Government Executive - Workforce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FAA administrator defends withholding part of ATC pay raise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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OPM uses conservative influencers on college tour to recruit young workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Judge halts ‘favorite EO’ question on federal job applications

Erich Wagner — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:39:45 -0400

A federal judge in Massachusetts issued a decision Friday halting federal agencies from asking job applicants about their favorite Trump administration initiative, concluding the essay question likely violated jobseekers’ First Amendment rights.

The case dates back to the Office of Personnel Management’s issuance of the Merit Hiring Plan, which asserted greater engagement in the hiring process by political appointees and introduced four essay questions to most federal job applications, in May 2025. The third question asked jobseekers how they would advance the president’s policies and asked for an example of an executive order or initiative “significant to” them.

In U.S. District Judge George O’Toole’s long-awaited ruling, he focused on a sworn declaration of a federal employee and member of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of three unions suing to block the question’s deployment, who said she felt compelled to provide an answer contrary to her personal views for fear that not answering—or answering honestly—would “hurt her application.”

“The plain language of Question Three calls for the applicant’s personal views on a political topic, and directly links that personal view to the duties of the desired civil service job,” O’Toole wrote. “Indeed, the defendants implicitly recognize the reasonableness of such an interpretation insofar as the [Merit Hiring Plan] guidance states that answers to Question Three and the other free-form essay questions should not be used as ‘an ideological litmus test.’ Notably, as far as the court can discern from the present record, the limitation stated in the MHP guidance does not appear in the text of Question Three as it is presented to civil service applicants.”

Attorneys for the Trump administration had sought to argue that O’Toole lacked jurisdiction to hear the case; instead, the unions or their members should have exhausted administrative processes before either the Federal Labor Relations Authority or the Merit Systems Protection Board, then appeal those decisions in federal circuit court.

But the judge said the unions’ constitutional claims were “wholly collateral” to those review schemes, and noted that the alleged First Amendment violations occurred regardless of the outcome of a hiring decision.

“[The unions] do not, however, seek to remedy an identified personnel decision against any one of their members,” O’Toole wrote. “Put another way, there is no ‘personnel practice’ at issue. In fact, under the plaintiffs’ theory, even a civil service employee who receives a promotion would suffer a constitutionally based injury alleged if faced with Question Three when completing the relevant application.”

O’Toole issued a stay in the case, requiring agencies to cease asking applicants for every federal job GS-5 and above the favorite EO question at least until the conclusion of litigation. But he found that he could not issue a preliminary injunction blocking agencies from considering answers to the question that they had already received from job applicants, for the same reason.

“The requested injunction would thus effectively restrain the defendants’ conduct when reaching hiring decisions in individual cases,” he wrote. “The plaintiffs, however, repeatedly emphasize that this dispute does not concern individual personnel decisions involving their members. Indeed, the plaintiffs contend that the challenged question causes their members’ constitutional injuries regardless of any ensuing personnel decision. Accordingly, the requested injunction would not redress the injuries alleged.”

Union leaders, alongside Democracy Forward, which helped represent them alongside Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP in the case, applauded Friday’s decision.

“Requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service, and we are pleased the judge has put an immediate stop to the administration’s loyalty question,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley. “Federal employees should be hired based solely on their ability to perform the job—not their allegiance to any particular administration.”

“For more than a century, civil servants have been hired based on their merits, not based on allegiance to a partisan political agenda,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward. “Today’s decision—stopping the Trump-Vance administration’s required loyalty question for public servants—reaffirms the importance of a nonpartisan civilian workforce that serves the American people.”

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How 'Star Trek' inspired generations of NASA scientists and astronauts

Deana L. Weibel, The Conversation — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Star Trek” began as a television series but grew into a cultural phenomenon.

When it premiered in 1966, no one could have predicted that it would lead to more than a dozen spinoff shows, more than a dozen movies and one of the most enduring fandoms in popular culture.

“Star Trek” is also unusual for its close connections to NASA, both in its storylines and in the real world. Decades of “Star Trek” adventures have ignited a love of spaceflight across generations, inspiring many who now work as space professionals.

I’m a cultural anthropologist who studies why people work in space exploration. I’ve interviewed astronomers, engineers, flight surgeons and astronauts. Although I focus more on science fact than science fiction, I’ve noticed in my interviews how much the two threads intertwine.

Because of this, I found myself at a “Star Trek” convention in early August 2026, just ahead of the show’s 60th anniversary on Sept. 8. The convention participants included people of widely different ages, appearances and identities. I was struck by just how much those gathered reflected the series’ values.

When NASA met Star Trek

In the original series, the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, came up with a philosophy held by the Vulcan people. He called it IDIC: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It suggests that an ideal society is made up of many different types, all working together.

It represented Roddenberry’s rejection of conformity. It also explained why the Enterprise crew included a Russian alongside Americans, and Black, Japanese and female characters all in positions of responsibility and authority. While many ordinary viewers absorbed “Star Trek’s” lessons of camaraderie and acceptance, those involved in real space exploration also took notice.

Roddenberry established relationships with NASA personnel in the early days of his series. NASA provided photographs of planetary bodies and advice about the realities of spaceflight, as well as stock footage and access to certain NASA facilities.

Leonard Nimoy, who played the popular character Mr. Spock, was even brought to the National Space Club’s Goddard Memorial Dinner in 1967 as a special guest. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey gave the keynote speech. Afterward, though, it was Nimoy, not Humphrey, who found himself surrounded by the club’s members, including NASA employees, aerospace engineers, members of the military and government officials, all eager to meet the actor portraying the starship Enterprise’s first officer.

The relationship between NASA and “Star Trek” benefited the show by legitimizing the series. It also helped NASA by publicizing its work and depicting a positive future where its efforts to land on the Moon would eventually lead to visits to distant worlds – and amazing scientific advances like the show’s transporter and warp drive.

The connection between the space show and space agency was reflected in NASA’s decision to name its first space shuttle Enterprise, after some encouragement from the “Star Trek” fan community.

Inspiring astronauts

In 1977, actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Uhura, was hired to recruit for NASA. The space agency had expanded its pool of astronauts to include scientists and other “mission specialists.” For the first time, an astronaut no longer needed to be a pilot to participate in a space mission.

NASA selected its first Black astronaut candidates and its first female astronaut candidates in 1978. While this move toward inclusivity may not have been directly influenced by infinite diversity in infinite combinations, it was compatible with it. “Star Trek” inspired many of NASA’s future employees. In interviews for my book “The Ultraview Effect,” a quarter of the space professionals I spoke with mentioned “Star Trek” as an influence.

An Apollo astronaut I interviewed, for instance, said he believed humans would eventually “be able to go anywhere in the universe, just like ‘Star Trek.’”

A young engineer who had grown up in the 1990s told me his motivation came from the “opening line of ‘Star Trek’… to explore strange new worlds.”

A space shuttle mission specialist emphasized Roddenberry’s decision to make the starship crew multicultural, explaining: “Today I look at the diversity of it … he was setting the stage back when it wasn’t acceptable [in order] to be acceptable!”

A changing future

That influence has accompanied a changing astronaut corps.

Both the 2025 astronaut class, which for the first time included more women than men, and the crew of Artemis II, which sent the first woman, first Black astronaut and first Canadian on a lunar mission, resemble the future that “Star Trek” imagined.

The “Star Trek” fans at the convention I attended were even more diverse. It was clear to me that Roddenberry’s “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” isn’t just a concept from the series, but something that has become a defining value of contemporary Trek fandom.

One such fan, Bjo Trimble, holds special status. She is credited with “saving ‘Star Trek’” when the series was almost canceled in 1968 after two seasons. Wearing a rainbow “IDIC” pin, she signed autographs at the SyFy Sistas booth, where T-shirts featuring Black “Star Trek” icons such as Uhura and Benjamin Sisko were on display.

However, with the Trump administration’s recent orders to dismantle all of NASA’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs and policies, institutional support for “Star Trek’s” vision of acceptance and inclusivity, which flourishes in its fan base, is being undone. This rollback occurred just as NASA’s crews were reaching new milestones in representing the diverse future that “Star Trek” has encouraged for decades.

Sixty years later, some of the diverse future that “Star Trek” imagined has become part of everyday spaceflight. Other parts of that ideal remain unfinished.

Deana L. Weibel, Professor of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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What does 9/11 mean for young public servants who hardly remember it?

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:59:00 -0400

Many of the articles about the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, will likely begin with the writer sharing where they were that fateful Tuesday morning. I can’t start this piece that way, however, because I don’t remember anything from that day. Because I was 4.

While there was a time when the only segment of the population that would have had little to no memory of the attacks was young children, I was born the same year as former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., the youngest member of Congress.

More people who don’t remember 9/11, or were born after it, will continue to enter government service. Nevertheless, three individuals who were young during the attacks — including a federal employee, a veteran and one who worked in national security – said that 9/11 and its aftermath continue to impact the next generation of public servants.

“I feel guilty I don't remember”

While I don’t remember anything from Sept. 11, 2001, I do have memories from the following days — specifically a tribute to the victims on local news and my parents talking about the attacks with their friends at church. Given how unreliable childhood memories can be, however, I’m not confident in my recollections.

Likewise, Megan Anderson — who previously worked for the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a membership organization for individuals who work in those fields — who was 5 on 9/11 is “pretty confident” she remembers her grandmother picking her up at school.

“I love my grandmother, so I was very excited to see her,” she recalled.

Anderson said that she didn’t see her dad, who worked for the FBI and responded to the Pentagon, for about two weeks after the attack. She said that visits to the building with her dad over the years helped her to make sense of 9/11.

“The big thing that I remember about seeing the Pentagon is my dad walking me through what happened from his perspective,” she said.

Taylor Wensel, the president of a Veterans Affairs Department union local in Utah and a coordinator for the American Federation of Government Employees committee for young members, was also 5 on 9/11 but has no memory of the attacks.

“I even asked my mom a couple times because people bring up what they remember,” Wensel said. “My mom was like, ‘Maybe you were playing with your Barbies.’ I was a Barbie kid, so I was probably playing with Barbies in the basement.”

Every year on 9/11, Wensel watches documentaries about the attacks.

“I feel guilty I don't remember. I don't have my own memories, so I have what's called collective memory, so I'm learning off of other people,” she said. “It was a big thing that happened in my timeline. I looked at my kid, and I said, ‘Hey, you're learning this, but I lived during it, but I don't remember it.’”

“There are people who are innately called to serve…and there are events that make that happen a lot quicker”

When I first pitched this article to my editor, who covered 9/11 as a reporter for Government Executive, she said that the attack initially motivated many people to serve in the federal government. It also led to an uptick in military enlistments.

Frank Lopez — an Air Force veteran who is currently attending Harvard Kennedy School through a fellowship for public servants – remembers being one of the last kids in his second grade class to be picked up on 9/11.

“I think by mistake, looking back now, [my teachers] turned on the television, and I actually saw the planes hit the towers,” he said. “I couldn't really at the time understand what was happening, but I had that feeling that something terrible had gone on.”

As an immigrant from Cuba, Lopez said that he always had a desire to give back to the U.S. but that 9/11 likely “made that happen a lot sooner.”

“I believe that there are people who are innately called to serve. I think that there are events that make that happen a lot quicker,” he said. “9/11 was a culminating event, and it did spur that spirit inside of me.”

Similarly, Anderson said that 9/11 influenced her interest in counterintelligence and counterterrorism work. She also said that the attacks motivated her younger brother, who was 3 in 2001, to join the Marines.

Even Wensel, who has no memory of 9/11, said that it probably impacted her desire to enlist in the military, which was her plan before she became pregnant.

“I think it pushed me to want to protect and to not see that happen — I know it probably won't happen here in Utah — but I don't want to see [9/11] happen again anywhere,” she said.

Still, Wensel sees a connection between her interest in the military and her current role at the VA.

“I do help veterans now, so I get the flip side that they protected me and now I help them in return, which is a nice turnover to me wanting to be a Marine,” she said.

“9/11 was just like a constant”

Even though the people I interviewed have limited recollections of the day itself, they said events that occurred as a result of 9/11 stand out in their memories.

“We launched the war in Iraq, and I remember the local casualties up on the nightly news,” Lopez said. “That stayed with me as a kid. I'd always wonder ‘Why are these people in the situation and why are they here on this television screen and like what's happening?’”

Wensel recalled that her neighbor’s dad was deployed.

“They would send him books and tape recorders, so he could read the books, and then the kids could listen to him,” she said. “That's how I correlated it. We were attacked, and now my neighbor doesn't get to see her dad.”

Anderson said that she woke her dad up in the middle of the night to tell him that Osama bin Laden was killed.

“That was actually something we talked about at school. It was a manhunt like ‘We don't know where he is’ and ‘Oh maybe we found his compound,” she recalled. “That was a really big topic because a lot of people in the area worked for the government, so 9/11 was just like a constant.”

I also remember when bin Laden was killed in 2011, but it’s because President Barack Obama’s announcement interrupted a new episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” so I missed which contestant was fired by host Donald Trump.

Lopez, who was deployed to Kuwait and Syria from 2019 through 2020, also brought up his memories of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, specifically the suicide bombing at a Kabul airport that killed more than 180 people, including 13 U.S. service members.

“I remember vividly sitting around the screen with my guys and gals, and we were talking through how centralizing forces within one airport and over the mission planning that would go behind an operation like that in order to get these folks out of there. We war-gamed it basically, and we all determined that what would happen is X potentially, like there's a high probability it would happen,” he said. “Sure enough, a day or two after, that same thing happened. I thought that was a complete — complete — operational failure, at least the aspect of those folks getting killed, I think it could have been avoided.”

Generational differences

Given that the people I interviewed were all young when 9/11 happened, I asked them if there are other national tragedies that stood out more clearly in their memories. Some of the events that they mentioned included Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wensel also brought up a bomb threat at her school that was connected with a belief that the world was going to end on Dec. 21, 2012, based on the ancient Mayan calendar.

“I remember the lockdown and the cop standing by the door all puffed up. He was a pretty big guy, but short, so it was pretty funny seeing him stock up,” she said. “I remember my parents texting us asking, ‘How's the day going? If anything weird's going on, you guys can leave whenever you want,’ which my parents never said that any other day.”

While many of the individuals entering public service today were born pre-9/11, they may only remember a post-9/11 world. As such, a large-scale terrorist attack occurring on U.S. soil, or a school being put into lockdown over a conspiracy theory, is not a wholly unexpected event for them.

“Younger generations get digged at because we’ve generally had pretty decent lives, but we’ve had all these big life events that have caused little things to change,” Wensel said. “My parents will be like ‘Oh, you guys had it easy.’ I beg to differ. I’d rather go through another 2008 recession if it can prevent more school shootings.”

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Bill would let federal whistleblowers sue if disciplined over violating NDAs

Erich Wagner — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:50:18 -0400

A pair of House Democrats introduced legislation last month that seeks to strengthen federal whistleblower protections in the face of the Trump administration’s effort to instill a standard non-disclosure agreement for use across government.

The Federal Worker Protection Act (H.R. 10198), introduced by Reps. Eugene Vindman and Suhas Subramanyam, both D-Va., would require every NDA issued by federal agencies to include a statement of federal employees’ whistleblower protection rights adjacent to each signature line in the document. Agencies would need preclearance from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel before deploying an NDA, and OSC would create a public repository of every NDA in use.

In the biggest departure from existing policy, federal employes removed or disciplined for violating an NDA in connection with a protected disclosure could sue their employing agency directly in federal district court. Currently, a whistleblower must go to their agency’s inspector general or OSC and then the Merit Systems Protection Board before appealing to a federal circuit court.

The Democrats’ legislation comes as the Trump administration weighs a proposal to institute a standardized governmentwide NDA for federal workers to sign, and shortly after the Office of Personnel Management in July finalized regulations granting itself the ability to remove federal workers for violating or refusing to comply with an NDA or other instances of “post-employment conduct” via suitability decisions, which bypass most of federal workers’ appeal rights.

And the National Security Agency’s inspector general reported last month that most of that agency’s NDAs already do not sufficiently inform employees of their whistleblower rights.

Allen Shoikhetbrod, managing partner at federal employment law firm Tully Rinckey PLLC, noted that bill’s proposed private right of action could open agencies up to liability unseen in most administratively channeled federal employment cases.

“It potentially creates an explicit private right to bring action in federal court to seek an injunction, damages, attorney fees and civil penalties for violations,” he said. “A judge could void noncompliant NDAs, or even just void a provision that would make them unenforceable altogether.”

In a statement, Vindman, whose brother Alexander Vindman’s whistleblowing led to President Trump’s first impeachment, warned the proposed NDA would have a chilling effect on the federal workforce.

“Federal workers should never have to choose between doing their jobs and speaking up when they see something wrong,” he said. “Last fall, I hosted a town hall for federal employees, where I heard directly from them about the fear and pressure they were facing. These are people who have dedicated their careers to serving their country and our communities. This legislation makes clear that public servants who speak up will not face politically motivated retaliation.”

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Don’t let federal agencies judge their own discrimination cases

Kendrick Roberson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400

For more than two million federal workers nationwide, the Trump administration has proposed taking away their automatic right to request a hearing before an impartial judge when they face workplace discrimination. If adopted, the proposal would make it harder for federal workers to challenge discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was expressly designed to protect workers from discrimination.

Specifically, the proposed rules would eliminate federal and D.C. government employees' automatic right to have their discrimination cases reviewed by a neutral administrative judge. Instead, the worker's employer would initially decide whether discrimination occurred. The worker could then appeal that decision to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and request that the commission refer the case to an administrative judge, but such a referral would be discretionary.

That change would create a clear conflict of interest. The same agency accused of discrimination would investigate the complaint and initially decide whether discrimination occurred.

The impartial hearing is crucial.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed to protect people in the United States from discrimination, and Title VII of that law specifically protects workers from discrimination. To enforce these protections, the law also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose stated mission is to "eliminate unlawful employment discrimination."

For many decades, federal workers who faced discrimination in the workplace have been able to appeal to the EEOC for relief and justice. For the past 40 years, they have had the right to request a hearing before an impartial administrative judge if they believed they were discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, disability, age, religion, genetic information or retaliation. The Trump administration seeks to end that automatic right and instead make an administrative judge hearing available only when the EEOC determines that such proceedings are necessary or efficient to resolve an appeal.

Under the current process, when a federal worker claims they faced discrimination in the workplace, the worker's employer is responsible for receiving the discrimination complaint, investigating it within 180 days and creating a report of the investigation.

If the employer is then in charge of deciding whether discrimination occurred and whether the employer will owe the worker restitution, federal workers are subject to a situation where the foxes are guarding the henhouse. The employer has a strong interest in deciding that the worker was not subject to discrimination. In FY 2021, agencies issued 5,604 merit final agency decisions that did not involve an administrative judge, and 109 of those decisions found discrimination. By comparison, 3,821 final orders implementing administrative judge decisions included 112 findings of discrimination.

This is why, in most circumstances, rather than have the employer make the decision, employees have a better opportunity to achieve justice by exercising their right to request a fair hearing before an administrative judge, which would be their first time engaging with a neutral party.

For example, we often represent employees who file discrimination complaints because their immediate supervisor sexually harassed them repeatedly and upper-level management knew and did nothing about it. Under the proposed rule, an agency would investigate the complaint and issue a final decision before the employee could appeal to the EEOC. The employee could request that the EEOC refer the case to an administrative judge, but the commission would decide whether such proceedings were necessary or efficient to resolve the appeal.

That means the agency that already controls the complaint and investigation process would initially decide whether the supervisor's actions constituted sexual harassment, whether management took appropriate action to stop the harassment, whether the employee is entitled to damages and, if so, the amount of those damages.

The historical data from the FY 2021 Annual Report also shows that administrative judge decisions accounted for a substantial share of findings of discrimination. Of the 221 findings of discrimination reported that year, 112 came through final orders implementing administrative judge decisions, while 109 came through final agency decisions without an administrative judge.

Furthermore, there are numerous instances when the federal agency that employs the worker does not complete its discrimination investigation within the 180-day deadline. Under the current process, when the investigation is complete, the employee can request a hearing before an EEOC administrative judge. The FY 2021 EEOC report found that agencies completed 86.4% of investigations on time, meaning thousands were not completed within 180 days.

We have represented many cases at the Department of Veterans Affairs where nurses with physical disabilities were fired or suspended for taking the same actions as employees without disabilities who were not disciplined. In many of these cases, the VA has blown through its deadlines to investigate the discrimination, and it was only through our ability to request intervention from a neutral judge that we were able to have the claims fully investigated and win relief for these nurses.

The proposed changes would remove that automatic avenue for these nurses and instead require them to wait for the agency to conduct its investigation and issue a final decision before appealing to the EEOC. Meanwhile, the nurses could be out of work and without a paycheck.

If this rule becomes final, there would also be significant practical and financial burdens placed on workers who allege discrimination. Court cases are complex and often involve significant court and attorney's fees. By taking away the automatic right to a hearing before an EEOC administrative judge and making such proceedings discretionary on appeal, the proposed rule's real effect would be to discourage employees from pursuing claims of illegal discrimination and make it harder for those who do move forward to challenge that discrimination successfully.

Every federal worker could be affected by this rule change, as the EEOC hearing process helps protect workers from discrimination as Congress intended. Although the proposed changes are currently targeted at federal and D.C. government employees, the rights of all workers are at stake and are under attack. This Trump administration has shown a malignant hunger to dismantle the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and this new proposed rule is a big, vicious bite.

Kendrick Roberson is a national vice president for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 820,000 federal employees. He leads AFGE's civil rights department, which represents members in discrimination cases through its Women and Fair Practices departments. Roberson is also a professor of labor at UCLA.

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For federal executives, retirement means losing more than a job

Joy Levin — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:08:14 -0400

Career Senior Executive Service ranks have dropped nearly 30% since the end of the Biden administration, falling from 8,127 members to 5,837 by January 2026, the lowest level on record since at least 1998. Notably, the Partnership for Public Service warned in a March report that the shrinking career SES will mean a real loss of institutional knowledge and operational continuity across agencies. Furthermore, roughly 105,000 federal employees are projected to retire across all grades by the end of 2026.

Agencies and OPM extensively cover the financial impacts of this for retirees in FERS annuity calculations, TSP withdrawal strategy, and FEHB and Medicare coordination. What gets far less structured attention is whether the executives behind those numbers are personally ready for what comes after the title, the clearance and the mission disappear. The same retirement wave carries costs for the agencies losing this expertise, and agencies have preparation of their own to do.

What makes this different for federal executives

For a career GS-15 or SES executive, that gap works differently than for a private-sector retiree. A corporate title can often be replaced with consulting work or a board seat. A federal clearance typically cannot be carried forward without a new sponsor, and a mission-driven identity built over two or three decades of public service has no clean private-sector substitute.

A departing federal executive gives up more than a general sense of loss: signature authority over budgets and programs, standing relationships with the GS-14s and 15s they were mentoring toward the SES track, and a clearance that, until it lapses, still defines what rooms a person can be in.

What this means for Gen X/Generation Jones

Gen X and Generation Jones federal employees also have no experiential template for this: They are the first cohort retiring almost entirely under FERS rather than the older CSRS pension structure, and that timing carries implications for the federal agencies they are leaving, too, since this cohort is retiring into an SES bench that has shrunk by nearly a third in two years. Previous generations handed off to a peer who had come up through the same institutional culture. However, with political appointees now filling a large share of senior roles, the current wave increasingly hands off to a smaller, thinner circle of career colleagues, or to no one at all.

What federal executives can do

Federal executives approaching retirement can treat identity readiness as its own planning track, run on the same timeline as the benefits paperwork rather than after it. Four moves matter most.

First, map what the title actually provides, roughly 12 to 18 months out: Consider decision authority, access, daily structure and recognition. Decide which to rebuild deliberately. Retirement advice usually covers what to retire toward, but rarely what to retire with. SES executives leave with real skills and talents intact. Deciding which to keep using, and how, matters as much as deciding what to build next.
Second, run that mapping alongside the OPM retirement application rather than after it. Digital applications are averaging well over three months this year, and the full wait to a first annuity check often runs six to nine months, long enough that postponed identity work can sit untouched for most of a year.
Third, decide early whether cleared work is part of the plan. Transferring a clearance to a private-sector or consulting role generally has to be worked out before separation, not after.
Fourth, build the identity conversation into the benefits counseling session a spouse or partner often already attends, rather than scheduling it separately. Retirement changes the household's structure and belongs in that conversation.

What agencies can change

Agencies have leverage here, too:

Pre-retirement seminars can add a structured identity-transition module alongside the FERS and TSP content. A deeper approach, rather than a single slide or an optional webinar, gives both the executive and the agency a clearer transition to plan around.
Succession planning can build in a formal knowledge-transfer period, pairing a departing senior executive with a successor for the final several months, giving the departing executive a defined role until the end instead of a hard stop.
Structured retirement coaching support, in-house or external, can serve both sides of that handoff: a framework for the executive's identity readiness and better-documented knowledge transfer for the agency.
And HR leadership can start tracking identity-related retirement risk the way it already tracks eligibility and succession pipeline data on OPM's dashboard: Which senior leaders are eligible to retire, and which of them have no plan beyond the paperwork? None of this shows up on that dashboard today, which may be exactly why it has gone unaddressed.

Agencies have gotten very good at measuring who can retire and when. The open question is whether agencies, and the executives themselves, are equally prepared for what retirement actually asks of a person who has spent a career being the one with the clearance and the mission.

Joy Levin is a Certified Professional Retirement Coach and founder of Gen X Exec Encore. She spent nearly 30 years in market research before shifting her focus to executive transition coaching and works with Gen X and Generation Jones leaders, including federal executives, preparing for retirement.

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Former pardon atty calls MSPB ‘a dead end,’ sues for reinstatement

Erich Wagner — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:31:21 -0400

Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer sued the Trump administration Thursday, asserting that her 2025 firing on “Article II” grounds violated her First and Fifth amendment rights, as well as the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

Oyer, who served as a federal public defender for a decade prior to her appointment to pardon attorney in 2022, was removed from her career post in March 2025, shortly after refusing to issue a nonbinding recommendation that actor Mel Gibson’s right to own a firearm be restored despite his 2011 domestic violence conviction.

Her removal was one of the first in a string of so-called Article II firings at the Justice Department that eventually encompassed attorneys, prosecutors and immigration judges. In these cases, the department has elided the firing procedures and rules set forth by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, instead arguing that the president has constitutional authority to remove these employees at will.

Though Oyer filed an appeal with the Merit Systems Protection Board shortly after her firing last year, she has yet to receive meaningful movement toward a decision before the quasi-adjudicative agency. Last March, the MSPB relinquished jurisdiction of such cases, and in June, an MSPB administrative judge dismissed Oyer’s case without prejudice, a decision that means she must wait at least another six months before she may refile and longer to receive a decision.

“The MSPB has proved, however, to be a dead end,” the lawsuit states. “Despite filing her MSPB appeal more than 16 months ago, she has yet to receive any substantive review of her termination. Most recently, on June 2, 2026, the MSPB dismissed Ms. Oyer’s appeal without prejudice for a minimum of an additional six months (and likely far longer), sending her case to a further prolonged limbo.”

Although federal workers typically must exhaust their administrative avenue to appeal a personnel action before heading to federal circuit courts for judicial review, Oyer argued that the morass of seeking MSPB review, combined with her firing purportedly on constitutional grounds, rather than via the Civil Service Reform Act’s procedures, allow her to pursue her case before the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C.

Oyer and her attorneys also argued that even if administration officials can bypass statutory removal protections when they fire inferior officers under Article II of the Constitution, the Justice Department failed to follow its own policy governing such removals, as her firing was signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“With respect to its purported removal of Ms. Oyer, moreover, DOJ did not even use the procedures that DOJ itself maintains are necessary to effectuate a removal under Article II,” the lawsuit states. “That is because Ms. Oyer’s removal was signed only by the deputy attorney general. This distinction is significant because—on DOJ’s own telling—only the attorney general can wield the president’s Article II removal authority.”

Another case challenging the Justice Department’s Article II filings, Jackler v. MSPB, is set to go before the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for oral arguments in December.

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Former CISA employee pleads guilty to defrauding government with secret contractor jobs

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:05:03 -0400

A former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency employee pleaded guilty Wednesday to defrauding the government of nearly $250,000 by secretly holding multiple federal contracting jobs and submitting timesheets that sometimes claimed she worked 33 hours in a single day.

Richeline Anisso Fung pleaded guilty to a federal false claims charge, the Justice Department announced.

She worked full time at CISA from September 2016 until October 2025. Between January 2021 and August 2024, she simultaneously held contracting positions supporting the Drug Enforcement Administration and the departments of Energy, Justice, Transportation and Agriculture, as well as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Some of that work was performed through RAF Pro-Consulting, a Florida company Fung established in 2020. She concealed the overlapping jobs from CISA and the contractors, according to prosecutors.

The arrangement resulted in extraordinary claims on her timesheets. In February 2022, Fung was working for CISA and three contractors supporting the DOJ, Agriculture Department and Federal Highway Administration. Her reported working time exceeded 24 hours a day on 15 occasions that month.

She claimed to have worked 33 hours on four consecutive days and 32 hours on a fifth, prosecutors said.

Fung admitted that she was able to conceal the overlapping employment because the positions were carried out remotely. Justice did not disclose her role at CISA or describe the work she performed for the other agencies.

Nextgov/FCW could not immediately reach Fung for comment. As part of a plea agreement, she must repay nearly $250,000 to the government, with sentencing scheduled for Jan. 20.

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Here’s what Trump’s new ‘Space Academy’ could mean for the US military

Thomas Novelly — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400

President Donald Trump’s mandate for a new “Space Academy” puts defense leaders under a NASA-led initiative that could mean military service requirements for the future school's graduates.

Trump signed the executive order on Friday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston during a ceremony where he presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four crew members who are to take the Artemis II spacecraft around the Moon. It appoints a commission, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and chaired by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, to “strengthen the nation’s space workforce” by planning for a new national academy.

“Given the rapid growth of the U.S. Space Force and commercial space industry, and the expansion of our ambitions to the Moon and far beyond the Moon, it’s clear we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators,” Trump said at the ceremony.

The idea of a Space Academy isn’t new, but one defense expert told Defense One it’s unclear how a new institution would further the administration’s military space-related ambitions. The Space Force does not lack for recruits, although its civilian workforce was cut during last year’s federal workforce purge. Currently, the Space Force commissions new officers through the Air Force Academy, ROTC, or Officer Training School. Friday’s executive order instructs the commission to consider imposing military-service requirements on academy graduates.

The order calls for an evaluation of “service obligations for graduates, including service in the armed forces” and explores “prerequisites for applicants, including citizenship status, security clearances, and government employment or military status.”

Air Force officials declined to comment and clarify details of the executive order. White House spokespeople did not immediately respond when asked for details and how a Space Academy would interact with the armed services and officer-commissioning pathways. The commission has 120 days to submit a report to Trump “proposing key details” to establish the Space Academy.

A White House fact sheet said the Space Academy will “combine rigorous technical education with leadership development and public service, preparing graduates for careers supporting America’s military, civil, and broader space enterprise.”

“In the years ahead, we will return NASA astronauts to the lunar surface, build the Moon Base, get underway on nuclear power, ignite the orbital economy and launch more missions of science and discovery,” NASA’s Isaacman said in a news release. “I have no doubt that so much of the future talent that will graduate and contribute to these exciting endeavors will be educated at the United States Space Academy.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s playbook for the Trump administration, pitched the idea of creating a “Space Force Academy.”

“Explore creation of a Space Force Academy to attract top aero–astro students, engineers, and scientists and develop astronauts,” the playbook read. “The academy could be attached initially to a large existing research university like the California Institute of Technology or MIT, share faculty and funding, and eventually be built separately to be on par with the other service academies.”

Todd Harrision, the American Enterprise Institute’s defense budget and space expert, called the executive order “out of left field” and fears it will further muddy civilian and military roles.

“NASA, the Space Force, and the intel space agencies—they all have very well-defined lanes and responsibilities and areas of expertise,” Harrison said. “Intermingling them like this does not sound like a good idea.”

Harrison also questioned the idea of a government-run “Space Academy” when there’s world-class private and public universities that produce top-notch aerospace and engineering students. The Space Force recruits from such schools under its University Partnership Program.

Trump’s push to bolster space-related careers comes as the Space Force works to rebuild its civilian workforce after the administration’s hasty cuts last year.Officials have been aggressively trying to hire talent to manage a requested $71.3 billion service budget, which would be the largest year-on-year increase, by percentage, for any military service branch since 1952, according to a report from the Aerospace Corporation.

The Space Force hasn’t struggled to hit its uniformed recruiting goals. Service leaders have pitched plans to double the number of its guardians. Harrison said it’s not clear how the Space Academy aligns with those realities.

“It’s not consistent with the other workforce changes the administration has been making,” Harrison said. “It doesn’t appear there is a clear need for this. The other thing too is … they’re going to need authorization and funding from Congress to actually do this. So, what is their plan there?”

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Agencies have a new question to answer about employee misconduct

Bill Pedersen — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Agencies across the executive branch must reassess longstanding practices for addressing employee misconduct following a flurry of regulatory activity by the Office of Personnel Management. OPM’s two recent updates to the federal suitability regulations, little more than a month apart, rewrite the employee misconduct playbook for the over 1.35 million competitive service and career Senior Executive Service members of the federal workforce.

OPM’s first rule, published June 30 and already in effect, introduced a new tool for addressing employee misconduct: suitability actions based on post-appointment conduct under 5 CFR 731. These actions allow agencies to tap into OPM’s resources to remove individuals who have engaged in gross misconduct.

This is a significant change. Instead of relying solely on the agency’s staff and traditional adverse action procedures under Chapter 75 of Title 5, the law governing most serious disciplinary actions against federal employees, OPM can step in to act.

OPM’s second rule, published Aug. 3 and effective Sept. 2, streamlined the appeals process for suitability actions and moved the venue for appeals from the quasi-judicial Merit Systems Protection Board to OPM. The new appeals rule replaces the prior MSPB appeal route with an OPM appeal process.

Together, the rules create an alternative path when an individual poses an unacceptable risk to the integrity or efficiency of the federal service that can:

Reduce the agency’s level of effort required; and
Accelerate timelines for resolving threats to the government’s people, property, information and critical missions.

Figure 1.0 illustrates how OPM’s rules reshape the landscape and why agencies should take a timeout to reassess their employee misconduct playbooks.

Figure 1.0 How employee misconduct is addressed

The suitability path shifts responsibility from the agency to OPM after evidence gathering. This single action drastically reduces the burden on the agency’s HR, employee relations and attorney resources. The streamlined appeals process could also lead to a faster final resolution when someone challenges an action.

OPM’s final rules might provide agencies with a straightforward approach to address a possible rise in employee misconduct cases due to the ongoing government efforts to implement continuous vetting. This is part of a comprehensive overhaul of the federal personnel vetting system called Trusted Workforce 2.0.

Continuous vetting, a core element of Trusted Workforce 2.0, aims to proactively detect potentially problematic behavior among trusted federal employees. Identifying risky conduct earlier than traditional reactionary methods is expected to enhance the government’s ability to mitigate risk before a concern escalates into a serious problem.

Continuous vetting uses automated records checks, traditional investigative activity at certain time intervals or in response to certain life events, and information maintained locally at the agency, like disciplinary or security incidents.

Agencies generally embrace the enhanced ability to identify potential risks delivered by continuous vetting. Its expansion to cover the non-national security populations of the workforce fills a void where vetting processes either previously omitted staff in low-risk positions or saw varied compliance with requirements to check in on the conduct of the public trust population. A Government Accountability Office report on Trusted Workforce 2.0 found that agencies reported improved access to real-time information on personnel, while also identifying challenges with implementation.

The looming question facing agencies, though, is what will they do with all of this new information about employee misconduct once it’s identified?

Being prepared to adopt the new post-appointment suitability path rules could be the best move to handle a possible surge in employee misconduct cases. Agencies interested in this should start rethinking their traditional workflows and familiarize themselves with the updated suitability policies and guidance.

Key considerations include:

Identifying information-sharing protocols between agency mission areas (HR, Information Security, Insider Threat, OIG, etc.) to ensure communication breakdowns do not block effective risk management;
Developing workflows that create clear lanes of responsibility;
Providing position-specific training tailored to HR, employee relations and personnel vetting/security staff on updated suitability regulations to equip them to adopt new processes; and
Creating operating procedures for evidence gathering and submitting suitability referrals that comply with OPM’s suitability regulation and its implementing guidance in OPM’s Suitability and Fitness Processing Manual.

Agencies exploring how to reengineer processes to leverage OPM’s suitability updates can obviously look to recent guidance issued by OPM. OPM’s ability to help agencies might be limited because its suitability office is currently focused on expanding its capacity to handle up to four times more suitability actions each year. At the same time, it is establishing a new suitability appeals function.

Recruiting trusted industry partners with expertise in suitability is one play call agency leaders could use to ready themselves where OPM’s capacity to provide support may be limited.

OPM’s new rulings changed the playing field, and continuous vetting may increase the need to address employee misconduct. Game day is not the time to learn a new playbook. Agencies should use this early implementation window to build the workflows, train their teams and establish the partnerships they will need to put these new authorities into practice.

Bill Pedersen is a Personnel Vetting Enablement & Strategy Lead with Xcelerate Solutions and brings decades of experience in federal personnel security, suitability and vetting reform. As a former Division Director within OPM’s Suitability Executive Agent Program, he led Trusted Workforce 2.0 initiatives, authored key national policies and earned the OPM Director’s Individual Award for Customer Service.

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EEOC votes to propose new rule stripping feds of hearing rights, class action complaints

Erich Wagner — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:27:45 -0400

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 Wednesday to propose new regulations that would overhaul how federal workers may pursue workplace discrimination claims, removing employees’ right to request a hearing before an administrative judge and outright banning class action cases outside of federal court.

Currently, federal workers alleging discrimination at their employing agency must undergo up to 90 days of pre-complaint counseling, which includes informing employees about the EEO process and sometimes mediation, after which their agency will conduct an internal investigation. Once that is complete—or after 180 days—the employee may request a hearing before an EEOC administrative judge.

But under a new proposed rule, set for publication Friday in the Federal Register, complainants would no longer go through pre-complaint counseling, instead directly filing their complaints to EEOC within 60 days of the alleged discriminatory incident. And they would no longer be guaranteed a hearing; that decision would instead be made by officials within the EEOC’s Office of the Federal Sector.

Under the plan, complainants would have to affirmatively request a hearing when they appeal a final agency decision, and in some cases submit an explanation justifying its need. Those who do receive a hearing under the new process would no longer have the benefit of discovery, a practice by which parties can request and receive documentation related to the case.

Additionally, while employees with similar allegations of discrimination may elect to have their individual complaints processed “jointly,” EEOC would cease consideration of class action cases. If employees wish to proceed as a class, they would each have to exhaust their individual cases before the agency and then file a class action lawsuit in federal court.

EEOC’s two Republican appointees, Chairwoman Andrea Lucas and Commissioner Brittany Bull Panuccio, said the proposed changes are needed to speed up the resolution of discrimination cases. Between fiscal 2021 and 2025, successful complainants waited an average of more than two years from when they requested a hearing to receive an administrative judge’s decision granting relief.

“As things stand today, EEOC administrative judges spend most of their time and energy on motion practices for cases, sometimes often cases without merit,” Lucas said. “The proliferation of so many clearly meritoriousless complaints indicates the process has become susceptible to abuse. Employees can use lengthy and complex administrative judge proceedings to evade performance accountability and stymie routine performance personnel actions that have no plausible link to unlawful discrimination.”

Lucas argued that though federal employees currently have the expectation that they may request a hearing before an administrative judge, that technically is not a right.

“It’s important to start with the concept of what in fact are the statutory rights provided by Title VII [of the 1964 Civil Rights Act],” she said. “What we’re talking about here is not changing anyone’s statutory rights. We’re talking about an administrative process that EEOC has created, a process that we were entitled to take some steps to do via rulemaking, and that we can also have the authority to change it via rulemaking. Again, it is a creature of regulatory creation that is not working right now for federal employees, and therefore we have the right and the obligation to reform that process.”

But Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, who as the commission’s lone Democrat appointee voted against the regulations, said that while she would not defend the status quo, the new proposal “kneecaps” federal employees who believe they’re victims of discrimination.

By removing complainants’ right to a hearing, agencies, whose internal EEO investigations routinely miss deadlines for submitting a final agency decision, would have no incentive to ensure their investigations are timely and thorough, she said. With reports of severe contractions in the headcounts at EEO, HR and civil rights offices across government, many employees could be left in "limbo," unable to advance their complaint.

“In the past, EEOC has identified impediments to [final agency decisions], including inadequate investigations and heavy caseloads,” Kotagal said. "With no pre-complaint counseling and mandatory FADs, these challenges will balloon under this proposal. Although this [notice of proposed rulemaking] purports to make the process speedier, the reality is that myriad other aspects of it, like insufficient consequences for noncompliance, undermine that objective symptomatically.”

Courtney Mickman, an attorney focusing on federal employment issues and a former EEOC administrative judge, said the proposal for agency staff to vet which complaints receive an administrative judge, estimated in the regulations as taking “one half hour,” is unrealistic.

“30 minutes is a truly unbelievable statement,” she said. “Earlier this afternoon, I had an initial conference in a case, and the report of investigation was 184 pages, and I specifically told the judge in that case that the report was deficient,” she said. “[I’m] not sure how many people can line-by-line go through 184 pages in 30 minutes, but the average report is 500 pages. And in lengthy hostile work environment claims I’ve seen ROIs hit 1,000 or 2,000 pages.”

And Michael Fallings, managing partner at Tully Rinckey, another federal employment law firm, said that the removal of discovery from EEOC’s process would hamstring complainants and administrative judges alike.

“The [agency] investigators are asking boiler plate questions in writing for officials to answer, so that means there are no follow ups, and a lot of times management officials just don’t understand a question and write, ‘I don’t understand,’” he said. “There’s not really a good or consistent process for obtaining relevant documentation either—that’s why discovery is often needed, to seek that additional info. Sometimes what happens is the administrative judge already recognizes and orders for additional documents to be produced by the agency or the complainant, but without discovery that’s not going to occur.”

The move to end consideration of class complaints, which EEOC officials said would not apply to already filed cases, comes after the agency quietly instructed its staff to cease work on those cases, and a week after the commissioners by a 2-1 vote moved to decertify a handful of classes in pending cases. In a statement, the American Federation of Government Employees, which sued the agency last month over the stop-work directive, decried the proposal.

"The changes being proposed by the EEOC will result in discrimination cases taking longer to resolve at greater cost to taxpayers, which is a disservice both to federal employees and the American public,” said Kendrick Roberson, the union's national vice president for women and fair practices. “The Trump administration is assigning the fox to guard the hen house. Under these proposed changes, when federal workers allege that an agency has discriminated against them, they will no longer have the right to have their case reviewed by a neutral judge. Instead, the agency will decide if the agency engaged in discrimination, and that is a crystal-clear conflict of interest and a denial of justice.”

Kotogal sought to at least secure a longer 60-day window for members of the public to submit comments on the proposed rule, but was rebuffed. Comments on EEOC’s proposal will be due Sept. 27.

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Unions: OPM’s suitability and performance management overhauls assert ‘plenary’ authority over federal firing

Erich Wagner — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:24:14 -0400

A coalition of unions that represent roughly half of all civilian federal employees sued the Trump administration Monday, seeking to halt a pair of recent regulatory changes that erode federal workers’ civil service protections and instill unprecedented power in the government’s dedicated HR agency.

The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, centers on a pair of regulations finalized by the Office of Personnel Management this year: one requiring agencies to follow a forced distribution when conducting performance appraisals—effectively limiting how many employees receive top ratings—and another granting OPM the ability to fire employees across government for post-appointment conduct via suitability decisions, which previously only applied to job applicants, not incumbent employees.

The unions argued that the regulations at various points conflict with the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, as well as violate the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirements that regulations be sufficiently reasoned and consider the reliance interests of stakeholders.

And they said the suitability rule, when considered in conjunction with separate regulations taking review of those and other personnel actions away from the Merit Systems Protection Board, effectively bypasses Congress’ intended bifurcation of the old Civil Service Commission into two agencies.

“Because an employee can only appeal a suitability action with OPM itself, the same agency (OPM): (1) establishes the use of suitability actions for removing employees, (2) takes such actions against employees, and (3) purports to determine whether its own actions were proper,” the lawsuit states. “In short, OPM has granted itself plenary and, in its view, unreviewable authority to fire employees across the government. It is hard to imagine a scheme that is more contrary to Congress’ design.”

In addition to the removal of appeals rights for feds fired under a suitability action, the labor groups called out the lack of transparency in who would effectuate those removals.

“There are no requirements or standards for determining who at OPM is authorized to make decisions regarding suitability actions, nor is that information public,” they wrote. “OPM’s website currently claims: “OPM’s Suitability Executive Agent Programs serves as the federal government’s suitability and fitness authority.’ OPM provides no further information regarding who comprises ‘SuitEA’ (which is not a subcomponent created or regulated by statute or regulation.”

The adoption of a “forced curve” on agency workforces through the new performance management process violates the Civil Service Reform Act’s requirement that performance appraisals must be based on objective criteria—ranking employees in relation to one another is inherently a subjective metric, the unions said.

“A small team with only high performers will need to rank some as less high performers,” the unions wrote. “Further, if two employees have the same objective performance rating and the new ‘distribution’ requires that they receive different summary levels, this is an invitation for favoritism based on subjective and impermissible factors. OPM has not shown that more dispersed evaluations are also more accurate and objective or that the use of objective criteria is no longer feasible.”

In a joint statement, union officials warned that these changes—if allowed to proceed—ultimately will erode agencies’ ability to serve the public.

“Congress built the civil service on a simple principle—that public servants are hired, judged and fired on merit, not on politics,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “OPM does not have the authority to write those protections out of the law, and no statute gives it the sweeping power it has claimed here.”

“These rules proposed by the Trump Administration are yet another illegal continuation of their attacks on federal workers and the apolitical civil service, as they seek to eliminate long-held worker due process rights while implementing a ‘fox guarding the henhouse’ employee appeal process,” said International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers President Matt Biggs. “These actions are un-American.”

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Unions accuse mediation agency of ‘doublespeak’ in updated lawsuit

Erich Wagner — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:16:23 -0400

“Doublespeak,” “internally inconsistent,” and “inappropriate post-hoc justification.”

A coalition of federal employee unions had harsh words for regulations submitted last month that formalized a policy to block some labor groups from obtaining independent arbitrators to hash out disputes with management.

Earlier this year, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service abandoned more than four decades of precedent when it began asking parties about a grievance’s arbitrability prior to issuing a panel of arbitrators for a union and their agency to choose from. An April memo stated that it would no longer appoint arbitrators for grievances at agencies named in President Trump’s two 2025 executive orders banning collective bargaining on national security grounds.

Unions sued to block the new policy, arguing that it violated FMCS’ own regulations, which stated that it would honor requests for an arbitrator “whether joint or unilateral,” as well as federal statute, which stipulates that federal sector collective bargaining agreement must allow for “either” party to invoke arbitration.

But in July, FMCS published an interim final rule changing its regulations to allow itself to conduct investigations and make “limited threshold determinations” regarding its authority to issue arbitrator panels in federal sector grievance cases.

The unions filed an amended complaint last week in its case against FMCS, incorporating the new regulations into its argument. In addition to accusing the agency of reverse-engineering its regulations to allow the April directive, the unions said that FMCS is effectively inserting itself into Congress’ intended review scheme: arbitrators determine the arbitrability of a particular grievance, with appeals of those decisions going to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

“Under the guise of clarifying its longstanding regulations, the [interim final rule] transforms FMCS from a facilitator of arbitration to a decision-making body, instituting a new ‘threshold inquiry’ to determine whether issuing a panel would violate ‘applicable law, a court order or FMCS’ statutory or regulatory authority,” the unions wrote. “Other than noting that FMCS ‘may request the parties’ agreement, a statutory provision, regulation, court order, written authorization or other information needed to determine whether FMCS may provide the requested service,’ no further details are given regarding the scope and extent of the new inquiry before providing an arbitration panel, nor whether or how a party could dispute the decision made.”

The unions argued that the new regulations’ imposition of a review process at FMCS contradicts the agency’s continued insistence that it does not decide the arbitrability of a dispute.

“FMCS’s own explanation or why this change is needed is internally inconsistent with its insistence that by conducting this inquiry, it is not deciding ‘the validity of any collective bargaining agreement, the merits of any grievance, the arbitrability of any dispute, or the parties’ rights or obligations under any agreement or law,’” they wrote. “FMCS does not—and cannot—explain how an inquiry that calls for examination of agreements, statutes and regulations to determine whether a party has a right to an arbitration panel aligns with regulatory provisions stating that FMCS is not determining arbitrability.”

A scheduling hearing in the case before the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., is slated for Sept. 23.

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IRS CEO’s call to end advanced leave should be ‘null and void,’ NTEU says in lawsuit

Jory Heckman — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:14:34 -0400

The National Treasury Employees Union is asking a federal judge to block a recent IRS decision prohibiting its employees from taking annual leave or sick leave time they haven’t accrued yet.

NTEU, in a lawsuit filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argued that the IRS workforce policy change should be declared “null and void” because it was made by Frank Bisignano, who is leading the agency as its “chief executive officer,” a new title created under the Trump administration.

Bisignano is also the Senate-confirmed commissioner of the Social Security Administration, which rolled out the same prohibition on advanced leave in a nearly identically worded memo.

NTEU wrote that, to its knowledge, “no other agencies besides IRS and SSA have issued directives categorically barring their employees from using advanced annual or sick leave.”

The union, in its complaint, said Bisignano's de facto leadership of the IRS violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has interpreted this clause as requiring “principal” officers to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

NTEU wrote that Bisignano “is carrying out the functions of the IRS Commissioner, which is a principal officer, but the President did not nominate him to that position and the Senate did not confirm him to it.”

“Mr. Bisignano has therefore lacked authority for his official actions, including issuing the Directive,” the union told the court.

Bisignano has mused aloud about how unusual it is to be running both the IRS and SSA.

“I don't know that there'll be another person who oversees both of them,” he said at the Government Service Delivery Summit in June. “I also think overseeing both of them is much like running a large company.”

The IRS currently lacks a permanent or acting IRS commissioner or deputy commissioner.

The Senate confirmed former Republican congressman Billy Long in June 2025 to serve as the agency’s permanent leader, but he left after less than two months on the job. Long now serves as the U.S. ambassador to Iceland.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took over as acting IRS commissioner in August 2025, but officially stepped back from that acting role after his 210-day acting term under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act expired in March 2026. Bessent appointed Bisignano as the IRS CEO last October.

The IRS released a statement in March 2026 stating that Bessent “retains the authority and responsibility to perform the functions and duties of vacant Treasury offices that are not filled on an acting basis, and that Bisignano is “successfully leading day-to-day operations and reporting directly to the Secretary.”

“If this type of circumvention of the Appointments Clause is allowed to stand, there could be an executive branch full of CEOs at the helm of each agency, instead of a Secretary or Commissioner — none of whom would go through the Constitution’s process of presidential nominations and Senate confirmations,” NTEU wrote. “That would plainly conflict with what the Framers intended through the Appointments Clause.”

The union also argued that the agency’s new prohibition on advanced leave and advanced sick leave is “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act, “because it requires across-the-board denials of all pending advanced leave requests and because it cuts off any future such requests, regardless of an employee’s individual circumstances.”

An IRS spokesperson declined to comment on pending litigation, but said in a statement that the agency’s advanced leave restriction “aligns with the agency’s efforts to build a high-performing, highly engaged workforce operating as One IRS to deliver a world-class customer experience and aligns to our commitment to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

“The IRS continues to offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits and leave program that promotes employee well-being, flexibility, and long-term financial security,” the spokesperson said.

The IRS’ Internal Revenue Manual (IRM) instructs supervisors to review each request for advanced annual and sick leave on a case-by-case basis. Guidance from the Office of Personnel Management states advanced sick leave is a “flexibility” agencies can use to help new employees who haven’t accrued much leave yet, as well as more tenured employees experiencing personal hardships.

OPM directs agency supervisors to “use their judgment in reviewing a request for advanced sick leave” and minimize the chances of employees separating from service with a negative leave balance.

Federal employees replenish their annual and sick leave over time. Federal employees who leave government service with a negative leave balance must refund the cost of that advanced leave, and agencies may deduct it from their final paycheck.

NTEU wrote that the IRS’ new policy “is harming numerous IRS employees” who had advanced leave requests pending.

“The agency has now summarily denied all of those requests pursuant to the Directive,” the union wrote.

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Federal job listings provide clues for next set of Schedule P/C conversions

Erich Wagner — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:09:05 -0400

As agencies prep for a reported second round of conversions of federal positions out of the competitive service and into the at-will Schedule Policy/Career, experts have taken to reading new job postings as tea leaves in an effort to understand the initiatives current and future scope.

The new job category, ostensibly for “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, and policy-advocating” positions in government, was formally implemented in June, when President Trump signed an executive order converting around 8,000 positions from the apolitical competitive service into the excepted service.

Employees placed into Schedule P/C are effectively at-will employees; they no longer may challenge adverse personnel actions before the Merit Systems Protection Board, and their whistleblower complaints would be investigated by their own agency, rather than the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

But since its initial implementation, it has been difficult to ascertain whom exactly has been impacted by the new policy. Thus far, the only public documentation of Schedule Policy/Career’s scope are the statements of officials, who have said 97% of conversions involved GS-15s or senior leaders (SL), and an appendix to Trump’s executive order listing various job titles by agency, along with a position number that agencies only use internally.

New analysis from the Partnership for Public Service examining more than 130 listings that mention Schedule P/C on USAJOBS, the federal government’s dedicated online job board, has found at least a dozen positions—or nearly 10%—tagged for the new job category at the GS-13 level or below. In some cases, jobs like airport screeners at the Transportation Security Administration were listed as Schedule P/C despite not being listed in the appendix, though the agency told Government Executive those were due to an administrative error and would be corrected.

Other job listings, including for a variety of posts at the International Development Finance Corporation, state that the agency has submitted the position to OPM for conversion into Schedule P/C but had not yet received approval. The Energy Department flagged some of its jobs as “potentially meeting the requirements” for the job category, while three U.S. Agency for Global Media positions are listed as “under review for inclusion” in Schedule P/C.

Brandon Lardy, the Partnership’s data director, said in an interview that a combination of the Trump administration’s “opaque” documentation surrounding the new job category along with the chilling effect created by stripping employees of their civil service protections has created a nightmare for transparency advocates.

“We continue to be concerned as we see this rollout continue to play out, particularly as it seems to be going beyond the bounds of the executive order and its intended scope,” he said. “We’re also concerned about the effect this will have on morale across the federal workforce with the fear of being classified into Schedule P/C and losing their protections.”

Ultimately, Lardy argued that the Schedule P/C tag will hurt federal agencies’ ability to attract qualified applicants to these positions.

“Especially when you take it in the context of the administration’s actions last year, particularly to remove probationary period workers from government, that in combination with these reclassifications and this new appointment type all makes it easier to be fired,” he said. “That does have an effect on who is looking to get into government, either as a new graduate from university or someone with a long career in private sector looking to shift into public service. Either way, someone would be pretty nervous to see that their position could seemingly be reclassified and lose the civil service protections that are often a draw for folks who move into government . . . It’s not a healthy way to recruit folks into an organization.”

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Archives workers granted telework ahead of D.C. IndyCar race

Erich Wagner — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:34:16 -0400

Officials at the National Archives and Records Administration announced Tuesday that employees stationed at its headquarters building in downtown Washington may telework for the rest of the week due to nearby construction associated with this weekend’s IndyCar race in response to safety concerns from its union.

Archives I, referred to colloquially as A1, is located inside and bound on three sides by the planned race route. Employees said that beginning this week, getting to the office has required navigating road closures, active construction around the building and a temporary pedestrian bridge over Pennsylvania Avenue NW, which itself is partially blocked by the branches of a neighboring tree as well as a fence.

Credit: IndyCar

Officials with the American Federation of Government Employees Council 260, which represents NARA workers, told Government Executive that they had been raising concerns about the potential for disruptions caused by the event since at least June. It was only after the union sent an email demanding management address “unsafe working conditions” around the building Tuesday that the agency informed employees—though not AFGE—that it would approve telework.

“NARA is authorizing situational telework, to the extent possible, through August 23, for employees whose duty station is Washington, D.C.,” the agency wrote in an email to employees. “Employees should coordinate with their supervisor to consider other workplace flexibilities such as maxiflex, and/or unscheduled leave. Schedule changes should be approved by your supervisor. Employees who must report onsite should plan for additional travel time and remain alert to road closures, pedestrian restrictions and transit service adjustments.”

In a separate message to the union, agency management said that while it had been in regular contact with both the U.S. Secret Service and IndyCar parent company Penske, it bemoaned a “fluid” situation “with circumstances constantly changing.”

But union officials said offering telework through Friday is not enough to protect employees, particularly those with disabilities. In an email to management Tuesday urging the authorization of telework, they described the difficulty that an employee “with mobility issues” had accessing the building on Monday, something they said would recur next week, as race organizers begin breaking down the temporary barricades and pedestrian bridge.

Photo courtesy AFGE

“Once they found [an ADA accessible] entrance, they were not able to use it because there was no one there to operate the lift,” the union wrote. “The employee then had to find the pedestrian bridge, which is not ADA accessible, and put their health and safety at risk by climbing the stairs. Since the bridge that employees were instructed to use was built against a tree with limbs at rail height . . . they were instructed to crawl under the limb, at additional risk to their health and safety as an employee with disabilities. This situation is obviously unacceptable.”

A photo taken Wednesday morning documented that workers had since cut the tree branch, though a fence continues to at least partially block the pedestrian bridge’s entrance.

Photo courtesy AFGE

The union also said the agency’s expectation that employees familiarize themselves with a newly modified building evacuation plan is similarly insufficient to ensure employees’ safety.

“The agency is obligated to ensure a safe working environment,” AFGE officials wrote in a follow-up email Tuesday. “The union expects that managers and supervisors will review the plans with their employees to ensure that everyone is aware of emergency egress routes. Since everything has been so fluid, those plans have not covered the situation on the ground so far this week, which is why we have requested that the agency station one or more facilities or security employees at the staff exit to help with way-finding.”

As of press time, union officials said the agency had not responded to its request to extend telework into next week. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.

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OPM finalizes expanded hazard pay for federal firefighters

Erich Wagner — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:20:47 -0400

Federal wildland firefighters will soon have more opportunities to receive hazard pay in connection with their work fighting and preventing wildfires, thanks to newly finalized regulations from the Office of Personnel Management.

Currently, federal firefighters are eligible for hazard pay—a 25% increase over their normal salary—only when working to extinguish an unplanned wildfire. But they do not receive this increased pay when working on prescribed burns, in which officials intentionally ignite decaying forest material in the hopes of mitigating the risk of an uncontrolled wildfire breaking out in the future.

In a new rule published in the Federal Register Friday, OPM finalized its April proposal to expand firefighters’ access to hazard pay to include prescribed burns, effective Sept. 13. The regulation authorizes hazardous duty pay for prescribed burns for firefighters hired under the General Schedule pay sale, as well as environmental differential pay for those serving under the Federal Wage System.

But OPM noted that the new hazard pay will not be available for every activity associated with a prescribed burn.

“As in the proposed rule, the final rule limits differential coverage to employees participating as a member of a firefighting crew engaged in activities on the fireline directly involving the implementation and control of a prescribed wildland fire,” OPM wrote. “The rule does not extend the differential to pre-ignition preparation activities. OPM retains this limitation because the hazards justifying coverage are associated with the active fire environment and its immediate aftermath on the fireline, not preparatory work performed before a fire has been ignited.”

Typically, federal workers are not entitled to hazard pay for duties that fall within their position description; an exception exists for firefighters due to the health risks inherent in the job.

“Prescribed fire duties [include] ignition, holding, patrol, mop-up, fireline construction, and snag felling expose employees to open flame, radiant and convective heat, smoke, unstable terrain, fire-weakened trees, chemical by-products of combustion, and biological hazards,” the regulations state. “OPM concluded that these hazards cannot be fully mitigated through training, personal protective equipment, or standard operational controls and are comparable in degree to the hazards supporting the existing 25 percent differential for wildfire fireline work.”

In a statement Thursday, National Federation of Federal Employees President Randy Erwin, whose union first recommended approving hazard pay for planned burns in 2022, applauded OPM’s decision.

“This is yet another step in the right direction to ensuring federal wildland firefighters receive the pay they deserve for the incredible work they do protecting our communities from the wildfire crisis,” Erwin said. “For years, NFFE has been seeking a permanent policy allowing hazard pay for prescribed fire activities. We have explored legal options, legislation, and regulatory action, and after many sustained efforts by NFFE members campaigning for change, we have achieved a monumental victory.”

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Statistical agency staffing cuts put federal data under new scrutiny on Capitol Hill

Jory Heckman — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:05:33 -0400

The top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee is seeking a hearing on the state of federal statistical agencies, following a report documenting deep staffing cuts and leadership vacancies.

Citing “alarming” data in a recent report from the American Statistical Association, Committee Ranking Member Bobby Scott, D-Va., is asking the committee’s chairman, Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., to give members “the opportunity to explore the hard choices these agencies have had to face as they absorb these cuts and do more with less.”

Scott’s requested hearing would focus on three statistical agencies that fall under the committee’s purview – the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics.

“I ask that you schedule a hearing in September so that Committee Members have the opportunity to hear about the erosion of our nation’s federal statistical infrastructure and better understand the downstream effects of poorer data quality and less frequent product releases,” Scott wrote.

All 13 principal federal statistical agencies have seen staffing cuts since the start of the Trump administration. Six of them shed at least a third of their headcount, and two of them lost more than two-thirds of their employees.

The American Statistical Association’s midyear report, released last month, found staffing cuts and persistent leadership vacancies “put the agencies in a weakened and vulnerable position to meet rigorous production schedules,” and “keep up with the demands of producing relevant, timely, and accurate statistics for decisionmakers and the public.”

“These agencies serve as vital lifelines for policymakers, businesses, and the public—producing nonpartisan, reliable statistics describing the realities confronting our constituents every day,” Scott wrote.

The association found in a report last year that widespread staffing and spending cuts, along with policy changes under the Trump administration, led to certain public-facing data sets being delayed, suspended or canceled.

The Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics lost nearly all its employees last year, as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing plans to dismantle the department. NCES, which operates within the department’s Institute of Education Sciences, shrank from about 100 staff to just four employees last year, but now has about a dozen full-time staff.

Scott wrote that NCES projects and studies on school crime and safety, teachers and principals, homeschooling and virtual education, and adults’ skills and competencies remain “inactive” amid these staffing cuts. Other work has been reduced in scope or transferred to other agencies.

Savannah Newhouse, the department’s press secretary, said in a statement that NCES and IES “were in need of reform,” and that the Trump Administration “is committed to ensuring that IES delivers usable, high-quality statistics, data, and resources for educators, researchers, and other stakeholders.”

USDA’s Economic Research Service cut a third of its workforce between fiscal 2024 and 2026. ERS, which produces data on the agricultural economy, food and nutrition, food safety, global markets, and rural economies, is planning to relocate employees to Kansas City this fall, doubling down on staffing moves carried out under the first Trump administration.

Many employees who received relocation notices in 2019 quit rather than move to keep their jobs. ERS in the process lost more than half its staff and dealt with productivity declines that took years for the agency to recover from.

Federal employee unions and nonprofit groups are suing to block USDA’s widespread relocation plans, arguing that they are a veiled attempt to intentionally shrink its workforce.

“It is both the Administration’s prerogative and our concern that staff departures will continue to undermine the ERS’s irreplaceable work to understand the challenges faced across the country regarding agriculture and food security,” Scott wrote.

Last summer, President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency produced a monthly jobs report that showed hiring had slowed. The incident raised concerns about the long-term independence of federal statistical agencies.

The Senate confirmed Brett Matsumoto as the bureau’s new permanent director last week, but many of its leadership positions remain vacant. The bureau cut its staffing by 20% between fiscal 2024 and 2026.

BLS announced last month that it would no longer produce monthly state-by-state data snapshots of job openings, hiring, layoffs and workers quitting their jobs. Instead, the bureau will now publish monthly estimates for the prior year in annual data releases.

BLS never resumed data series that had been cut due to sequestration cuts from 2013, including the elimination of the Mass Layoffs Statistics program, which provided “information that identifies, describes, and tracks the effects of major job cutbacks in the economy.”

“These changes reflect long-standing understaffing and underdevelopment, despite warnings from current and former staff,” Scott wrote.

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State Department expands push to reclassify employees as at-will workers

Jory Heckman — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400

The State Department is taking another look at its workforce to see if more employees should fall under a new governmentwide designation that makes them easier to fire. Agency officials are expanding their search for employees to reclassify as at-will workers under the Trump administration’s new Schedule Policy/Career designation for the federal workforce.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in June that officially reclassified 8,000 federal employees into Schedule Policy/Career, a rebranding of the Schedule F designation that Trump pursued in his first term, but did not implement before leaving office.

Employees placed into the new schedule would no longer be able to challenge adverse personnel actions before the Merit Systems Protection Board, and whistleblower complaints filed by Schedule P/C employees would be investigated by their own agency, rather than the Office of Special Counsel.

The Office of Personnel Management previously estimated that about 50,000 federal employees would fall under this new job category. But an OPM spokesperson said in June that the administration chose to instead focus on “the most senior-level career policy officials.”

The State Department’s actions suggest that its initial reclassification of employees fell short of the White House’s expectations, and other agencies may take a similar approach. NOTUS first reported that the Trump administration is directing agencies to find more federal employees to convert to Schedule P/C.

A spokesperson for the foreign policy agency declined to comment on “internal deliberative personnel matters.”

One State Department employee told Government Executive that human resources officials are using a short questionnaire to determine if GS-13 and GS-14 level employees are working in policymaking positions that should be reclassified to Schedule P/C.

“It is not clear how many ‘yes’ responses would trigger a new Schedule P/C status,” the employee said.

The questionnaire asks if a position “formulates, develops and/or determines foreign policy, including creation of draft documents with policy recommendations," or "develops or reviews non-public Executive Orders, regulations, directives, policy memoranda, or deliberative materials protected by the deliberative process privilege regarding foreign policy."

Other screening questions ask if an employee “provides substantive advocacy of foreign policy,” or represents the department before Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, foreign governments or external organizations regarding the administration’s foreign policy.

The questionnaire asks if an employee “publicly advocates Administration foreign policy through official communications or media engagement” or “exercises delegated authority to commit or bind the Department to policy decisions."

The department is also looking for positions that conduct official bargaining or negotiations on behalf of the department, or whether an employee “performs statutory policy-making responsibilities."

The State Department has already shifted supervisory foreign affairs officers and specialists, as well as other senior-level positions, to Schedule Policy/Career.

A second State staffer said the department is still in the early stages of its expanded search for Schedule P/C conversions, but added that this work is “moving relatively fast.” Staff have been directed to update to their position descriptions to ensure they reflect the full scope of their responsibilities.

“GS-13s, I don’t think, are typically in a position that you’re going to think of as a senior policymaking position,” the employee said. “I was surprised, personally, to see positions that junior given this designation.”

A senior administration official told reporters in June that 97% of employees that fall under Schedule Policy/Career are at a GS-15 level or higher. The official said a “small number” of GS-13 and GS-14 employees were also converted, but that most of them work at OMB.

“Outside of OMB, there are very, very few positions that are below the level of GS-15 that are being covered,” the administration official said. “The bottom line is that almost all of these are very senior positions in the federal government.”

The administration official said Schedule Policy/Career would “increase the accountability of officials who are responsible for carrying out the elected president’s policy agenda,” but would have little day-to-day impact on reclassified employees.

“As long as they’re performing their job duties in a competent, professional manner, they have nothing to be afraid of,” the official said.

The second State Department employee said Schedule P/C’s impact on the workforce has not yet been fully felt, but suggested that newly at-will employees may be reluctant to offer candid feedback on policy matters.

“If you convert my position to a position that can be expeditiously removed, I’m going to more carefully tailor what I’m saying,” they said. “Its practical effect, I think it’s safe to assume, is that it will reduce people’s willingness to give advice or offer policy positions that are inconsistent with the direction of the administration.”

A third individual said the department has started reviewing GS-13 and GS-14 positions for “possible conversion to Schedule Policy/Career.”

“That process has resulted in a hold on reclassifying any of the thousands of GS-13 and 14 positions, which an office or bureau might otherwise do from time to time to align position grades with updated responsibilities,” the individual said.

OPM's guidance to agencies states that many aspects of federal employment – including rules around pay, leave, benefits and reductions in force – remain unchanged for those moved to Schedule P/C. OPM also included a sample termination notice agencies may use when firing Schedule P/C employees. In the template, agencies may specify “unacceptable performance or misconduct” as justification for an employee's termination.

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IRS says a new policy ‘moots’ NTEU’s First Amendment lawsuit. The union isn’t so sure

Erich Wagner — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:31:42 -0400

The Internal Revenue Service says a new policy governing what materials may posted in communal office spaces like bulletin boards clears the agency of accusations that it violated employees’ First Amendment rights when it began confiscating flyers and decorations supportive of the National Treasury Employees Union.

But attorneys representing the union said they’ve thus far received mixed messages as to whether the new policy would adequately address the concerns underlying a federal lawsuit stemming from the initial May directive.

On May 29, IRS issued a directive, purportedly stemming from President Trump’s 2025 executive order banning collective bargaining at many agencies, instructing its facilities management employees to remove “any and all NTEU materials” in IRS facilities using “whatever steps necessary,” short of vandalism. A federal lawsuit the following month documented instances in which NTEU flyers and decorations were taken from communal bulletin boards, stolen from employees’ cubicles and, in several cases, destroyed.

In late June, the IRS and NTEU jointly filed a stipulation to the court, announcing that agency management agreed to halt its campaign and return any union materials that had been confiscated but not yet destroyed.

In a new filing last week, IRS informed the court that it had promulgated a new policy, this time stating that only “agency-sponsored materials” and non-agency documents mandated by law, such as Occupational Safety and Health Administration notices, may be permitted in communal spaces such as bulletin boards. Employees may still decorate their workspace as they wish, provided they are consistent with federal ethics, equal employment opportunity and other existing IRS rules.

“[Facilities Management and Security Services] retains exclusive authority over posting and displays of materials in common areas or on designated bulletin boards of IRS facilities, and will only authorize agency-sponsored materials, with the exception of non-agency materials mandated by law,” the August 4 memo states. “Employees are not authorized to post written materials in IRS facilities.”

As part of its filing, IRS asked the union if it would entertain dismissing the portion of its lawsuit against the agency stemming from the materials confiscation policy as “moot,” noting that policies governing speech are generally not considered First Amendment violations if they are “content neutral.”

NTEU, in its response filed Monday, said it needs more information as it has received “conflicting information” about the new policy and its implementation.

“The language of the August 4 policy says, for example, that the only materials that may be posted in IRS workplace common areas are ‘agency-sponsored materials,’ which the IRS interprets as ‘materials created at the behest of the IRS and for the purpose of IRS business,’” the union wrote. “But the IRS’ Facilities Management and Security Services is posting notices telling employees, in contrast to the August 4 policy, that it may approve ‘non-agency-sponsored materials for display in common areas’ . . . NTEU might challenge this policy if it believes that it is merely a façade for viewpoint-based discrimination.”

But even if the new policy does assuage NTEU’s concerns, that would not be the end of the legal challenge. That’s because last month, the union amended its complaint to include additional alleged First Amendment violations, this time in the form of a content filter blocking access to the union’s website from agency computers.

If someone tries to access NTEU.org from an agency work station, a splash screen appears warning that the site has been flagged for “potentially damaging content,” for which the ban has “very limited or no exceptions.”

According to the IRS’ IT regulations, employees are barred from accessing pornography, “personal services” like online dating or most social media, hacking websites, online games, “proxy avoidance” sites and filesharing. One IRS employee told Government Executive the web filter typically lists one of those six categories when blocking a website; conversely, they had never seen the “potentially damaging” category before.

Also unusual was language suggesting that the restrictions would have “very limited or no exceptions,” the employee said. In most cases, IRS has a process by which employees may request an exception to access a website that has been blocked for a business need, such as for an audit or other investigation.

According to the amended complaint, the agency has also gone so far as to block all emails originating from the nteu.org domain. This has had damaging ramifications for employees involved in EEO cases and appeals before the Merit Systems Protection Board, the union said.

“When one NTEU attorney who had filed an MSPB case on behalf of an IRS employee engaged in settlement discussions over the phone with the agency attorney, the agency attorney told him that she would email him a document,” the complaint states. “After a day or two, however, the NTEU attorney had not received the document, even though the agency attorney insisted that she sent it. After another few days, the NTEU attorney told that agency attorney that he would go to the MSPB judge if he continued to not receive the document. Then, another day or two later, he was able to send emails to and receive them from the agency attorney.”

Ultimately, the IRS unblocked emails associated with NTEU for managers, HR personnel and some attorneys at the agency; it left it in place for members of the bargaining unit.

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