if you work for the people who were fired, you're concerned about “Am I going to get in trouble? Am I going to lose my job because I'm going after someone that may be in a certain party or may be a part of the current administration? If I go after a friend of somebody's or somebody in a red state, am I going to put myself at risk?”

One of the hardest jobs for all IGs to deal with is that sometimes you will get a request from a congressional member. And that congressional member may want you to investigate the secretary or somebody on their staff. Most IGs, when they get that request, they know that the price of poker just went up because they also know that “If I don't find what that congressional member wants me to find, are they going to hold that against me? If I do find that the secretary did commit a violation, I'm going to have the secretary mad at me.”

At the end of the day, most IGs don't care about that. They just care about getting it right. IGs follow the facts wherever the facts may lead us. We're like referees. We're independent, we're impartial and we don't even get distracted by political affiliation or what a senator or a Congress member wrote. You don't even worry about that. You’re just worried about “We got tasked with going out here and investigating something. Let's make sure we do a thorough job, and make sure we check and double check to make sure that it’s correct.”

Q. While in your book you praise many of your previous supervisors, you also discuss a “toxic” boss you had while at the Defense Department inspector general office. This individual was ultimately fired, in part, for making false claims against you. What advice would you give to a federal employee or any worker who has a boss that is creating a hostile work environment?

A. One thing I always told my staff is one of the keys to being successful is learning how to work under anybody. The first time that you have a boss that's difficult, don't just throw your hands up and say “I'm out of here.” It's almost like a math problem. You try to figure it out, and this route doesn't work. You try several things, and at some point, you may get to where you’ve exhausted all methods and all means. At that point in time, then I would advise someone to start looking outside for a different opportunity.

When you're younger and you're going through a difficult boss, sometimes you get frustrated and you want to let it get personal. What I've always advised my staff is to, first of all, always remain professional and always stay positive. At the end of the day, if it gets negative, a lot of times you're at a disadvantage because you're dealing with somebody that writes your appraisal. You always really just got to stay professional, and I think that's the hardest thing for a lot of junior employees to do because they take it personally.

But at some point in time, you may get to a point where you need to say, “You know what? I've tried all these different methods and ways to make this work. I've met with my boss, tried to find out what I can do to improve or change their opinion of me.” And sometimes you may work for somebody that just don't like you. And when it happens, the best thing I think an employee can do is start looking elsewhere. Some people get so frustrated they quit and walk away before they have something else. I would never advise anybody to do that. I would always say stay the course until you can find something better.

Q. This is my final question. Is there a question I didn't ask you that you wished I had?

A. I decided to write the book because throughout my time in the government, as well as in the Army, my leadership style has been somewhat unconventional. What I mean by that is that work does not have to be drudgery. I actually believe that work can be fun, and one thing I like about the OIG community is that a lot of our folks really love what they do. It's about creating an environment where they can continue being productive, and they want to come to work and their passion comes through.

I've had several managers who were toxic, and so it was for that reason that I wanted to be a leader. Too often, I hear GS-15s and -14s say “I want a non-managerial job.” I've never felt that way. I want a job where I can control something more than having somebody control me. If I'm the IG or the deputy IG, I can ensure that we have a positive environment where people can be productive.

I wrote the book because I'm a people's person. Oftentimes, when I was the IG and deputy IG — and throughout my career, and even now since I've left the government — I'm always giving advice or mentoring or coaching. But what happened was, I'm only giving that advice to a handful of people now as opposed to when I was giving it to a whole agency. I thought one way to share some of that knowledge and the success that I've had in my government career and military career was to write a book and just share some of those things with folks who are trying to learn, who are trying to be more effective as leaders and trying to get into the government.

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Shutdown threat possibly lifted as House passes stopgap spending bill

Jory Heckman — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:22:02 -0400

The House approved a stopgap spending bill on Tuesday that will keep the federal government funded through early December, taking a government shutdown off the table ahead of midterm elections this fall.

The House voted 370-48 to pass a continuing resolution that will keep the federal government funded through Dec. 11.

The continuing resolution includes a provision that temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule that would put federal grant funding under review by political appointees. It also includes language that would prevent the Trump administration from transferring funds from other programs to Border Patrol.

The Senate passed the stopgap spending bill in a 90-6 vote in July before leaving for its summer recess.

Federal employees dealt with the longest government shutdown in history last year, followed by the longest partial shutdown, which impacted the Homeland Security Department. Both shutdowns led to federal workers missing paychecks.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Tuesday morning ahead of votes that Congress is “going to avoid the threat” of another government shutdown.

“On this CR we'll take up, it simply holds funding steady at current levels through Dec. 11th, as Republicans work to complete the full year appropriations process,” Johnson said.

The stopgap spending bill gives Congress more time to reach a deal on a comprehensive spending package for fiscal 2027. So far, the House has passed three of 12 spending bills that make up a comprehensive spending plan. The Senate hasn’t passed any of its FY 2027 bills yet.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla. said “the fiscal year deadline is outpacing the work that remains,” and that the continuing resolution will ensure constituents “will continue to get the services they need.”

“This will allow Congress time to get past the November elections, and allow us time to assess and move forward with further appropriations measures in November and December,” Cole said.

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. said the CR is a “marked improvement” from an earlier version that would have kept the government funded through Dec. 4 – and did not contain provisions blocking OMB’s proposed rule.

“The continuing resolution we are considering today is in no way a substitute for the full-year funding process. It is merely a means to complete this important work while averting a lapse in government funding,” DeLauro said.

The House passed the previous Dec. 4 CR largely along party lines, with Republicans overwhelmingly voting in favor of the bill. House Democratic leaders rejected the earlier stopgap spending bill, but House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said this latest version would receive “broad bipartisan support."

Vice Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus Ted Liu, D-Calif., said he would vote for the CR, “even though doing CRs is a stupid way to run government.”

“It is not a good way to run our federal government. But it's the only alternative that's gonna be put before us,” Lieu said.

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Nearly 3,150 Labor employees seeking disability accommodations impacted by data leak, internal memo says

Jory Heckman — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:35:19 -0400

Updated at 10:03 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Sept. 1

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 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.

According to a “talking points” memo obtained by Government Executive, the department’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management says the data leak discovered this summer impacted nearly 3,150 employees, all of whom submitted a reasonable accommodation request sometime over the past two-and-a-half years.

The talking-points memo states that the spreadsheet contained the personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) of employees who submitted reasonable accommodation requests between October 2023 and June 1, 2026.

The memo states that DOL “sent notification letters to all impacted individuals by mail," and that the department “is reviewing and considering current and new measures that may be necessary to safeguard the information.”

“The Department is extremely concerned about the recent disclosure of personal information maintained on behalf of DOL employees. DOL will continue to engage in remediation activities to recover and destroy all the information involved in this incident,” the department wrote in its talking-points memo.

A Labor Department spokesperson said in a statement that the department "takes this issue very seriously, and is taking every effort to ensure protection for all personally identifiable information and protected health information in the future."

Data impacted by the leak includes employees’ first and last names, duty location, work email address, job title, supervisor name and email address, pay grade and series. The spreadsheet also included information about each employees' disabilities or medical conditions that were the basis of their reasonable accommodation requests.

Naomi Berry-Perez, director of the department’s Civil Rights Center, previously told employees that “no Social Security Numbers (SSNs), dates of birth (DOBs), more specific medical diagnoses" were included in the spreadsheet.

Union officials said they’re frustrated the department waited about a month after discovering the data leak to notify impacted employees. They say the department has also been unable to answer basic questions about the incident – including the position, title and affiliation of the individual who sent the data to their personal email address, or why the information was sent to a non-agency email more than once.

Brent Barron, president of the American Federation of Government Employees’ National Council of Field Labor Locals (NCFLL), said the Labor Department has been “dragging their feet” processing employees’ reasonable accommodation requests, and was slow to notify employees impacted by the data leak.

“We take pride in protecting the American workforce, and our own agency can’t protect its employees,” Barron said.

Labor Department employees recently told Government Executive that the department is facing a backlog of hundreds of RA requests. Several reported waiting months or, in some cases, a year or longer for the department to process their requests.

Faced with a backlog of reasonable accommodation requests, the department is looking to roll out artificial intelligence tools to triage the workload. Experts warned that processing confidential medical records through AI tools could create privacy issues.

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‘Not our decision,’ USPS chief says, as agency faces mail-in voting lawsuits and a looming cash crisis once more

Jory Heckman — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:34:00 -0400

The Postal Service is dealing with a familiar pair of challenges: legal scrutiny over its capacity to deliver mail-in ballots ahead of the fast-approaching election season, and a plea to Congress to help the agency avoid running out of cash.

In the lead up to this year’s midterm election, several federal lawsuits are challenging the Trump administration’s executive order imposing new rules on mail-in voting.

USPS is also once again at risk of running out of cash. The agency is calling on Congress to take up a legislative package meant to help put the agency on firmer financial footing – either through annual appropriations or a cost-cutting package that may include shuttering post offices and reducing delivery days.

It’s a déjà vu moment for USPS. In 2020, federal courts scrutinized the nearly insolvent agency’s readiness to deliver an unprecedented volume of mail-in ballots, a process that is now fairly routine. About one in three U.S. voters cast ballots by mail.

Postmaster General David Steiner, in a wide-ranging interview, told Government Executive that regarding these two issues, the legal battle over mail-in ballots and reforms to its struggling finances, USPS stands in the middle of policy decisions largely out of its control.

Steiner said USPS “is not a political organization,” and is prepared to carry out its end of executive order if the courts ultimately rule in favor of the administration, or comply if the courts decide to permanently block the EO’s implementation.

“We deliver the mail. Someone else makes the rules. We deliver the mail, and so we deliver the mail under the rules that are put on us, and that's exactly what we'll do. People can fight over whether the rules are valid or not. Once that fight is finished, we'll do whatever the courts say we can do. That's not our decision,” Steiner said.

The Supreme Court allowed USPS on last Monday to proceed with a final rule on its implementation of the executive order. Last Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts granted a temporary restraining order blocking USPS from carrying its final rule. But the ruling has already been appealed, and may soon head back to the Supreme Court.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuits argue the cash-strapped USPS is being directed to implement new restrictions with no time left to vet these changes ahead of Election Day. The Trump administration argues its order isn’t “restricting” mail-in voting, but introduces “modest envelope design requirements" on states that mail ballots to voters.

“You just can't do nothing”

USPS has floated the possibility of Congress providing “modest appropriations” – at least in the short term – to keep the agency from running out of cash. That would bring USPS more in line with its earlier business model, when it functioned as a Cabinet-level agency.

Absent those funds, Steiner said USPS will need to scale back days of delivery, shutter unprofitable post offices, and reduce the size of the USPS workforce – but the agency can’t make these changes without approval from Congress.

“Both issues are the same thing: other people make the policy, we just enforce it. On the EO, we're going to follow the rules that we get given. On the business, we don't get to make the policy decision. Congress gets to make the policy decision,” Steiner said.

Since 1971, the Postal Service has operated more like a business, funded largely through its own revenue. But an accelerating decline in mail volume has left the agency with few options to stay afloat through its own actions.

Steiner said he’s “agnostic” on which choice Congress makes, but said granting short-term funding would allow USPS to keep providing its same level of service to the American public.

“All I'm asking Congress to do is pick one of the policies,” Steiner said. “You just can't do nothing, because if you do nothing, we're out of business.”

Making mail-in ballots 'more safe and secure'

If the courts ultimately allow USPS to proceed with implementation of the executive order, Steiner said the agency has the capacity to make changes in a short period of time.

“It's really not dramatically different than what we've been doing for years,” Steiner said. “Not sure why it creates such a kerfuffle.”

Under the final rule, any state that plans to use mail-in or absentee ballots must provide USPS with a list of participating voters. USPS is also tasked under the executive order with launching a Federal Mail Ballot Portal for states to upload their voter lists.

“We don't compile the list. We don't review the list. We don't do anything with the list other than to make sure that the ballots on that are listed on that list are ballots that get delivered to the customer,” Steiner said.

The final rule also establishes new barcode and envelope-formatting requirements. USPS provided nonbinding guidance to states in previous elections, but now says it will reject ballots that don’t meet its standards.

Outbound ballots, USPS wrote in an FAQ, “will be rejected if during verification prior to acceptance the Postal Service cannot match the unique Intelligent Mail barcode on the envelope with the data in the Federal Ballot Mail Portal."

Steiner said the barcode requirement is very similar to the agency’s longstanding guidance, and “reduces the amount of work for our folks.”

“Honestly, if we could put that into law, we would put it into law, because it makes the mail more efficient,” Steiner said. “It makes it easier for us to deliver ballots, it makes it easier for election officials to trace the ballots. No one can disagree that that is a more efficient way, from our perspective, and from the mailer's perspective, to track and understand the mail.”

As part of a 2021 settlement with the NAACP and Public Citizen, USPS has agreed to deploy “extraordinary measures” for mail-in ballots ahead of subsequent elections. That includes extra deliveries and collections, special pickups, expanded hours at processing plants, Sunday collections and visual checks of various points for ballots. Steiner said these measures will remain in place for the 2026 election, noting that while they are costly for normal mail, the agency has performed them for years and views them as a “non-issue” from a cost perspective.

But postal experts remain wary about USPS’ capacity to roll out new changes just a few months out from Election Day.

Robert Fisher, a former USPS executive, postal consultant and the founder of the Research Alliance for Postal Policy, said USPS has done a “great job” delivering ballots in previous elections, but “to do what’s being asked in the short term, it’d be a disaster.”

“The scope of it, the complexity it adds, having to deal with so many exceptions to longstanding practices, it’s going to be a disaster, in spite of heroic efforts,” Fisher said.

Mike Plunkett, a former USPS manager for pricing strategy and innovation and manager of retail alliances, now president of the Association for Postal Commerce, said the last time USPS was asked to pull carry new, complex work in a short amount of time was working with the Biden administration to mail COVID-19 tests to households at the height of the pandemic.

“This, to me, seems orders of magnitude more difficult technically, because they have to coordinate among 50-plus states and territories. If you compile that list, and then put in place acceptance procedures for thousands of locations that will allow them to do verifications against those lists within less than 10 weeks, that is a tall order,” Plunkett said.

Voters are slated to receive mail-in ballots well ahead of Election Day.

“I have no idea how many disputes this will create, because inevitably there will be disagreements between the postal officials and the election officials,” Plunkett added. “And there’s no existing dispute resolution processes in place that I’m aware of, so they will have to create that on the fly too.”

President Donald Trump has been openly skeptical of mail-in ballots. Politico first reported that Trump, who is registered to vote in Florida, cast his vote in the state’s Republican primary via USPS.

Asked about vote-by-mail skepticism, Steiner said USPS has a solid track record of delivering ballots quickly and on time. In the 2024 election, the agency delivered ballots in 1.4 days on average.

“Yes, it's safe and secure. Can it be more safe and secure? Absolutely. All I can talk to is the part that we are responsible for. I don't know what happens to a ballot once it shows up in your hand. Is something going on there? No idea,” Steiner said. “Our job is to move mail, and when we move ballot mail, we move it safely and securely. Now, that's when it's in our possession, right? What happens to that ballot when it's outside of our possession? No idea. Could there be something going on? No idea.”

“Don't let that change the sense of urgency”

After the midterm elections, USPS will still need help from Congress to avoid running out of cash. There's a chance these negotiations may require support from a Democratic majority in the House or Senate, depending on the outcome of the election.

Steiner said USPS will be submitting a legislative proposal to Congress in “weeks, not months.”

Lawmakers have been critical of USPS leadership in recent public hearings, but Steiner noted that private talks with the Congressional Postal Service Caucus and the appropriations committees have ”been very constructive.”

“It's a problem-solving session, which I thoroughly enjoy,” Steiner said about these closed-door meetings. “Obviously, the hearings are more theater, but the private conversations we've had have been spectacular.”

USPS estimates that its public service obligations cost the agency about $6-9 billion annually to carry out. Given an accelerated decline in mail volume, Steiner has proposed Congress partially fund USPS through annual appropriations, or free up the agency to close post offices and reduce delivery days.

“I don’t think we need that amount of money to be profitable. I think it’s more like $4-6 billion. I think that would be the range that we’d be in,” Steiner said about the agency’s appropriations request.

According to the National Association of Postal Supervisors, USPS is authorized to request up to $460 million from Congress each year as “public service reimbursement.” But the agency hasn’t requested or received any public service reimbursement since 1982.

“All we're asking is let's bring that concept back. If you're going to ask us to do things that lose money, pay us for that,” Steiner said.

Steiner said Congress could put in a provision in the spending package that requires lawmakers to revisit USPS appropriations about every five years, because by then, the agency could be in better shape financially.

Steiner said three things are losing USPS money – its legal obligation to deliver mail and packages to every address six days a week, an inability to set its own prices without approval from its regulator, and keeping all of its post offices open, even though 60-70% of them are unprofitable.

“Take those shackles off of us, we'll be profitable in six months. Not hard. Let us operate like a business. If our mandate is to make money, let us operate like a business. We'll make money in six months. Now you're going to have less days of service. You're going to have less post offices. You're going to have higher prices, so that's one policy choice. The other policy choice is fund the mandates.”

If Congress doesn’t act on a legislative package for USPS this year, Steiner said the mail agency will be forced to consider lowering service standards, raising prices and closing thousands of “unprofitable” post offices.

“If we don't have a legislative solution, which I hope we will – or at least a view to a legislative solution. We don't have to have an actual bill, but I'd like to know which way Congress is going. If we don't know that by, call it first quarter of 2027, we'll start closing post offices. We'll start looking at how we can reduce service levels, and we'll do everything we can on pricing.”

Earlier this year, Steiner told lawmakers that USPS would run out of cash in early 2027, if it kept meeting all of its financial obligations. But the agency now expects to avoid a cash crisis until about 2031 by suspending its contributions to one of its employee retirement plans. USPS also put new restrictions on nonessential spending to avoid running out of cash sooner than expected.

Steiner stressed that USPS is buying itself more time through emergency measures – not paying its contributions to the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) – and that Congress should not see this as an opportunity to “kick the can down the road.”

“If we do nothing now, not only are we out of money, our employees' retirement is out of money in 2031,” he said. “We had to do that to keep the doors open, but don't let that change the sense of urgency for you. Don't think that things are rosy. We are borrowing from our employees' retirement. It's what I told Congress, we're not comfortable with that. Our employees aren't comfortable with that. They shouldn't be comfortable with that.”

“I get the frustration”

Congress passed long-awaited reform legislation in April 2022 that saved USPS $107 billion in total costs. USPS warned lawmakers that it was also on the verge of running out of cash at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and received $10 billion in pandemic relief funds.

Congressional Republicans backed the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act after USPS rolled out its 10-year Delivering for America plan, championed by former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

Lawmakers and the agency’s regulator have soured on the plan, arguing that projected USPS cost-savings haven’t justified declines in on-time delivery. In June, two of Trump’s nominees to serve on the USPS Board of Governors told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that was time for the agency to come up with a new long-term plan.

“I get the frustration,” Steiner said. “We got out over our skis. We promised profitability, and you can see we didn't achieve profitability.”

At its core, the plan envisioned getting USPS to “break even” by cutting costs and boosting revenue through a reconfiguration of its postal processing facilities and transportation network. Under DFA, USPS is also running trucks less often between processing plants and post offices to transport mail, under a “Regional Transportation Optimization” (RTO) strategy.

Steiner said “it’s time to step back and take another look at” DFA, acknowledging that for some of its customers, elements of the 10-year plan have become shorthand for unreliable service.

“When they hear DFA, they think, ‘My letter didn't show up, it must be DFA.’ Whenever their letter’s late, they go, ‘RTO.’ They don't even understand what it is, but it's become sort of a catchphrase for all the problems of the Postal Service,” Steiner said. “End-to-end visibility will take the occurrences of that happening, and shrink it dramatically.”

More than a year into the job, Steiner has emphasized the need for USPS to improve on-time delivery metrics. Steiner said some elements of the DFA plan, including its overhaul of postal facilities, will result in greater efficiencies and growth in its shipping and packages business.

“The capital's been spent. It would be foolish to say let's start over,” Steiner said. “We now know how to operate the network, but we will operate it so much more efficiently when we know where every piece is at every point. And right now, we don't. We know where it is at certain points in the network, but we don't know every place, every point.”

“How do we fix it for the American public?”

As the head of USPS, Steiner holds meetings with lots of stakeholders. At times, he’s met with the president. Steiner said he’s met with Trump “a couple of times,” the first being when he interviewed with the board for the job of postmaster general. Trump also met with DeJoy and former Postmaster General Megan Brennan.

“I wouldn't say that we've had deep strategic conversations. I've given him sort of the 50,000-foot view,” Steiner said.

In his initial meeting with the president, Steiner said he also met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“Howard has been hugely helpful. I don’t have a lot of conversations with the president. I’ve had quite a few with Howard, and Howard's goal is how do we make things faster, better, cheaper for the American public,” he said.

USPS has partnered with the Census Bureau on a small-scale test of the 2030 population count.

“[Lutnick] came to me at the very beginning and said, ‘Can you guys do the Census?’ He said, ‘Look, we're sending people out to get information on the Census, and we're sending them out 10 different times, and people aren't home. You guys go by every house every day. You are the absolute logical people to do this,’ and so we started a couple pilots in that regard,” Steiner said.

As USPS looks for ways to overcome its long-term financial problems, Steiner said he’s looking for more opportunities to collaborate with other agencies.

“I don’t talk to the president, but I talk to the administration, and everybody to a person in the administration has been hugely helpful in trying to figure out how to fix this, and every single one of them goes about it by saying, ‘How do we fix it for the American public?’” he said.

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Why a smaller government isn't automatically better

Gene Lockwood-Shabat — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400

This hurricane season, FEMA, the agency responsible for coordinating the federal disaster response, is operating without a strategic plan. This predicament highlights a broader systemic shift: Washington is shrinking the federal workforce at a pace not seen in decades, even as public confidence in government sits near historic lows.

The 2026 Harvard Youth Poll found just 15% of young Americans trust the federal government, the lowest mark in the poll's history.

The Pew Research Center’s most recent survey found a similar low, 17%, among the general public.

Meanwhile, GAO's workforce data shows the civilian workforce contracted by more than 250,000 employees across 22 major federal agencies between December 2024 and January 2026, an 11% overall decline.

The question for government leaders isn't whether government can become smaller. (It can, and it has.) The question is whether it can become smaller while operating better.

History offers a precedent. The National Performance Review under the Clinton administration pursued a similar drawdown in the 1990s, calling for the elimination of 252,000 federal positions by 1999—a target Congress later increased to 272,900. Over that period, public trust in government also recovered according to Pew’s survey from the low levels of the mid-1990s, rising from the low 20s in 1994 to the 40s in 2000. While broader political and economic factors influenced that rise, including a strong economy and a budget surplus, the approach of the 1990s offers three lessons for government reform today that hold up regardless of politics.

Target work processes, not just headcount

The National Performance Review in the 1990s went beyond standard personnel cuts to focus on structural efficiency. Working with a Republican Congress, the Clinton administration cut red tape and consolidated overlapping functions, concentrating reductions in management and internal review layers rather than front-line service positions.

At the IRS today, reductions are outpacing operational redesign, and the service data shows it. The agency lost approximately 17,000 employees in 2025, or about 17% of its workforce, through deferred resignation and early-retirement programs. In July 2026, GAO reported that reduced staffing contributed to longer wait times, fewer calls answered, and delays in processing paper returns. Notably, IRS customer service representatives answered about two million fewer calls, while average wait times nearly tripled, from three minutes to eight.

At the Department of the Interior, GAO’s review of the Bureau of Indian Affairs found an 11% net workforce decline between January and July 2025, with some regional offices losing close to a third of their staff. GAO reported that agency officials said the reductions had resulted in a loss of experienced leadership and placed additional strain on short-staffed offices, while Tribal leaders reported impaired service delivery and concerns that the agency lacked adequate staff to carry out its responsibilities.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, GAO reported that the agency cut its contracting staff by about 15% between April and November 2025. VA obligated more than $78 billion in contracts in Fiscal Year 2025 and has remained on GAO’s High-Risk List for acquisition management since 2019, with 23 prior GAO recommendations still open as of January 2026. GAO’s review underscores the importance of strategic workforce planning, employee involvement, and clear mechanisms for monitoring whether reorganizations are achieving their intended results. As of February 2026, VA had not yet developed a full plan to address the workforce challenges affecting its acquisition management.

Three agencies, three different missions, but the same underlying lesson: a smaller workforce requires a deliberate redesign of how the work gets done.

Empower front-line staff to redesign work and implement AI

The 1990s reforms gave federal employees a direct role in identifying outdated rules and inefficient ways of doing their jobs. The same principle should apply today. AI can help eliminate routine administrative work, but agency leaders shouldn't leave decisions about how to use it solely to vendors or headquarters. The employees who process claims, manage grants and answer calls often know best where time and effort are being wasted. They should help identify and redesign those processes before agencies automate them.

VA also offers a working example done well. At a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing in April, VA officials testified that the average time to complete a disability claim had fallen 42%, to 81 days, while its 12-month issue-based accuracy rate reached 94%, the highest in two years. VA attributed the gains to increased productivity and a whole-lifecycle approach to claims processing that included AI and automation. The lesson isn't that technology replaces the workforce. It's that government can use technology to take routine work off employees' plates, improve productivity and let them focus on the decisions that require human judgment.

Evaluate success by public experience metrics

The 1990s reinvention framework measured success against concrete customer-service standards, an approach later reinforced by statutory reporting requirements under the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 and the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010. Agency effectiveness should continue to be judged by service delivery outcomes, such as call resolution rates, benefit processing speeds, and permit approval timelines.

Reducing headcount is a fiscal mechanism. Government reform is a management discipline. To ensure workforce contractions lead to better performance, not worse, agency leaders need honest answers to three questions:

Are workflows being streamlined, or are essential staff simply being removed?
Are front-line employees empowered to use tools like AI to redesign daily operations?
Can the agency demonstrate faster, more accurate service through metrics the public can see?

Shrinking the federal workforce doesn't automatically destroy public trust. But downsizing without operational redesign puts service performance at risk. The test of modern public administration is whether a smaller government is also a measurably better one. With the next crisis always on the horizon, we cannot afford to wait to find out.

Gene Lockwood-Shabat is a former senior federal executive with nearly three decades of public service across five federal agencies. From 2022 to 2025 he served as associate deputy assistant secretary for Planning and Performance Management at the Department of Veterans Affairs and VA’s Performance Improvement Officer.

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Data from Labor employees seeking disability accommodations impacted by 'internal incident'

Jory Heckman — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:01:25 -0400

The Labor Department is informing employees who requested reasonable accommodations for a disability or medical condition that some of their personal health information was improperly shared outside of the department’s network.

In a notice sent last week, Naomi Berry-Perez, director of the department’s Civil Rights Center, told employees seeking reasonable accommodations about an “incident that may have affected the privacy of some of your information.”

According to the notice, shared with Government Executive by impacted individuals, DOL learned in an “internal incident report” on July 22 that a single email containing a spreadsheet of personally identifiable information related to employees' RA requests was sent to “one individual's personal email address outside of the DOL domain.”

“The individual had authorized access to the information in the performance of their DOL duties. However, the individual did not have the authority to send the information to a personal email address,” Berry-Perez wrote.

She told employees that, 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.

“DOL is currently assessing the scope and impact of these related incidents. DOL is engaging in remediation activities to recover and destroy all the information involved,” Berry-Perez wrote. The department, she added, is also “reviewing and considering current and new measures that may be necessary to safeguard your information.”

It’s not entirely clear how many DOL employees received these notices or are impacted by the incident. Labor Department employees recently told Government Executive that the department is facing a backlog of hundreds of RA requests. Several reported waiting months or, in some cases, a year or longer for the department to process their requests.

“We have been contacted by about 80 people in an hour,” a union official employee said about the notification letters. "Essentially everyone who has applied for an RA.”

The Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“If DOL determines that additional categories of PII/PHI left the DOL domain, verifies additional incidents where your information has been disclosed, or identifies additional recommended steps that may safeguard your information, additional notifications will be provided,” Berry-Perez wrote.

She told employees that the department “has identified all of the information that was involved in the incident,” which includes employees’ first and last names, duty location, work email address, job title, supervisor name and email address, pay grade and series.

The spreadsheet sent to a personal email address also included applicants' PHI, which in this case included “categories of functional limitations that are the basis for the reasonable accommodation request.” Functional limitations listed on the spreadsheet included whether employees had any of the following conditions:

• Dexterity/mobility issues

• Low vision/blindness

• Physical disability

• Deafness/hard of hearing

• Mental health

• Cognitive learning disability

• Chronic health condition

• Pregnancy

“No Social Security Numbers (SSNs), dates of birth (DOBs), more specific medical diagnoses beyond the above-listed functional limitations, medical documents, or additional financial information were included in this spreadsheet,” Berry-Perez wrote.

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Pushed out by the Trump administration, these ex-feds want to make agency firings simpler and fairer

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:59:00 -0400

After being pushed out of their jobs last year by the Trump administration, Maureen Klovers and April Mohr Harding co-founded We the Doers, an organization that aims to take the expertise of former civil servants and use it to improve government operations.

Because she had been in a new Senior Executive Service position for less than a year, Klovers was briefly fired as a result of the mass removals of newly hired or promoted agency staffers in their probationary periods. Ultimately, however, she decided to leave government service through the deferred resignation program rather than be reassigned to a new location as part of the Agriculture Department’s reorganization initiative.

Similarly, Harding, who was a senior official at the IRS, participated in DRP after being told that her position was slated to be eliminated as part of workforce reductions.

In the midst of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the procedures for removing agency staffers, which critics contend is chipping away at federal employees’ due process rights, We the Doers on Thursday issued a report on federal firing reform. Klovers and Harding argue that their recommendations would make it easier to terminate an underperforming employee for cause while still preserving civil service job protections.

“[Firing] is one of those very polarizing things — and our approach to this, as with all of our work — is really to bring the lived experience of people who have moved through the actual process into the conversation and to pretty aggressively pursue a common sense set of solutions that is not partisan and that is based on the things that we can all agree on — which is if someone's not in the right job, there should be a way to move them on or move them out,” Harding said. “And if that happens, it should be as quick and painless as possible for all parties involved.”

For its report, We the Doers in the spring convened 10 former or current federal managers who addressed an employee performance or conduct issue as a first- or second-level supervisor. Across a dozen cases that these individuals were directly involved in, it took an average of 19 months between when the manager initiated the removal process and when the employee resigned, retired, transferred to another agency or was fired.

Klovers and Harding also consulted with federal HR officials and a former Democratic and Republican member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which adjudicates federal employee appeals concerning violations of merit principles. We the Doers is financially supported by the Fund for Constitutional Government nonprofit.

Harding said that their "most high-impact" recommendation is to establish a standard, governmentwide removal process. She argued that the federal firing process seems simple on paper, but that it is complicated by agency-specific policy and possible additional requirements in union collective bargaining agreements.

“This is an example of a much broader issue in the sort of breakdown between theory and practice in workforce management. The process as documented at different levels is pretty straightforward and pretty clear. But then it immediately exponentially grows because there is so much variation,” she said. “That's a big part of why [the removal process] feels opaque and confusing to people. Because you can do it in one place and then do it in another place — or do it in the same place with different people supporting you — and have a different experience. If we don't clean that up, then the rest of the reforms won't be effective.”

Klovers shared, for example, that she had to discipline an employee who wasn’t showing up for work. An HR official told her that before she could issue a written reprimand she needed to engage in informal counseling. (i.e. “Just tell [the employee] you have to show up for work when you're scheduled.”) In contrast, other feds who We the Doers interviewed said their agency mandates an automatic written reprimand when a worker is AWOL.

Klovers and Harding also recommended that lawmakers “consolidate all post-removal appeals and investigative processes for federal employees into a new, strengthened, non-political single adjudicatory body.”

Currently, feds can appeal a removal decision to the MSPB, the Office of Special Counsel (which specializes in whistleblower cases and can act as a prosecutor before the MSPB) as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (which has jurisdiction over claims of discrimination in the public and private sectors).

An agency attorney who We the Doers interviewed said that they handled a case that took a decade to resolve because the employee “bounced back and forth” among those three agencies.

“At the end of those 10 years, none of the witnesses were available because they died, moved or other things had happened, and so the agency ended up having to settle with the employee because after 10 years they didn't have a case because they had no witnesses,” Klovers said. “That's an extreme example, but it's an example of why it's such a problem that there are three different bodies an employee can go to.”

The duo acknowledged that a challenge to establishing such an agency is a recent Supreme Court decision that permitted the president to fire without cause members of bipartisan boards, such as the MSPB.

“We think it's critical to get buy-in from both sides of the aisle and to have a fair process to have an adjudicatory body that is truly independent,” Klovers said.

Some of We the Doers’ other recommendations include:

Requiring agencies to track how long it takes to remove employees, or “time to fire.”
Mandating agencies to request agency-funded second medical opinions for most Family and Medical Leave Act or reasonable accommodation requests from employees on an active performance improvement plan. Based on their interviews, Klovers and Harding found that staffers can take advantage of these processes to delay removal or use a denial as grounds for a complaint.
Assessing supervisors’ ability to address “performance and conduct issues in a professional, expeditious manner.” The duo noted that OPM in June similarly required performance plans to include a section regarding how “timely and efficiently” supervisors address “poor and mediocre performance” of employees they oversee.

Since the start of Trump’s second administration, OPM has issued rules to grant itself the ability to fire government employees for post-appointment conduct (which previously only applied to job applicants), take over adjudication of appeals for reduction-in-force decisions from MSPB and overhaul federal worker discipline.

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GSA's $13 billion fraud claim relies on cases predating task force

Nick Wakeman — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The General Services Administration claims it has uncovered more than $13 billion in suspected fraud by federal contractors since launching its anti-fraud task force in March.

The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is using governmentwide contract data, public reporting, and inspector general enforcement information to uncover the fraud, GSA said in its announcement.

“Let this serve as a warning to any bad actors thinking of stealing from the federal government: we will catch you, we will work with law enforcement to ensure your arrest, and we will do everything in our power to help recover every dollar you stole,” said GSA Administrator Edward C. Forst.

The GSA announcement doesn’t offer examples of the fraud but links off to a Breitbart News article that cites examples the organization says GSA provided it.

But the examples Breitbart cites predate the launch of the fraud task force and at least one case predates the Trump administration.

The alleged fraud of the cases adds up to about $117 million, and the companies paid $29 million to settle the allegations.

GSA did not respond to a request to confirm the Breitbart story or provide information on the number of fraud cases it has referred to the Justice Department.

While not actually uncovered by the fraud task force, the allegations at the three companies cited by Breitbart are egregious.

Sierra Nevada Corp. agreed to pay $7.75 million to settle False Claims Act allegations because it hired a consultant, Michael Henry, while he was still employed by the Defense Department’s Joint Staff/J6.

He formed a business with another, unnamed Sierra Nevada employee, but took that person’s name off the business to hide any connection, according to Henry’s 2025 plea agreement. DOJ indicted Henry in 2024 of “acts affecting a personal financial interest,” the court document states.

Henry helped the company win three contracts with DOD. Breitbart reports that Sierra Nevada allegedly committed $44 million in suspected fraud.

Sierra Nevada’s settlement with the Justice Department was announced last month. DOJ said the company “knowingly made, or knowingly caused to be made, material false statements, material false certifications, and material omissions” involving organizational conflicts of interest.

According to court records, Sierra Nevada didn’t put any OCI mitigation practices in place when it hired Henry.

The agreement with DOJ settles the allegations but is not a finding of civil liability, according to the Justice Department.

The second case Breitbart cited involves two companies and their senior executives. Broadway Electric and Cornerstone Contracting created a scheme to win contracts reserved for service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses as well as other small businesses. Cornerstone is a subsidiary of Broadway Electric.

Broadway and Cornerstone were not qualified to bid on the contracts, as they were not service-disabled small businesses.

The Justice Department said the companies and their senior executives, John Oehler and Christian Blake, would enlist a SDVOSB to be the prime. While Broadway and Cornerstone did the work of preparing bids, securing bonding, and performing most of the work, they would pay the small business a fixed fee of between 1 and 3%, according to the settlement.

Part of the $21.3 million settlement will go to two whistleblowers, who will share $3.7 million.

The companies ran their scheme from 2019 to March 2025. The companies and the executives “admit, acknowledge, and accept responsibility” for their actions, according to DOJ.

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Politicizing government investments hurts all of us

Jason Walsh — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The federal government has a fundamental responsibility to spend tax dollars in the best interest of taxpayers. This should not be a controversial stance.

And yet, the Trump administration is attempting to politicize the allocation of federal funds. Nestled into a massive new rule proposed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is a revision of Section 200.205 in the Uniform Guidance (UG) that would require political appointees to review and approve any awarding of federal funds. The revision would upend longstanding processes for how federal funds are awarded and would impact all federal agencies that award funding. For example, under the current UG, the Labor Department uses a peer review process in award decisions. That process is managed by a career civil service grant officer. A review board awards points based on the funding announcement criteria for awards and the grant officer has final say on award determinations. This ensures that grant decisions are merit-based rather than politically motivated.

The Section 200.205 revision in the proposed rule would still allow most of this process, but in the end, a political appointee would have final say based on subjective criteria, like “anti-American values” or the “president's policy priorities.” Perhaps even more disturbing, the OMB rule attaches new ideological conditions on funds in an effort to ensure they don’t promote diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and it would allow federal agencies to exclude specific types of nonprofit organizations from eligibility before an application is even opened. This effectively removes any fair competitive environment where potential applicants are aware of the rules prior to applying.

This kind of politically motivated funding decision-making can be disastrous. For example, under the second Trump administration’s Agriculture Department policies overseeing wildfire funding require states to yield to the administration on unrelated efforts, including deportation and eliminating DEI programs. Because of that, $15 million in wildfire-prevention grants for an area in Washington state have been long delayed. That area was impacted by wildfires earlier this month and 65,000 residents had to be evacuated. As of Aug. 8, those funds were still on hold. More than 900 homes, businesses and buildings have been destroyed.

The award of congressionally mandated funds should not be tied to any president’s whims. Doing so, by design, deprioritizes the public good.

This has long been well understood and is why, historically and under current guidance, there is a firewall that allows apolitical career staffers to make merit-based award decisions without the participation of political appointees. I experienced this myself as an Obama administration appointee at the Energy Department. I ran an office that regularly made competitive grant awards, but I didn’t touch the selection process, which was conducted by career staff. Even as an administration appointee, I was kept separate from the selection process because the appearance of political favoritism had to be avoided to maintain the integrity of the process.

The bottom line: Taxpayers will not benefit from a system under which grants are awarded based on who curries the most favor with the president. Politicizing the grantmaking process by adding arbitrary requirements to fulfill presidential priorities and enabling political appointees to block projects they deem distasteful will hold back our ability to fund the projects our nation needs to maintain its research, development and deployment edge in a rapidly shifting economy.

We’ve already seen what the Trump administration’s attempts to politicize federal grant funding look like. A federal court ruled that the Trump administration acted unconstitutionally when the Energy Department canceled billions of dollars in grants for clean energy projects that were awarded in states that didn’t vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. This is not speculation. The Trump administration admitted to basing the cancellation decisions solely on whether projects were based in blue states. With these terminations, Trump used the federal government to sacrifice jobs and investment for partisanship. The courts correctly interpreted this as an assault on the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law. Now OMB is attempting to institutionalize this same approach to federal funding.

The harm caused by this proposed rule would stretch far beyond the projects targeted. It could make it less likely that high-quality applicants would compete for federal grants and loans, undermine trust in federal contracts, jeopardize private investment and weaken U.S. competitiveness. If private-sector and nongovernmental leaders cannot trust the impartiality and stability of government decisions and commitments, they may be less likely to include partnerships with the federal government in their business and innovation strategies. This could drive talent, capital and partnerships toward countries with more stable, apolitical funding environments, putting U.S. leadership in energy, science and technology at risk. It weakens the government’s ability to partner with companies to invest in strategic sectors, support vital domestic industries and ensure next-generation technologies scale in the United States, ironically, goals the Trump administration claims to support.

Jason Walsh is executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance. Walsh previously served in the Obama administration, as the director of the Office of Strategic Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and as a senior policy advisor in the White House Domestic Policy Council, where he led the Obama administration’s efforts to align and scale up federal investments in workers and communities impacted by the shift away from coal in the power sector.

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Agencies backfilled 20,600 employees who left government under the deferred resignation programs, analysis finds

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:48:43 -0400

As the Trump administration slashed the civil service last year by more than 300,000 employees, about 41% of the separations were a result of the deferred resignation program. Under the initiative, participating workers were generally placed on paid leave for several months through the end of September 2025 when their federal service officially ended.

In an Aug. 20 analysis, however, the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit found that many agencies appear to have backfilled impacted positions. Specifically, researchers reported that, by June 2026, nearly 20,600 employees “had been hired in the same agency subcomponents and occupational series as prior DRP separations.”

“Many employees were paid to resign only to be replaced just months later, often at a more junior level,” the Partnership asserted.

For example, 155 staffers in the “consumer safety inspection” occupational series left government under the DRP, according to Office of Personnel Management federal workforce data, but an equal number of individuals were then hired into jobs in that same series.

OPM Director Scott Kupor criticized the analysis in a Tuesday blog post, arguing the job classifications that researchers used are too broad to serve as a proxy for backfills. While he disputed the Partnership’s methodology, he also pointed out that it shows only around 15% of individuals who separated under DRP were replaced.

“That’s pretty good for a program that was rolled out government-wide,” he wrote. “Simply put, 85% of the reductions were real and lasting.”

The Partnership analysis also found that new hires in the backfilled positions came in at an average of roughly 1.4 General Schedule grades below the people they replaced. In particular, researchers flagged that the average GS grade for new employees in the FBI’s “criminal investigation” series was 3.1 grades lower than the average grade among employees at the law enforcement agency who left under DRP.

In his blog, Kupor contended that the federal government needs to address the underrepresentation of early-career employees at agencies.

“We believe that organizations can also benefit from bringing in new talent — even with lesser experience — and finding ways to train and promote them to become future leaders,” he wrote. “We don’t have a long-term sustainable organization without developing new talent.”

Government watchdogs in recent months have criticized agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, IRS and General Services Administration, for cutting staff without analyzing how doing so would impact services to the public.

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State Department board’s ability to challenge firings undercut by DOJ

Jory Heckman — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:11:02 -0400

The Trump administration is challenging the authority of an independent board to prevent the State Department from firing or disciplining Foreign Service employees who face allegations of misconduct.

The Foreign Service Grievance Board, a panel created under the 1980 Foreign Service Act, can reverse disciplinary measures and reinstate Foreign Service employees who face termination if the board deems there is insufficient evidence for the State Department to justify those actions. While the board views its role as an evidentiary check to ensure the department’s case holds up, the administration views this check as an infringement on executive power.

In a legal opinion released last Friday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel determined that the grievance board violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution because it had “unreviewable authority" over the secretary of state.

Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser wrote that although the secretary of state appoints members to the board, he cannot remove them except for cause. In most cases, the board’s decisions can be appealed to federal district courts.

“The Act violates the Appointments Clause by vesting final decisionmaking authority in the Board, rather than the presidentially accountable Secretary,” Gaiser wrote.

DOJ wrote in a press release that the Foreign Service Grievance Board may continue to hear grievances, but that the secretary of state “will retain final decision-making authority, as the Constitution requires.”

Rubio’s failure to fill board vacancies serves as a practical, albeit passive, way to achieve the administration’s goal of weakening independent oversight.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on X that the board “effectively has the power to overrule the secretary and the president on whether particular conduct — e.g. alcoholism, drug use, spousal abuse, or even espionage — warrants disciplinary consequences and, if so, what kind.”

“Under our Constitution, the President and the Secretary of State must have the final word on whether Foreign Service officers, who represent our country abroad, are subject to disciplinary consequences, including termination, for their actions,” Landau wrote.

Critics of the decision say the DOJ opinion is part of the Trump administration's goal of making it easier to fire federal employees who are not fully aligned with its policy goals.

Last summer, the State Department sent reduction in force notices to nearly 1,350 employees. Last year, the department made "fidelity" to the Trump administration’s policy goals a new criteria for promotions and career advancement within the Foreign Service.

Daniel Crowley, a partner with the law firm Crowley So LLP, noted that the Foreign Service Grievance Board serves as a vital check, determining whether the department has gathered sufficient evidence to justify disciplinary action or termination. He warned that without this independent oversight, "we’re going to have cases where they can’t prove it, and they just fire them anyway. It’s really just about the administration’s desire to fire employees for any reason."

Crowley said the Foreign Service’s "up-or-out promotional system" already holds officers to a high performance standard. While the administration frames the shift to easier terminations as a mechanism for accountability, critics argue the existing system already enforces high standards, suggesting the change is less about performance and more about removing obstacles to executive discretion.

Last month, the Office of Personnel Management finalized regulations that significantly shrink the role of the Merit System Protection Board in hearing appeals from federal employees.

Charles Carron, chairman of the Foreign Service Grievance Board, told lawmakers and the State Department in July that Rubio hasn't named anyone to serve on the board. He said the terms of its remaining members will expire on Oct. 1, and that the board “will cease to function until new members are appointed by the Secretary.”

In the board's latest annual report, Carron wrote that its inability to function “is contrary to the intent of the Congress, which established the Board as the sole, independent grievance appeals body of the Foreign Service, adjudicating grievances from the Department of State and other foreign affairs agencies within its jurisdiction.”

Carron said the board received nearly three times as many new cases in the first half of 2026 as it did for the same period the prior year. He wrote to Rubio in May, asking if he intended to make any appointments to the board, but did not yet receive a response.

“Right now, they’re at half-staff with an explosion of cases because of everything that’s happened at the State Department and across the government,” Crowley said. “They’re already pretty hamstrung, and this is just the next step.”

George Chuzi, senior counsel at the law firm Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch P.C., said the DOJ decision is just the latest in a series of legal opinions giving President Donald Trump broad authority to reshape the federal workforce.

The Supreme Court last summer allowed the Trump administration to proceed with mass layoffs. In June, the court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that the administration is free to fire members of most independent boards — with the exception of the Federal Reserve. This empowers the secretary of state to act unilaterally on these personnel decisions, reinforcing the "unreviewable authority" point made earlier.

“The Supreme Court, in the Slaughter case, has made clear that the president’s power to appoint, even with the advice and consent of the Senate, cannot be limited by Congress,” Chuzi said. “If he has the power to appoint them, even with advice and consent, for whatever reasons he wants, he can terminate them.”

Members of the Foreign Service Grievance Board serve two-year terms and can be removed by the secretary of state only “for corruption, neglect of duty, malfeasance, or demonstrated incapacity to perform his or her functions."

DOJ's Gaiser said the board in 2013 reinstated a Foreign Service member who had been terminated for downloading and viewing pornography on his government-provider computer. Crowley said that in this particular case, the employee was accused of viewing pornography at work, but the department didn't present evidence at the hearing fully supporting it claims. The department, he added, didn’t appeal the board's decision in federal court.

“That’s not a case of the grievance board saying that this person who viewed pornography at work shouldn’t be fired. It’s the grievance board saying there was no evidence that person viewed pornography at work,” he said.

The American Foreign Service Association said in a statement that the legal opinion “threatens a key safeguard of the professional, nonpartisan Foreign Service.”

“An independent review process cannot provide the same safeguards if the department whose action is being challenged ultimately has the power to overrule the decision,” AFSA said.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., said the DOJ opinion is "part of a broader effort to politicize the federal civil service, purge career public servants, and replace them with unqualified political lackeys.”

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Blanche is confirmed. Now Congress needs to hold him accountable

Stacey Young — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400

“I am not entirely satisfied where this is,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said of the vindictive prosecutions pursued by the Justice Department under Todd Blanche. “I have no doubts I will have concerns in the future.” Hours later, he voted to confirm Blanche as attorney general.

This queasy acquiescence and the verbal gymnastics needed to justify his vote echoes the reasoning given days earlier by Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, who were likewise on the fence about the confirmation. Tillis and Cornyn, both lame ducks like Cassidy, wrangled a milquetoast concession out of Blanche to feel more secure in their vote. Even then, the written order they demanded confirming the anti-weaponization fund’s cancellation did not legally bind the parties of the lawsuit, including President Trump.

That ambiguity was validated just an hour after Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony when Trump, asked whether the fund was still alive, said “that would be up to Todd Blanche.”

While Blanche has not indicated whether he will revive the fund, his loyalty to Trump is an established fact. As a top Justice Department leader, Blanche fired individuals who worked on cases disfavored by the president. He also oversaw the Weaponization Working Group, signed off on vindictive prosecutions, protected administration allies, obscured Trump’s involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s illegal conduct, and shifted thousands of agents, attorneys, and analysts away from mission-critical work to support the president’s immigration agenda and 2020 election fraud obsession.

Senators voted to confirm Blanche with full knowledge of this record; that is their prerogative. But just as important — especially for those who expressed concerns over Blanche’s deference to the White House — is their duty to hold him accountable when he steps over the line.

That starts with making it safe for whistleblowers to come forward. Over the past year and a half, traditional avenues for employees to report abuses or misconduct have been constrained. DOJ’s Office of Inspector General appears to have retreated. The Office of Professional Responsibility’s staff shrank by nearly half, DOJ fired its head last year, and the number of new investigations are at a 20-year low, even as complaints have reportedly reached record levels. The Office of Special Counsel, which investigates misconduct across the federal government, is no longer trusted to be impartial. (This is why Justice Connection worked with Protect Democracy on a guide for employees who want to disclose wrongdoing to the press — an option that can still be covered by whistleblower protection laws).

Congress has a responsibility to investigate these offices to ensure internal checks on waste, fraud, and abuse work as intended, without partisan favor, loyalty tests, or the fear that stepping forward will ruin someone’s career.

More than that, Congress itself must once again be a safe place for whistleblowers. Before this administration, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle treated whistleblowers with respect and encouraged them to come forward. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Kan., in particular, built a reputation as a champion of whistleblowers, even those reporting allegations against Republican political appointees. Yet over the last 18 months, DOJ employees who have disclosed credible claims have been smeared and derided, including by Grassley.

Blanche himself has cracked down on employees’ ability to speak out. Under his watch, the department has fired hundreds of agents, attorneys, and support staff who were assigned to work on cases disfavored by this administration or who disagreed with investigative steps in other cases. He has also issued a new policy imposing stiff penalties on employees who post anything work-related on social media. The culture of fear inside DOJ is staggering. As Justice Connection's Peter Carr told Congress, “if an agent or prosecutor thinks they’ll be fired for their cases, they are less likely to accept difficult assignments. And they might start looking more at the long-term consequences of an investigation for their careers, rather than at the facts and the law. That’s not the justice we should want for our country.”

Congress needs to start meaningfully exercising its oversight powers. Lawmakers, especially those who voted for Blanche despite their reservations, must make clear that confirmation does not equal free reign. Instead, it should be treated as the beginning of a relationship of accountability that includes taking whistleblowers seriously and bringing to light abuses reported from concerned public servants inside the department.

Stacey Young is executive director of Justice Connection, an organization that provides direct support to Justice Department employees. Young was previously a DOJ lawyer for 18 years, and ran the DOJ Gender Equality Network.

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White House space transportation policy calls for integration with air traffic control modernization

Edward Graham — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:18:58 -0400

New space transportation policy released by the Trump administration on Thursday looks to build out the infrastructure capabilities needed to rapidly increase the number of U.S.-led rocket launches in the coming years, including by tying the push with ongoing efforts to modernize the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems.

President Donald Trump’s strategy sets a goal of supporting “more than 1,000 launches and reentries” by 2030, largely by prioritizing enhanced commercial sector engagement and increasing the number of launch and entry sites across the country.

Building out this infrastructure, the policy says, will entail the Pentagon and NASA working together to “operate Federal launch and reentry ranges and facilities in a transparent manner that accommodates government and non government users.”

Other relevant agencies will also need to be involved in these discussions, the strategy adds, to develop and publish range schedules that can “maximize efficient use of range resources for commercial users” and “optimize launch capacity.”

To help facilitate more space launches in U.S. airspace, the Transportation Department — in coordination with the Pentagon and NASA — is directed to “implement a plan to integrate space launch and reentry management into airspace and traffic control modernization efforts” and “designate priority airspace for critical space launch corridors” within 180 days of the policy’s release.

Under Transportation’s leadership, the Federal Aviation Administration has been driving the administration’s effort to radically overhaul the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems.

The modernization initiative was announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in May 2025 and followed several high-profile airspace incidents, including a deadly crash between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that January.

While the project includes some brick-and-mortar upgrades at U.S. airports and related facilities, most of the effort is focused on updating outdated air traffic monitoring and communications systems.

The One Big, Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law in July 2025, allocated $12.5 billion for the modernization effort. Transportation, however, called that amount a “down payment” that December and said it would need an additional $20 billion for the initiative.

It remains to be seen what steps will be needed to integrate the administration’s strategy with the air traffic control modernization effort, and whether or not this will have any impact on the project’s timeline.

The FAA announced in December that it awarded Peraton a $1.5 billion contract to serve as the project’s prime integrator, although Politico reported on Thursday that officials within the agency were growing frustrated by the company’s management of the massive systems overhaul.

During an April event, however, Duffy said “we’re on track to have this project completed before President Trump leaves office.”

When reached for comment, Transportation directed Nextgov/FCW to a Friday press release that announced the agency’s request for public comment on where new space launch facilities should be built, as well as how it should go about setting aside “priority airspace” for future launches.

Both Transportation’s request for information and press release, however, did not include any details as to how the space transportation policy would be integrated with the agency’s air traffic control modernization project.

An FAA spokesperson similarly referenced Transportation's release and said the agency is "seeking input on how increased launch cadence can be integrated into the U.S. airspace system."

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include comment from the FAA.

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House Democrats want answers on what CISA lost in workforce cuts

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Five House Democrats are asking Congress’ investigative arm to examine how significant staffing cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have affected the government’s ability to defend federal networks and critical infrastructure.

The lawmakers are calling on the Government Accountability Office — the top congressional watchdog that audits and evaluates federal programs — to examine the impact of personnel and program reductions enacted at CISA since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, according to a letter first seen by Nextgov/FCW.

The request, addressed to acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, is led by Reps. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., and Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee. Ramirez is the top Democrat on the panel’s cybersecurity subcommittee, where Walkinshaw also serves. Reps. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., and LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., who also serve on the cyber panel, joined the request.

The lawmakers say CISA has lost nearly a third of its workforce “at precisely the moment when our adversaries are accelerating attacks against critical infrastructure,” leaving Congress without a clear picture of which capabilities were lost and whether remaining teams can keep pace with growing cyber and physical threats.

The concerns have grown during the war with Iran, as CISA and the FBI help utilities navigate cyberattacks affecting at least 12 states that some U.S. officials suspect may be tied to Tehran.

The lawmakers are asking GAO to examine how CISA’s workforce has changed over the past five years, including its size, composition, geographic distribution and reliance on contractors. They also want the watchdog to identify which programs were affected by the reductions and what consequences CISA and its industry and government partners have reported.

The letter further asks GAO to evaluate what data CISA uses to make workforce decisions and whether its human capital strategy aligns with its current and future mission needs.

“Little is known about the impact of these workforce reductions on CISA’s programs and services,” the lawmakers write, arguing it’s unclear whether the agency is positioned to replace the skills it has lost.

Nextgov/FCW has asked CISA and GAO for comment.

CISA is now attempting to rebuild parts of its workforce after layoffs, voluntary departures and other personnel actions reduced staffing from roughly 3,300 employees to about 2,200. Acting Director Nick Andersen has said the agency plans to hire about 330 people, while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said CISA may need roughly 600 additional staff and that hiring could take a year or more.

Walkinshaw previously told Nextgov/FCW that restaffing the agency would be “a very difficult thing to do,” noting that cyber personnel have seen colleagues pushed out and their work publicly criticized by administration officials.

The workforce picture has also been complicated by internal DHS transfers. CISA’s former acting director told lawmakers in February that about 70 agency employees were reassigned to other DHS offices, while just over 30 moved into CISA.

At the same time, the administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request calls for eliminating roughly 870 CISA positions, including cutting staff tied to election security, stakeholder engagement and workforce development. House appropriators have since advanced a bill that would provide CISA with about $400 million more than the White House requested and set aside $31 million for critical hires. The measure has not received a House floor vote, and the Senate has not released its version, leaving the agency’s final funding and staffing levels unsettled.

The cuts were part of the Trump administration’s broader push to shrink the federal workforce, but CISA has drawn particular scrutiny over its past election security work.

That fight dates back to Trump’s first term, when he fired CISA’s first director, Chris Krebs, after Krebs rejected Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Republicans have concurrently accused the agency of censoring conservative speech when it worked with social media platforms to flag election- and COVID-related misinformation in and around the 2020 race.

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Trump’s FDA pick faces questions about leading the agency

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:00:20 -0400

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration will face challenges securing Senate confirmation after the committee chairman in charge of that process expressed doubts.

That, however, hasn’t deterred White House officials from pressing for Dr. Heidi Overton, arguing she has the experience needed and that her policy goals align with the president's.

“As Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, Dr. Heidi Overton has spent the last year and a half coordinating an interagency policymaking process with senior officials across HHS, FDA, CDC, USDA, and other agencies to deliver on President Trump’s MAHA agenda,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Thursday.

“Dr. Overton has been integral to ensuring that the Administration’s policies are correct, consistent, and grounded in Gold Standard Science, and will play a similar role at the FDA as its next Commissioner,” Desai added. “The White House looks forward to her swift confirmation by the Senate.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., wrote in a social media post on Wednesday that while he respects Overton’s “experience as a physician,” he isn’t convinced she’s the right person to lead the FDA, highlighting her role in a Health and Human Services Department executive order that would weaken vaccine requirements.

“Her lack of managerial experience does not prepare her well for leading a large organization that is already dealing with staffing and morale issues,” Cassidy wrote. “Additionally, Dr. Overton’s active role in last week’s nonsensical vaccine executive order calls into question her commitment to standing up for sound science and protecting children’s health. That alone is almost disqualifying.”

Cassidy, as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has control over whether to schedule a confirmation hearing or a committee vote on Overton’s nomination.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Cassidy was open to changing his mind on Overton’s nomination. He expressed doubts about HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Erica Schwartz before voting to confirm both of those nominees.

But the White House did have to withdraw surgeon general nominee Dr. Casey Means after it became clear she didn’t have the votes to advance out of committee. And Trump had to rescind Janette Nesheiwat’s nomination for surgeon general.

The president wrote in a social media post on Wednesday that he would nominate Overton “to ensure that the U.S. remains the WORLD LEADER for Scientific Discovery and CURES.”

“Dr. Overton was a prestigious White House Fellow in my First Term, is a Board-Certified Physician in Public Health and General Preventive Medicine, and holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Investigations from the Johns Hopkins University,” he wrote. “She is SMART and RESPECTED by all! Dr. Heidi will work with Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Oz to RAPIDLY deliver on my priorities of FASTER Cures, INCREASED American Innovation, MAJOR Clinical Trial Reforms, LOWER Drug Prices, and even more MAHA WINS!”

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GSA looks to ‘meaningfully increase’ hiring to replenish its workforce

Jory Heckman — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:29:48 -0400

The General Services Administration, the federal government’s landlord, is looking to increase its hiring after going through significant staffing cuts last year.

GSA’s Public Buildings Service told staff in an internal notice last week that a total of 142 new vacancies have been posted to USAJobs, “reflecting our continued growth and need for talented individuals.” According to the notice obtained by Government Executive, PBS is hiring a mix of construction managers, lease contracting officers and building managers.

GSA Administrator Ed Forst told office heads in a separate email that “we need to meaningfully increase our hiring in certain disciplines and decisively attract the best talent that will support GSA as we continue to grow as an agency.”

“Recruiting the right people is one of the most important things we will do to strengthen our agency. The people we bring in will shape our capacity, our performance, and our ability to power the federal government for today and our future,” Forst wrote.

An agency official familiar with the matter told Government Executive that 142 vacancies “constitutes just one week's worth of hiring news,” and that "GSA has a few hundred approved hiring opportunities, which will include external hires and internal merit promotions.”

“Many positions have already been filled, and many more opportunities are in the offer or awaiting onboarding stage as GSA strategically invests to meet its evolving mission needs,” the official said.

Current and former agency officials said significant hiring is needed at PBS to help it recover from last year’s deep staffing cuts. Since the start of the second Trump administration, PBS has cut its total workforce by more than 2,500 employees through a combination of layoffs, attrition and voluntary separation incentives.

PBS cut its workforce by 45% between September 2024 and November 2025, according to a report in April from the Government Accountability Office. Agency officials told GAO that PBS didn’t conduct workforce planning before the staffing cuts.

In the early days of the Trump administration, Department of Government Efficiency officials embedded at GSA pushed for dramatic reductions in government office space, posting lease terminations on its online “Wall of Receipts.” The DOGE website shows that 264 leases were eliminated, roughly a third of its earlier goal.

PBS employees said the agency’s staffing cuts have hampered its goal of offloading underutilized office space. A PBS employee said the agency lost nearly half of its workforce “but retained 100% of the work.”

“Everything was being slow-rolled while they tried to terminate all soft-term leases,” the employee said. “Fast-forward to today, where we aren’t just sprinting, we are racing. Workloads have doubled for just about everyone. The workforce remaining is feeling the strain.”

GSA officials told GAO that about a third of the staff responsible for processing disposals of GSA-owned properties left the agency, “creating uncertainty on whether properties were properly vetted and approved to begin the process.”

The agency, which manages 40% of the federal government’s office space, is accelerating plans to offload underutilized buildings and those falling into disrepair as part of a $50 billion maintenance backlog. Forst told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee in May that half of GSA’s buildings portfolio is in “fair” or “poor” condition.

Forst and the heads of more than 20 federal departments and agencies asked Congress to give GSA full access to the Federal Buildings Fund, a pot of money that includes all rent payments GSA receives from its tenant agencies.

Over the past 15 years, Congress has skimmed about $1 billion annually from the Federal Buildings Fund to cover other expenses. Adjusted for inflation, Forst said that Congress has “looted” about $22 billion from the fund that would have otherwise gone to repairing and maintaining federal buildings.

The Public Buildings Reform Board, created by Congress under the 2016 Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act (FASTA) to help GSA identify properties it should offload from its portfolio, said congressional appropriations won’t address GSA’s maintenance backlog without a “radical reduction” of its real estate portfolio.

The Trump administration, with GSA's assistance, is in the process of selling or consolidating headquarters buildings used by several agencies in the Washington, D.C. area. So far, it has announced plans to sell headquarters buildings for the Agriculture Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Education Department plans to vacate its headquarters and hand it over to the Energy Department. The PBRB recommends selling the current Energy Department headquarters.

Education employees under this plan would relocate to leased space that previously held staff for the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development.

The FBI is moving out of its headquarters building and relocating to the Ronald Reagan Building, just a few blocks away, which already provides office space for several other agencies. This week, a federal judge granted a permanent injunction blocking those plans.

GSA is also embarking on plans to renovate its own headquarters. Once those renovations are completed in December 2028, the building will also serve as OPM’s headquarters.

In the early days of the Trump administration, GSA officials pushed for deeper cuts to the PBS workforce, at one point seeking a 63% reduction in its workforce, which would have eliminated more than 3,500 total positions. But more recently, under new leadership, GSA has been taking steps to reverse those workforce cuts.

PBS told staff in April that it’s looking to hire 400 employees over the next six months. Last fall, the agency offered another 400 laid-off employees the opportunity to come back to their jobs.

Another PBS employee told Government Executive that “we don’t have enough people.”

“They realize they let go of too many people and were inundated, because the kids at DOGE didn’t know what they were doing,” the employee said.

A third PBS employee said “the cuts really had a brain drain effect that will take a decade to recover from.” A fourth employee said the agency’s hiring efforts were “replacements for all the firings.”

“It does appear that GSA is doing some serious hiring to rebuild after last year,” a fifth PBS employee said.

Tenant agency officials interviewed by GAO “voiced ongoing concern” about PBS’s capacity. One of its tenants, the Judicial Conference of the U.S., the national policymaking body for federal courts, is asking for control of courthouse property management.

While the Judicial Conference of the U.S. has held this perspective for decades, the organization told Congress that the issue has worsened since the Trump administration cut the staff at the federal government’s real estate agency.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sens. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. and John Boozman, R-Ark, introduced a bill last month that would give the federal judiciary authority to manage courthouse facilities in 10 judicial districts.

“Managing the federal government’s real estate portfolio is an enormous undertaking, and too often our courthouses are at the bottom of the priority list for maintenance, repairs, and upgrades,” Cramer said in a statement.

GSA’s Forst told the Washington Reporter that the Judicial Space and Facilities Management Effectiveness Act was “misguided,” and cited several GAO reports as evidence that the federal courts system is not prepared to manage its own facilities.

“The Judiciary’s core mission is to deliver justice — not to manage buildings,” he said.

A former PBS employee who received a RIF notice last year said the agency’s hiring push was “bittersweet” news. He said he considers himself “lucky for having landed a great new job” after the RIF, but his "former colleagues that are left need help with a relentless workload and there is so much to be done.”

“It was all just so random and terribly senseless, obviously,” he said about last year’s sweeping RIFs. “Honestly, I would never go back to [federal] employment under this administration and don’t envy anyone that is still there now. It’s just a real mixed bag of feelings.”

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New CDC chief looks to rebuild a workforce fearful of retaliation

Jory Heckman — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:13:20 -0400

The new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says she will focus on restoring trust with a workforce spread thin by staffing cuts and public health challenges.

CDC Director Erica Schwartz told staff at an all-hands meeting on Wednesday that she will “speak truth to power,” and ensure CDC employees can offer candid feedback on policy matters without fear of retaliation.

“I will listen to you. I will respect your expertise, and I will support you as you carry out this mission. I want CDC to be a place where an employee can respectfully say, ‘But ma'am, the evidence points in another direction,’ and know that your concern will be heard," Schwartz said, according to a transcript obtained by Government Executive. "Scientific integrity requires us to make room for respectful disagreement.”

Schwartz is the CDC’s first permanent leader in a year. The last permanent CDC director, Susan Monarez, was fired last summer, less than a month on the job, following conflicts with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Schwartz acknowledged Monarez’s firing, but told staff “there is no retribution for honest thought and honest conversation” under her leadership.

“I want you to feel psychologically safe. I do not want you to feel like you're in an environment where retribution will rain down upon you. That is not how I lead as a leader. And I feel very comfortable making sure that I can represent the CDC to our leadership and making sure that the secretary understands our point of view,” she said.

Schwartz said the CDC has been in a “a period of significant uncertainty,” and is looking to rebuild trust in the agency after more than a year of upheaval. The CDC recently commemorated the one-year anniversary of a shooting at its headquarters campus. On Aug. 8, 2025, a gunman fired more than 180 shots at the CDC headquarters, wanting to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines.

In recent months, CDC has responded to outbreaks of Ebola and hantavirus abroad, as well as cyclospora and measles outbreaks in the United States. It also stood up an emergency operations center for the FIFA World Cup.

Schwartz said she will work with CDC leadership to address the agency’s staffing gaps. The CDC has lost about a quarter of its workforce through layoffs and voluntary separation incentives. CDC officials told employees last month that a “strategic planning process” is underway to identify its staffing gaps and where hiring is most urgently needed.

“What are the critical areas that if we don't get these filled, we will fail in our mission for the American people? That information I will take back, and I will be that advocate for the CDC,” Schwartz said.

Among her concerns, Schwartz cited recent reporting from the Associated Press on “zombie programs” at the CDC that have been funded by Congress, but lack the staff to operate.

“The people that are here ... they're burning out, they're exhausted. And they're questioning, ‘Is this going to be the new normal?’ Well, the good news is, I'm here, I'm week one of being here, and now I can certainly be able to advocate for the CDC," she said.

A retired U.S. Public Health Services Commissioned Corps rear admiral, Schwartz previously served as the Coast Guard’s chief medical officer and deputy surgeon general.

The Trump administration has announced changes to the federal childhood immunization schedule that raise alarms among public health experts. Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order reducing the number of recommended childhood vaccines. Schwartz said she will try to earn back trust with vaccine skeptics during her tenure.

“There are a lot of Americans who have vaccine hesitancy, and they feel that the CDC has been somewhat paternalistic when it came to vaccines, and so they feel that the CDC may not be speaking for them. I do think we have to be honest as an agency to say, 'Are we an agency for just those Americans that believe in vaccines, or are we an agency for all Americans and helping those Americans that have vaccine hesitancy understand why vaccines are so safe and effective?'” she said.

CDC employees reiterated concerns about staffing shortages and fear of retaliation.

“Thank you for acknowledging that we are tired, because we are,” one CDC employee said during the Q&A. “We are at a significant reduction in our employees. And that makes it really hard on the rest of us to pick up the slack, because the work doesn't change. We were already under-resourced and understaffed in public health, as you know, and now it's even worse.”

Another CDC employee told Schwartz that “fear of retribution” is a common concern among staff.

“We've been shot at. We see multiple outbreaks right now,” the employee said. “We also know what happened to the previous director. And I think that there is a general fear of speaking [about] what's actually happening.”

A third employee asked if former employees who received reduction in force notices would have an opportunity to rejoin the agency.

“We have so many vacancies, and we had these wonderful staff that were not separated due to performance. They were separated because of the way the RIF was done. Many of them are very eager to come back,” the third employee said.

Schwartz and other senior CDC leaders said they would look into opportunities for RIF’d employees to come back.

Yolanda Jacobs, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, which represents CDC employees, previously told reporters that CDC has made very little progress on hiring, and that recently laid-off employees looking to rejoin the agency haven’t made it far in the hiring process.

Kennedy recently told lawmakers that HHS is looking to hire 12,000 employees after going through widespread layoffs last year.

“Not only have we not had any excessive amounts of new hires, or even any really significant hiring of CDC employees, but we've also had ignoring and stalling when it comes to those employees that had been RIF'd, who were supposed to have priority for some of those jobs as the rehiring starts," Jacobs said. "Those individuals are not seeing any action as far as hiring goes. Those who have even applied have been told that they did not meet the qualifications for their own jobs, the jobs that they previously had.”

Jacobs, however, added that "a new CDC director has an opportunity to turn the tide."

Sean Michael Newhouse contributed to this report.

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