Government Executive - Workforce

Judge rejects VA’s third attempt to cancel union contracts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mediation agency changes how labor disputes move forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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OPM finalizes rules expanding its power over RIFs, employee appeals

Erich Wagner — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:22:37 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management moved Friday to finalize regulations that collectively seize jurisdiction over thousands of employee appeals, as the federal government’s dedicated HR agency moves to centralize power over the federal workforce.

Across three final rules slated for publication in the Federal Register Monday, OPM implemented plans to take over adjudication of federal workers’ appeals of reduction-in-force decisions and suitability actions, as well as cases involving employees still serving in a probationary period. A fourth rule overhauls RIF procedures more broadly, primarily by emphasizing recent performance reviews over tenure.

Currently, a federal employee seeking to appeal an adverse personnel action stemming from a RIF, suitability decision or action that happened while they in their first probationary year of service does so by petitioning the Merit Systems Protection Board. Under the quasi-judicial agency’s jurisdiction, the employee’s case is heard by an administrative judge, with final review by the MSPB’s three-member board. Following a final decision by the agency, the employee—or their employing agency—can appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

But under the new process, appeals would primarily be handled by OPM’s Office of Merit System Accountability and Compliance and ultimately reviewable by the OPM director. Employees would no longer be able to appeal final agency decisions in federal courts.

In a blog post Friday, OPM Director Scott Kupor said the MSPB is too slow to handle its current workload.

“The current MSPB backlog stretches to many months and, in some cases, years,” Kupor wrote. “That is not good for employees who deserve timely resolution of their appeals and it is not good for agencies, which are left in management limbo while cases wind through a slow and costly adjudicatory process. Our proposed internal appeal processes are designed to be faster, more efficient, and, critically, structurally independent, with separate staff handling determinations and appeals.”

MSPB’s backlog in both Trump’s first and second terms stemmed from a lack of a quorum of presidential appointees atop the agency that until last week referred to itself as independent. The 2025 dearth of a quorum began after Trump fired Democratic appointee Cathy Harris in February of that year.

In the case of the regulation turning RIF appeals over to OPM, the HR agency said fully 99% of the around 1,250 public comments were opposed to the measure. Though OPM declined to publish the breakdown of comments submitted in regard to the other regulations, each produced “some” supporters and “many” opponents.

‘An existential threat to due process’

Raymond Limon, a former MSPB member who retired at the end of his term in February 2025, described OPM’s taking jurisdiction of federal employee appeals as a violation of Congress’ intent in enacting the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. Prior to that law, federal personnel policy and appeal adjudication both were held within the Civil Service Commission; the CSRA bifurcated those roles into two separate agencies—OPM would handle policy, while MSPB would handle appeals.

“It was very clear that an independent adjudicative body was to hear those cases,” Limon said. “’Good fences make good neighbors,’ and that creates due process, organizational discipline and consistency throughout the federal government. What we’re seeing here is an existential threat to due process by going against Congress’ words and intent and moving those due process protections to the personnel office.”

In its regulations, OPM argued that if these adjudicative functions were truly meant for MSPB to handle, Congress would have done so via statute. Instead, the duties were granted via OPM regulation.

“By carving out RIFs conducted under [Title 5 of the U.S. Code] from the MSPB’s jurisdiction, Congress distinguished this type of reorganization activity from the individually targeted personnel actions for which employees have traditionally been accorded formal procedural protections,” OPM wrote. “In the CSRA, Congress did not direct that the MSPB have jurisdiction over RIF appeals.”

But Limon said it’s not that simple, and noted Congress elsewhere has directed RIF appeals to the MSPB for review.

“Two years [after the Civil Service Reform Act], Congress passed the updated Foreign Service Act, in which it allowed foreign service officers to go to MSPB in cases of a RIF,” he said. “Congress knew that employees could go to the Merit Systems Protections Board for a RIF, and so they gave foreign service officers the option: you can appeal to the Foreign Service Grievance Board or to the MSPB.”

While the inability for an employee to appeal OPM’s final decision in federal court is the most noteworthy change as part of the move away from the MSPB, Limon said he was also troubled by the reduction of these cases to a “paper exercise.”

“Under the new process, you won’t have the benefit of an adversarial litigation process in which you have an attorney and can draw and cross-examine witnesses and you have an independent, trained judge to hear your case and hold both parties accountable,” he said. “None of that happens when you appeal one of these matters to OPM. It’s a paper exercise, and it’s really up to some person inside OPM to decide how much due process you get.”

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Survey shows the toll of USAID’s closure on former employees and their families

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:13:59 -0400

Jaime Oberlander was a foreign service officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development stationed in Ethiopia last year when administration officials folded USAID into the State Department, resulting in nearly all USAID employees losing their jobs. She said the layoffs hit employees serving overseas—and their families—particularly hard.

“You're being forced to make this huge international move with not a lot of information, changing guidance, not a lot of the resources needed for that level of move when you have to set up housing, set up schooling, set up these things all again,” she said.

For example, Oberlander questioned if her family would lose their housing, which had been paid for by the government, and knew it could take months for their belongings to be shipped back to the U.S. She recalled that a colleague’s son was a senior in high school preparing for final exams, only to face the prospect of not being able to finish the school year at all.

Now a graduate student at the University of Michigan School of Social Work with plans to become a therapist, Oberlander decided to study the impacts of the foreign aid agency’s closure on employees and their families. She conducted a survey of nearly 3,800 former foreign aid staffers who worked for USAID or a partner organization, finding that most are still struggling financially and have experienced adverse effects to their mental health.

“Ultimately, I do hope and want and believe it will be a story of resilience, but the community isn't there yet,” she said.

Only 40% of respondents to the survey, which was conducted between March 27 and April 26, reported that they’ve found full-time employment. Of those, 66% said they were making less than their previous salary.

“Former aid sector employees face structural barriers to re-employment: careers built around specialized graduate degrees, mastery of U.S. foreign assistance regulations and overseas networks do not translate easily to a stagnant labor market,” Oberlander wrote in a report on the survey results.

Additionally, 48% of survey participants that were foreign service officers experienced dual job loss. One respondent whose husband also worked for USAID said that they and their two children “found ourselves living temporarily from house to house as we tried to chart a new path. The extreme level of uncertainty caused tremendous stress such that I lost over 15 lbs and my husband suffered from depression and insomnia.”

Based on the survey results, Oberlander also found that younger workers are more likely to have found employment than their older counterparts and that former aid staffers who are Black have the lowest levels of full-time employment of any group.

And 81% of participants said they experienced stress-related physical symptoms, such as headaches, panic attacks or the worsening of an existing condition.

Oberlander’s findings correlate with other recent studies of Trump’s effort to downsize federal agencies. A winter survey of more than 300 fired agency probationary employees found that, of those who found new jobs, 68% reported that their salaries are “lower” or “significantly lower.” And 95% said they’ve experienced “new mental health symptoms that had negative impacts on personal wellbeing” since being terminated.

The former foreign service officer said she plans to conduct similar surveys in the future to examine the long-term consequences of shuttering USAID.

But she also emphasized that former aid workers are not just distressed about losing their jobs; they also worry about the effectiveness of foreign assistance moving forward. A 2025 peer-reviewed study found that cuts to foreign aid under Trump could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths around the world by 2030.

“It's recognizing that people are suffering and people are dying because we can't do our job,” Oberlander said.

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Why treating everything as 'URGENT!' makes government less effective

Alex Snider — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

I don't have to tell you that public service is hard work. The missions before us are vast, almost unending. Meanwhile, budgets and teams are even smaller than they used to be.

Faced with doing more with less, the result may sound familiar to federal managers: emails with "[Urgent!]" in the subject line, last-minute meetings put on calendars and having lunch at your desk or skipping a farewell party because there simply isn't enough time.

Urgency can be a form of care. Managers, in particular, feel pressure to keep work on track. It signals that our mission matters and that "good enough for government work" has no place in our workplace.

But after 15 years in government, I've come to believe that discernment, not a sense of urgency, is the more important leadership skill.

The costs of urgency

Urgency narrows our attention. It activates a stress response that makes us more reactive and less able to consider the broader picture or tradeoffs of working at high speed.

Sometimes these tradeoffs are strategic. Federal work is complex and depends on stakeholder engagement, collaboration across organizational units and navigating policy and bureaucratic constraints. When timelines become compressed, we skip consultation, cut short discussions about alternative approaches or settle for the status quo rather than something more generative.

Sometimes they are relational. When meetings follow agendas in rigid ways and deadlines are treated as immovable, employees can begin to feel like cogs rather than people. Over time, this erodes trust and contributes to burnout, disengagement and attrition.

And yes, dear federal managers, the tradeoffs can be personal, too. We do not do our best work when we're not able to slow down and make time for our health and family.

Leadership is choosing the right pace

Government will always have moments that demand speed. Emergencies happen. Windows of opportunity close. Sometimes asking more of a team and ourselves is the right choice.

But when this becomes an unquestioned reflex, we risk winning the battle and losing the war. When we don't slow down, we communicate, intentionally or not, that relationships, strategic thinking, recovering between periods of intense work and celebrating wins aren't important.

Good leadership is about discernment. It means distinguishing the moments that require immediate action from the moments when it's time to do the other important things: check in with a key stakeholder, zoom out to consider different approaches or extend a deadline so your team can take a breath.

I often think about Amy, a mentor from my State Department days. At the end of long days, she would remind us, "No one will die if we don't finish this today. Go home."

Urgency is a leadership decision

Perhaps it's time to let go of the idea that caring about our work always means rushing ourselves and one another.

The best public service leaders don't reject urgency. They use it as a tool, recognizing when speed advances the mission and when it undermines it.

Alex Snider is a former public servant and the author of Sometimes You Should Be Late. He served for 15 years in government, including at the State Department, Senate, and General Services Administration, and is the co-founder of Mindful Fed, a cross-government mindfulness community. He writes the Substack Slow Mindfulness.

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VA’s third attempt to scrap union contract heads back to court

Erich Wagner — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:49:50 -0400

A union representing more than 300,000 Veterans Affairs Department employees is asking a federal judge to block the department’s third attempt to cancel its collective bargaining agreements, this time after talks over a new agreement broke down..

Since President Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 banning collective bargaining at most federal agencies on national security grounds, the VA has twice tried to end its union contracts, first in August 2025 and again last March. Both efforts were blocked via preliminary injunctions imposed by U.S. District Judge Melissa Dubose, a Biden appointee, who found that the department violated employees’ First Amendment rights. The VA’s second attempt prompted Dubose to warn the department it could face contempt proceedings. A federal appeals court upheld most of Dubose’s rulings in May.

The latest dispute centers on whether VA can allow the current agreement to expire while they are still negotiating a new one.

The American Federation of Government Employees on Tuesday filed its second motion asking U.S. District Judge Melissa Dubose to enforce her prior court orders after management said it would terminate the contract upon its scheduled expiration date of Aug. 8. The VA, for its part, argued that it is simply letting the deal expire.

Though her injunction preserves the CBA only for “the remainder of the agreed-upon term,” the union said the VA issued a notice following the appeals court’s ruling in May seeking to begin negotiations for a new term. That action triggers a clause within the CBA—common across government—automatically extending the contract until the parties can reach a new deal.

“[AFGE’s National VA Council] promptly acknowledged VA’s letter in writing,” the union wrote. “The VA and NVAC began negotiating by focusing on preliminary matters, such as the arrangements for ground rules negotiations, including through letters written by NVAC to the VA dated June 5, June 12, June 17, June 26, June 30 and July 8.”

AFGE said that as part of those talks, management said the new deal would only cover the roughly 3,000 VA police officers, firefighters and security guards, in line with the executive order’s exception for such positions. But on July 24, management accused the union of refusing to meet for negotiations within 30 days of its request to begin negotiations, and said it would actually terminate the agreement for all bargaining unit workers.

But the VA, in a filing seeking reconsideration of an order that the department respond to the union’s motion within three days, said its actions were foreseeable and that any claims regarding the 3,000 employees exempt from the executive order must be channeled through the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

“Plaintiffs assert that the VA is seeking to ‘terminate’ the agreement come August 8, 2026,” attorneys for the department wrote. “The master agreement, however, expires August 8, 2026 by its own terms. And plaintiffs do not dispute that the VA informed them as early as May 19, 2026 (and again on July 15, 2026) what the VA’s position was on continued CBA coverage for employees who are not exempt from executive order 14,251. The rush to judgment on plaintiffs’ motion to enforce is a crisis of their own making, when they have been aware of this issue since May.”

The outcome could determine whether thousands of VA employees keep the workplace rules and protections negotiated in their current contract as the Trump administration moves to scale back collective bargaining across the federal government.

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Staffing cuts are leaving federal statistical agencies stretched thin

Jory Heckman — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:03:11 -0400

Federal statistical agencies, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau, are facing deep staffing cuts and minimal hiring, raising alarms about their long-term ability to deliver objective datasets that drive policymaking and the economy.

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, in its midyear report, warns that these 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.”

“While hiring has resumed at seven agencies, current recruitment has barely begun to offset earlier losses and does not immediately address the loss of expertise and experience that occurred in last year’s downsizing,” the report states.

Steve Pierson, the director of science policy at American Statistical Association, told Government Executive that “everyone is doing more these days because of these cuts.”

“The loss of staff is not just the numbers. It’s the expertise, it’s the mentorship,” Pierson said. “You lose that, and it does affect the long-term productivity, as well as possibly the production of these reports.”

Some agencies have seen particularly deep staffing cuts. The National Agricultural Statistics Service lost nearly 40% of its staff since 2024, and is expected to see further workforce attrition as part of the Agriculture Department’s sweeping relocation plans. NASS employees had until July 8 to decide whether to accept relocation to St. Louis or one of the agency’s regional offices. Relocated staff are expected to report to their new offices by Sept. 21.

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 shrank from about 100 staff to just four employees last year, but now has about a dozen full-time staff.

Claire McKay Bowen, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who leads its data governance and privacy team, said the remaining staff at these agencies are spread thin and often juggle work for several positions.

“Federal statistics are the eggs that go into cake that we like to eat, and the capacity aspect is the fact that we’re not having enough bakers now at this point,” Bowen said.

Meanwhile, many former federal statistical officials are still out of work following last year’s widespread layoffs and voluntary separation offers.

“That means that you get a bunch of folks who are highly educated flooding the market,” Bowen said.

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, but after pushback from Congress and those who rely on BLS data, Pierson said the Trump administration is unlikely to target the heads of other statistical agencies.

“We have full confidence that the products being released by the federal statistical agencies have not been improperly influenced or manipulated by this administration. It’s too hard to do. They don’t seem to have the desire to manipulate the data, and if that would happen, just given the processes, given the commitment of our civil servants, we would learn about it,” he said.

The Trump administration hasn’t named many permanent leaders to oversee these agencies. The Bureau of Justice Statistics hasn’t had a permanent director in three years. The Census Bureau, which is gearing up for the 2030 population count, has been under acting leadership for about a year and a half. About a third of leadership positions at BLS are vacant.

Bowen said the lack of permanent leadership makes it harder for these agencies to set longer-term goals.

“Nobody likes uncertainty, at the end of the day. Not knowing who is the leader, or what their priorities are, people are going to be hesitant to commit to making certain changes or proposals,” she said.

Bowen said that with the proliferation of acting leaders, many federal statistical officials are handling multiple roles.

“A lot of the folks that I’ve talked to across the agencies, a lot of them are wearing three, four, five hats – which is not great,” she said. “That person is doing the best they can, but you can imagine that that means their bandwidth is just very split.”

ASA 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.

“Whether these developments prove temporary or mark a longer-term reduction in the nation’s statistical capacity will depend largely on future staffing, funding, leadership appointments, and policy decisions, requiring close attention and strong actions from Congress and the administration,” the 2026 midyear report states.

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IRS and Social Security bar employees from taking advanced leave

Jory Heckman — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Employees at the IRS and the Social Security Administration – both led by the same official – are no longer able to tap into reserves of annual leave or sick leave time they haven’t accrued yet.

Federal employees are generally allowed to use “advanced” annual or sick leave for several reasons – including major medical emergencies, family care and bereavement of an immediate family member – if they have already exhausted their annual leave or sick leave. With advanced leave, employees are essentially borrowing from a reserve of leave hours they will eventually earn.

Human resources officials told IRS and Social Security Administration employees last Friday that they will no longer grant advanced annual leave or advanced sick leave until further notice.

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

“Just spent the last two hours talking to employees impacted,” an SSA official told Government Executive last Friday, as the email hit employees’ inboxes. “It’s going to be hard on those employees who already have negative leave balances.”

Pending requests for advanced leave at both agencies will be denied. Employees at both agencies can still donate their unused annual leave to coworkers through the Voluntary Leave Transfer Program, or go on unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act.

These changes have no impact on an employee’s ability to use accrued annual and sick leave.

Both agencies are led by Frank Bisignano, the Senate-confirmed SSA commissioner and the first chief executive officer of the IRS. Bisignano, speaking at an industry conference last month, compared leading both agencies as “like running a large company."

“If you think about these two organizations, I view them as businesses – the business of collecting taxes and administering and upholding the law on taxes, and the business of paying out Social Security payments,” Bisignano said at the Government Service Delivery summit.

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

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

SSA told employees that “the American people depend on SSA to deliver on its mission every day, and that mission depends on a workforce that is present and performing the public service they rely on us for.”

“Advanced leave, which is leave granted before it is earned, means employees are compensated for time away from our mission before the work has been done,” SSA wrote. “The cumulative effect over the years of this policy is significant and unsustainable and impacts our service to the public.”

AFGE Council 220 President Jessica LaPointe, whose union represents field office and teleservice center employees, said advanced leave functions as a sort of short-term or long-term disability insurance program for federal employees.

“We have workers going through cancer treatment. We have workers that have been the victim of car accidents, unexpected emergencies. We have caregivers of sick children, sick parents, elderly parents. We have been able to use this — not abuse it — to supplement our low wages. And now that we don’t have it, federal workers that are administering disability and retirement benefits are being forced to not get paid when disaster strikes,” LaPointe said.

A report from the Strategic Organizing Center, a research partner for AFGE, found that 54% of the 36,000 frontline SSA employees represented by the union were paid less than a living wage for their geographic region. A living wage is the minimum income needed for an individual to afford the minimum standard of living in their community.

In a survey of more than 800 current SSA employees, 17% of respondents with over 20 years on the job told SOC they are working a second job. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents said they were struggling to provide at least one necessity for their families.

“We have workers at this agency that don’t make a living wage, that can’t pay their bills,” LaPointe said. “If we go into leave without pay and can’t pay our bills, can’t pay our health insurance premiums, can’t pay for food, rent, all those things, that stresses you out. And when you’re stressed, and you have a preexisting condition, it gets worse and so you have more leave without pay.”

SSA employees told Government Executive that managers previously approved employee requests for advanced leave, as long as they had a documented reason for needing it -- but up until recently, all requests had to go through the agency chiefs of the components for approval.

“The administration is using the ‘fraud, waste and abuse’ phrase,” a second SSA employee said. “Management were the ones to approve with documents. Then they forced everyone to be approved by the chief of field operations. That lasted a month. Now [it’s a] full stop.”

Both agencies oversaw major staffing losses last year. The IRS shed more than a quarter of its employees largely through voluntary separation incentives. About 7,000 SSA employees took those same incentives last year, bringing the agency to its lowest staffing level in about 50 years.

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

According to the Office of Personnel Management, agencies may grant a maximum of 240 hours of advanced sick leave to a federal employee, although the total number of hours permitted varies depending on the circumstances.

A third SSA employee said she has a chronic history of migraines and had advanced leave pending approval before the agency’s policy went into effect. Having exhausted her other leave options, she said she must now go on unpaid leave for the time she’s requested.

“It’s just disheartening and really lowers the morale when we run into things like this,” the employee said. “We’re dealing with people who have disabilities, and you have to be sympathetic and empathetic to them – which we are, because we’re living with it ourselves sometimes. But the agency is not giving us the same respect that we give to the community.”

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.

“The leave transfer program, it’s great if you have friends and family that have leave available and that are willing to donate it to you. I’m not in that boat, and a lot of people I work with aren’t," the third SSA employee said. "There’s only so much leave that people are going to give up and give away to people.

An SSA spokesperson told Government Executive in a statement that “this change ensures that SSA’s workforce is available to deliver the high-quality service the American people rely on and deserve.”

An IRS spokesperson said the policy change “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 IRS spokesperson added.

LaPointe said AFGE has filed a grievance about these changes. The union alleges SSA has repudiated a provision of its collective bargaining agreement with the union.

“We have workers today going on a leave-without-pay status. We have workers today who are stressed about how they’re going to pay their health insurance premiums. How are they going to put food on the table? How do you recover from an illness or an injury without getting a paycheck?” LaPointe said.

Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement that “NTEU will vigorously challenge this move and continue defending our members’ rights under the law and our contract.”

“This is not only an illegal violation of the collective bargaining agreement, but it’s unnecessarily cruel and harmful to IRS employees who either themselves are facing a medical crisis or caring for an ill family member,” Greenwald said. “Any insinuations that IRS employees are abusing their leave or assertions that taking such leave would harm public services are completely unfounded.”

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New documentary recounts ‘free-for-all attitude of cruelty’ toward axed federal employees

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0400

When the documentary first features Katie Sandlin, a former employee at the National Institutes of Health, she apologizes that her car is making a “weird noise” but promises that it’ll stop once she gets on the road.

Sandlin — who was fired last year during the Trump administration’s downsizing of the federal workforce, after serving in her job for only a month — shared with the filmmakers some of the comments she had received online since posting about her job loss.

“You’re an oversized, unhealthy, bloated, fat f***, and thank God you’ve been fired,” she reads from her laptop. “Hopefully, soon at least you’ll not have the money to keep eating like a pig.”

Sandlin is one of several fired, laid off or otherwise pushed out civil servants featured in “Heist,” an Emmy-nominated short documentary that chronicles the personal and political impacts of federal job losses during the first half of 2025.

“We really felt we had to archive this no matter what happened,” said Ilene Kristen, one of the film’s producers. “No matter whether we could make this into a film — or not a film — we knew that we had to to capture this.”

The filmmakers, for instance, recorded newly unemployed federal employees trying to meet with lawmakers in the halls of Congress, asking them to push back on the administration’s agency job cuts and expressing concerns about the continued effectiveness of the programs they worked on. Several Capitol Hill offices called the police to remove the individuals.

There’s also many clips of axed civil servants exiting their former headquarters with the contents of desks and offices. At the U.S. Agency for International Development, workers were each assigned a 15-minute time slot to clear out.

“This happened because of a minority of people with agendas that are very destructive and greed-oriented,” said Rebecca Cammisa, the film’s director and a two-time Oscar nominee. “It was a free-for-all attitude of cruelty.”

The Trump administration argues that its agency staff cuts and reorganizations — including at USAID, which lost nearly all of its workforce after it was folded into the State Department — will enhance efficiency and slash spending.

The filmmakers behind “Heist,” however, contend that the downsizing of the civil service is benefiting individuals allied with the president. For example, the documentary highlights that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the top agencies targeted for job cuts by the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency, had been set to regulate one of Musk’s companies.

“We can't even have real debates about policy and what we think is right when government is no longer honest and the levers of power are quietly being pulled by the people who pay for that access,” said David Cowan, one of the producers.

The producing team is continuing the focus on civil servants; their next planned documentary will be about former feds running for office.

“Federal workers aren't people who are just purged and are down,” Cammisa said. “They've created organizations to help feed people. They've created organizations to help each other. Federal workers have created all kinds of things now that they're free to do it — and run for office because they're trying to reclaim government for the people.”

Still, the filmmakers are worried that the federal firings and layoffs could leave lasting damage to public services. With this in mind, they began and ended the documentary at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial on the National Mall.

“I think it was a good framework because these are the policies that are being screwed around with [by the Trump administration] that were part of [FDR’s] New Deal to put people back to work and to give people certain protections,” Kristen said.

The documentary’s closing shot features a young person taking a picture of statues in the FDR Memorial representing an unemployed couple during the Great Depression. The tourist puts her “Make America Great Again” baseball cap on them, remarking, “They became Trump supporters,” with a laugh.

“After the young lady left, Rebecca sat and cried,” Kristen recalled. “This is our country, folks. Like it or not, this is our country.”

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AFGE sues over EEOC’s apparent shutdown of class action cases against agencies

Erich Wagner — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:40:12 -0400

The nation’s largest federal employee union on Tuesday sued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force the quasi-judicial agency undo an unpublished edict that has blocked all class-action cases involving federal agencies for more than six months.

The American Federation of Government Employees accused EEOC Chairwoman Andrea Lucas of surreptitiously issuing a directive halting proceedings in all class-action discrimination and harassment complaints involving federal agencies last December. Though the document has never been published, administrative judges have since issued indefinite stays or otherwise paused class action case proceedings, including certifications, hearings and other appearances, and evidentiary and discovery processes.

“Effective immediately, all case processing in the above-captioned matter must be paused until further notice,” wrote EEOC Administrative Judge Erania Ebron on Dec. 10, 2025. “All scheduled deadlines and appearances are also cancelled. This notification applies to all class cases in the federal sector, including those alleging disparate impact.”

AFGE filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alongside union members and U.S. Bureau of Prisons correctional officers Deanna Chelette and Alexzandria Boyd, both of whom are within a certified class alleging their employer does not do enough to prevent rampant sexual harassment of female employees by inmates at the Federal Correctional Complex in Pollock, La. Their EEO case, filed in 2024 and receiving class-action certification for around 200 employees in March 2025, reports that inmates routinely verbally harass female correctional officers and subject them to “exhibitionist nudity,” public masturbation, rape threats and unwanted touching.

The EEOC’s own regulations encourage the use of class-action cases as a cheaper and faster manner of resolving allegations of discrimination or harassment than requiring each employee to file complaints individually—or filing individual or class-action lawsuits in federal court—and requires that class complaints “shall be processed promptly.” The union’s lawsuit accuses the commission of violating its own regulations, engaging in arbitrary and capricious decision-making in halting the processing of cases without any public announcement or rationale, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act.

“Defendants have not published the suspension directive or provided any explanation or authority for the decision,” the union wrote. “They have provided no procedure for an affected party to seek an exception or case-specific review. The directive has no stated termination date, leaving thousands of federal employees with no indication of when the EEOC will permit the adjudication of class claims to resume, and under what circumstances.”

AFGE argued that Lucas’ directive does far more than simply block class action EEO cases from moving forward. Because of how classes are determined by the commission, individuals who are not involved in a case but could be covered by its class cannot pursue their own claims on their own.

“The directive is also harmful to absent class members. In class cases, they cannot opt out, as their overlapping individual complaints are subsumed as soon as a formal class complaint is filed,” the union wrote. “They therefore cannot pursue their own claims in any form, administrative or judicial, while the proceeding that governs their rights remains frozen.”

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As USDA relocation deadlines near, employees say questions remain unanswered

Jory Heckman — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:55:53 -0400

Updated at 4:39 p.m. ET

The Agriculture Department is still sending relocation notices to employees on a rolling basis, despite a lawsuit seeking to put these plans on hold.

Employees also say the department has yet to answer key questions related to these upcoming moves, even as deadlines quicly approach.

USDA is asking thousands of employees to relocate across the country, as part of sweeping reorganization plans it began unveiling last year.

Employees across USDA’s component agencies have been getting relocation notices over the past few months, and must decide this summer whether they will accept relocation or leave their jobs. Staff who opt into the relocation generally must report to their new offices by September or October.

USDA announced last summer that it would relocate more than half of its Washington, D.C.-based headquarters employees out to five regional hubs across the country. It expanded its relocation plans to include many of its subcomponent agencies this spring. The department put part of its headquarters complex up for sale.

Department leaders have repeatedly claimed that most employees who get relocation notices will move to keep their jobs. But in its April 2025 Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan, recently made public by plaintiffs in a lawsuit, USDA states that a “significant number” of employees are not expected to relocate.

In this internal document, USDA planned to cut its total workforce by at least 23%, or by 31% when considering its public safety and inspection workforce.

USDA keeps relocation plans moving despite lawsuit

The Supreme Court ruled last summer that the Trump administration has sweeping authority to shrink the federal workforce through firings and layoffs. But unions and nonprofits leading the lawsuit argue that USDA’s actions “directly conflict” with spending bills passed by Congress that prohibit USDA from carrying out reorganization plans without the approval of lawmakers. They’re seeking a preliminary injunction from a federal judge that would temporarily block USDA’s relocation plans.

Mary Pletcher Rice, USDA’s acting principal deputy assistant secretary for administration, told the court on Friday that the department’s ARRP “does not reflect USDA’s current plans.” Under an agency staffing plan last updated in February, USDA forecasts a “modest increase in staffing,” and seeks to hire nearly 16,000 employees in fiscal 2026.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is scheduled to hold a hearing on Sept. 1 on whether to grant the injunction. Despite this upcoming court date, USDA is continuing to send out relocation notices to employees at its component agencies.

Employees say they're making decisions without answers

In a notice reviewed by Government Executive, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service recently told employees that relocation notices will go out to headquarters staff by July 31 and state staff by Aug. 14.

“NRCS leadership is committed to a transparent process, ensuring fairness, dignity, and respect for all employees. Personnel actions will be executed in accordance with federal merit requirements,” NRCS Chief Colton Buckley wrote in the notice.

Employees at the Food Safety and Inspection Service, which is relocating about two-thirds of its D.C.-area workforce to “mission-critical locations,” were told last month they must decide whether to relocate or quit their jobs by June 30.

Employees at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture also received their relocation notices last month. Non-bargaining unit employees got their notices weeks before those with union representation.

A NIFA employee told Government Executive that her relocation notice states she must decide whether or not she will relocate by July 29, but major questions about the possible move remain unanswered.

“This whole relocation has been marked with pervasive disorganization,” the NIFA employee said. “We’ve been asking about the injunction and if we should still be trying to sell our houses [and] commit funds to moving, but have been told the agency is moving ahead ‘business as usual.’”

Employees will be partially compensated for relocation expenses through the department’s new “lump sum” reimbursement model. Unions say the new reimbursement model is less generous than what USDA offered to employees who relocated under the first Trump administration, and could mean some employees end up spending thousands of dollars out of pocket in moving costs.

If employees opt into USDA’s “management-directed relocation," they receive an automated email that directs them to follow up with their supervisor on next steps. But the NIFA employee said those supervisors don’t have more details to offer, and that staff are running around in circles to get answers.

“The employee reaches out to their supervisor, who has no idea what’s next. The employee gets referred back to the MDR letter, which says someone will reach out. We end up with employees asking each other, ‘How do I talk to a relocation specialist? How does this work? What did you do?’” she said.

USDA officials have said in meetings that the department will roll out a process for employees to request a hardship exemption from relocation. USDA also told employees that there will be a process to review reasonable accommodations that would prevent employees with disabilities or medical conditions from relocating.

According to the NIFA employee, however, that process hasn’t been finalized yet, and USDA officials were surprised to hear in meetings that employees were already being denied relocation exemptions.

“The MOU mentions the ability to appeal, but folks have been told in their hardship denials that there is no appeals process,” the NIFA employee said.

A USDA spokesperson declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Unions warn relocations could deepen staffing losses

USDA shrank its workforce by about 20,000 employees largely through voluntary separation incentives last year – about a fifth of its total workforce.

Department leaders say the upcoming relocations are meant to bring its employees closer to the farmers, ranchers and other customers that they serve. But about 90% of USDA’s workforce is already outside of the D.C. metro area.

Genny Kotyk, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, said in a virtual briefing last Thursday that the Forest Service is still issuing relocation notices.

“This week alone, some of our senior level staff are getting their notices, that they're going to have to make a decision about moving or resigning. That's happening in real time right now,” Kotyk said.

Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told lawmakers that about 500 Forest employees are being asked to relocate as the agency moves its headquarters to Salt Lake City. The agency sent notices to 6,500 employees telling them that they could possibly be impacted by the agency’s relocation plans, but later said not all employees who received notices will be impacted.

Kotyk said that in an internal poll conducted by the union, only 7% of the 3,000 employees who responded said they would relocate if asked. About 40% of those 3,000 employees have some level of qualification that allows them to respond to wildland fires when needed.

“Potentially, that could be 93% of those 6,500 walking out the door along with those fire qualifications,” she said.

Chearice Vaughn, a financial and business loan specialist with USDA’s Rural Development mission area and president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 3870, said she is one of about 45 employees who recently received relocation notices to move from D.C. to Dallas.

“Relocating us hundreds of miles away doesn't make the work better,” Vaughn said. “It just adds moving costs, resignations, and lost expertise. That's not good government. That's a waste of taxpayer dollars to solve a problem that does not exist.”

Some agencies expect especially steep losses

According to Vaughn, 64% of impacted employees said in internal polling that they would not move to keep their jobs. Nearly all of them said they would stay in their jobs if they didn’t have to relocate to Texas.

Rural Development employees asked to relocate work for the Rural Utility Service and the Rural Business-Cooperative Service. These offices process loans and grants that fund rural water towers, broadband lines, electric co-ops and small businesses.

“It's a forced choice: Uproot your entire life, or leave federal service,” Vaughn said. “When a loan specialist with 30 years of underwriting experience walks out that door, that vacancy doesn't get refilled overnight. That's an active loan file that stalls, a water project that waits another year, a rural business loan that doesn't close in time to save the jobs that it was meant to create.”

Vaughn said that of the 45 employees asked to relocate, 86% are people of color, 72% are women, 90% are over the age of 40, and half have an approved reasonable accommodation on file.

“Whatever the intent behind this policy, the impact is falling overwhelmingly on Black women, older workers, and people with disabilities,” she said.

Some USDA components might see more severe staffing cuts than others. USDA's ARRP calls for cutting the Food and Nutrition Service’s workforce by at least 46% and directs FNS to “deemphasize the food stamp program,” referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

FNS lost about a third of its staffing last year, shrinking its more than 1,700-employee workforce down to less than 1,200 employees.

Officials and former leaders question the impact

Former FNS Administrator Cindy Long said FNS has always been a “leanly staffed organization relative to its massive responsibilities,” but would likely see further workforce attrition amid USDA’s relocation plans.

“Employees and the public have virtually no detail on how the new organization is supposed to operate and how it's expected to improve program operations,” Long said.

Two FNS employees told Government Executive that staff haven’t yet received notices to relocate to regional “hubs” across the country, but have gotten notices to move out of their Alexandria, Virginia headquarters and move to the George Washington Carver Center in Beltsville, Maryland and the Yates Building in downtown D.C.

USDA agencies saw major staffing losses when it relocated hundreds of D.C.-based employees to Kansas City under the first Trump administration — a much smaller-scale plan than what USDA is proposing under the second Trump term.

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

“The relocation of USDA agencies under Secretary [Sonny] Purdue, resulted in enormous staffing losses,” Bernie Kluger, a former senior advisor for management in USDA’s Office of the Secretary, now managing director of Prospect Partners, LLC, told Government Executive. Kluger said that this time around, “it would be safe to assume that the numbers would be comparable.”

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

“USDA already ran this experiment on our own agencies in 2019, and the results are sitting in the government's own audit,” said Laura Dodson, the vice president of AFGE Local 3403, which represents employees at ERS and NIFA.

The National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 226, which represents FNS employees, says more than 80% of staff who took an internal survey claim they will not relocate to keep their jobs. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, which represents USDA researchers, said it expects to see similar results.

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Federal employees say they’ll quit if they have to move to New Jersey

Fariha Rahman — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:03:47 -0400

What brings Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler and the majority of New York’s downstate congressional delegation together? A niche labor protest over the Trump administration’s attempt to move federal workers out of New York City.

The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 98, representing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ New York District and North Atlantic Division employees, rallied outside 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan on Thursday, protesting the proposed relocation of their offices to New Jersey. New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and Lander were among those who joined in person, while Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent a statement in support, calling on the federal government to keep the employees in New York. Members of both the Democratic and Republican New York congressional delegations have sent letters to the Trump administration urging them to reconsider the move.

Employees say they were not consulted on the decision to move offices out of New York City. The plan would move approximately 465 employees from the New York District office in Manhattan and the North Atlantic Division office in Brooklyn to a new proposed headquarters – likely in Newark, Hoboken or Jersey City – in an effort they say is aimed at reducing costs.

Critics of the planned move say it’s unfair and expressed concerns about depleting the workforce. When surveyed by the union, 45% of New York-based employees said they would leave their position if the office was relocated to New Jersey. Union members also claimed that this move would disproportionately impact women employees.

“We know that this issue disproportionately is affecting women when you talk about the additional costs that the workers would have to face,” Menin said Thursday. “We’re talking about childcare costs. We’re talking about extra transit costs. We have a situation where both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are opposed to this move.”

A lease for the new headquarters has not been signed yet according to Daniel Kim, president of IFPTE Local 98. An initial planned move for management into the new office is scheduled for Aug. 15 but the lease must be signed by July 31 to meet a 14-day requirement in accordance with the Congressional Review Act.

In a statement to City & State, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmed that no lease has been signed yet. “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has an ongoing responsibility to review its facilities and operational footprint to ensure the effective stewardship of taxpayer money,” said spokesperson Hector Mosley. He added they are “committed to ensuring there will be no impact on mission execution.”

Lander blamed President Donald Trump, claiming the move is aimed not at saving money but at weakening the Army Corps of Engineers.

“Their thought is that if they move it across the river, many people won’t stay in their jobs because they can’t manage a life of longer commuting, and they think some people will leave the agency,” he said. “Since they started with (the Department of Governmental Efficiency) they have been looking for a weaker, smaller federal government where they try to bust the labor unions, where they try to weaken the capacity of the essential services that Americans rely on, and we’ve seen that in agency after agency.”

A White House spokesperson referred City & State back to the Army Corps of Engineers when asked about Lander’s comments.

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Unions ask for injunction restoring collective bargaining at Defense

Erich Wagner — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:10:07 -0400

A pair of federal employee unions on Monday urged a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction restoring their collective bargaining agreements with the Defense Department, arguing that Secretary Pete Hegseth failed to follow the Trump administration’s own process for implementing two executive orders banning organized labor at most federal agencies.

Earlier this month, the American Federation of Government Employees and National Federation of Federal Employees sued the Pentagon over the April termination of their collective bargaining agreements, a move that the Defense Department said was aimed at complying with President Trump’s March 2025 executive order barring collective bargaining for two-thirds of the federal workforce on national security grounds.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for Maryland, focuses not on the legality of Trump’s edict, but rather whether Hegseth fulfilled his obligation to conduct “reasoned decision-making” under the Administrative Procedure Act when he ordered CBAs be terminated with just 24 hours’ notice.

“The Hegseth memorandum did not point to any facts showing that any of plaintiffs’ CBAs, much less all of them, were inconsistent with national security,” the unions wrote. “DOD agencies had voluntarily agreed to these CBAs. Nor did the Hegseth memorandum consider the obvious alternatives to immediate mass termination of all CBAs, such as refraining from terminating CBAs until litigation about [the executive order] runs its course, allowing CBAs to expire pursuant to their own terms, or identifying only those specific parts of CBAs that the secretary determined to be inconsistent with national security . . . The Hegseth memorandum was the opposite of the reasoned decision-making that the APA requires before final agency action.”

The unions said that the Defense Department did not even follow a template for terminating union contracts issued by the Office of Personnel Management in February, seemingly designed to address the APA’s requirements for agencies to explain policy changes and consider the reliance interests of stakeholders. Instead, Hegseth wrote simply that the actions were “required” in order to comply with Trump’s order.

“The OPM termination template reinforces that CBA terminations are discretionary and must comply with the APA’s requirements for reasoned decision-making,” the unions wrote. “The OPM template indicates that agencies should specify that, after the issuance of the EO, the agency ‘considered whether to terminate any CBA, in whole or part, as it pertains to those bargaining unit employees who fall within the EO’s scope.’”

Since the contracts’ termination in April, management officials have told union members that their union “does not exist any longer,” and some employees have been required to sign documents attesting that they lack union representation. Employees in disciplinary proceedings are denied access to union representation, managers are unilaterally changing employees’ work schedules with little notice, and the labor groups’ membership is on the decline.

“Plaintiffs face an existential threat because workers are afraid to engage in any union activity or are confused about their right to do so,” they wrote. “DOD is telling plaintiffs’ members and prospective members that they are ineligible to join unions and that their unions ‘do not exist.’ Plaintiffs cannot successfully retain or recruit members under such circumstances, and union membership is declining. These harms are irreparable.”

Since its initial filing earlier this month, AFGE and NFFE’s case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a jurist who was nominated to the federal bench by both presidents Obama and Trump.

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OPM shrinks its workforce by a third, seeks further staffing cuts

Jory Heckman — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:40:49 -0400

The federal government’s human resources office shed more than a third of its total workforce so far under the second Trump administration and is seeking further staffing cuts through another round of voluntary separation incentives.

The Office of Personnel Management shrank its total headcount by 35% between December 2024 and March 2026, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

In its analysis of federal workforce data, GAO found that more than half of OPM employees who left during this period had 11 or more years of service.

“These actions have reduced institutional knowledge and operational capacity at the agency,” GAO wrote, adding that these staffing cuts may worsen skills gaps it previously flagged at OPM.

Nearly 60% of OPM employees who have left under the second Trump administration did so through the deferred resignation program. Layoffs through a reduction in force account for 10% of OPM’s staffing cuts.

OPM is pursuing further workforce cuts. Last month, the agency announced it would give employees in its healthcare and insurance division another shot at opting into the deferred resignation program.

OPM set a July 13 deadline for eligible employees to opt in to the latest DRP offer. But employees age 40 or older have until Aug. 27 to consider the agreement. OPM employees accepted into this round of the DRP will go on paid administrative leave, starting at the end of August, and will officially separate from the agency in March 2027.

An OPM employee who opted into the latest DRP offer said it’s not yet clear how many coworkers have made the same decision.

“We are all curious, but no one is sharing unless they’re fully committed to staying,” the OPM employee said.

The latest DRP offer comes a few months before OPM’s busy Open Season, a one-month period in which federal and Postal Service employees can make changes to their healthcare plans.

Open Season starts in November and ends in December. Health plan changes made during this period go into effect in January.

An OPM spokesperson did not specify how many employees have opted into the latest DRP offer, but said in a statement that “we feel very confident in our staffing levels and OPM’s ability to deliver on a successful open season.”

Amid these workforce cuts, OPM has seen some processing delays.

OPM has been rolling out a long-awaited online system for federal retirees and marked its “last day” of paper-based processing this month. But federal employees who accepted the DRP offer last year are still waiting on OPM to finalize their retirement paperwork.

A former IRS employee who took the deferred resignation program last year said she is still waiting for her retirement checks to arrive.

“Those of us in this position have been forced to drain our savings, withdraw money from our 401(k)s and use credit cards to pay bills while waiting for our retirement checks to start,” she said.

The retired IRS employee said agency management held several meetings with employees about the deferred resignation offer and what it would mean for employees. But she said that “waiting almost a year for your retirement checks to process was not part of that discussion.”

She said she wouldn’t have taken the DRP offer if she knew she’d be waiting this long for her paperwork to be processed.

A former federal employee who retired from the National Cancer Institute last year said that OPM has not yet fully processed his retirement application. An OPM representative recently told him that his application has been adjudicated, but is still waiting to be reviewed.

"I can't help but wonder how many retirees are in the same boat,” the former NCI employee said.

An OPM spokesperson said the agency “remains committed to ensuring federal retirees receive the benefits they have earned while modernizing a decades-old retirement processing system,” and that the transition from a paper-based system will reduce processing times and provide a better experience for retirees.

GAO’s report found OPM’s retirement services office saw a 16% staffing decrease between fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2026.

OPM, earlier this year, proposed taking over the work of adjudicating the appeals of certain terminated federal employees from the Merit Systems Protection Board. But OPM’s Merit System Accountability & Compliance division, which would take on this work, has seen a more than 40% staffing cut.

OPM, in its FY 2027 budget justification, proposed using AI tools and modernizing its IT systems to carry out its work with fewer staff.

GAO wrote that it requested additional documents from OPM regarding its reorganization efforts and the rationale behind closing or consolidating offices, but OPM officials did not provide any of the requested documents, meet with GAO officials, or respond to GAO’s written questions.

Dawn Locke, the director of GAO’s Strategic Issues Team, said OPM provided additional information after GAO released its report on Monday. Locke said GAO requested this information from OPM more than five months ago, and has not yet had an opportunity to review the materials that OPM just submitted.

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Arbitrator restores telework for IRS workers

Erich Wagner — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:52:35 -0400

An independent arbitrator last week became the latest to order a federal agency to restore 2024-era telework agreements to its workforce, concluding that the Internal Revenue Service unlawfully repudiated its union contract when it effectively ended the workplace flexibility last year.

The National Treasury Employees Union first filed the grievance in March 2025, shortly after the IRS unilaterally cancelled telework and remote work agreements en masse, despite a collective bargaining agreement that required a “case-by-case” review of employees’ eligibility along with a detailed list of potential rationales for doing so. IRS rejected that grievance in May 2025, leading the union to request the help of an arbitrator.

But in late March, the agency told arbitrator Christopher Shulman that he was “no longer authorized to accept or adjudicate any grievances involving the IRS and NTEU,” and that management was withdrawing from all pending grievance proceedings. This corresponded both with a push by the Office of Personnel Management that month to encourage agencies to formally terminate their union contracts in accordance with President Trump’s 2025 executive orders banning unions at most federal agencies due to their purported national security work, as well as a push by some in the administration to prevent the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service from assigning arbitrators in the first place.

Shulman and NTEU then conducted a hearing in May with the agency in absentia, citing an provision within the parties’ collective bargaining agreement allowing proceedings to continue with only one party’s consent.

Shulman bemoaned the uncertainty surrounding much of the federal collective bargaining apparatus, as a variety of lawsuits challenging the validity of Trump’s anti-union executive orders and their implementation continue to work their way through the courts.

“It is not hyperbole that most federal sector labor practitioners await a final judicial determination on this issue with bated breath,” he wrote. “If the EO’s exclusion of the agency from [the federal sector labor management statute’s’] ambit is ultimately upheld, then the agency’s termination of the parties’ collective bargaining agreements and subsequent withdrawal from the arbitration process will be deemed legal. If the IRS exclusion under executive order 14251 is not upheld, then the agency will likely have committed an unfair labor practice by terminating the collective bargaining agreement and withdrawing from this arbitration.”

But that is all moot, he said, because IRS terminated its telework and remote work agreements before the March 2025 executive order and the ultimate March 2026 contract termination.

“It is black letter law that expiration of a collective bargaining agreement does not terminate rights and obligations arising under the contract during its term,” Shulman wrote. “The obligation to arbitrate survives expiration where (as here) ‘the dispute arose during the life of the contract but arbitration proceedings had not begun before termination. The same would be true if arbitration processes began but were not completed, during the contract’s term.’”

Despite IRS’ lack of participation, Shulman approximated the agency’s argument, based upon its announcement that it would withdraw as well as its initial decision denying the union’s grievance. Like other agencies, IRS said it was compelled to implement its return-to-office mandate by Trump’s Jan. 20 memo instructing federal workers to return to agency offices full-time and OPM’s declaration that telework is a management right, making CBA provisions governing the workplace flexibility “unenforceable.”

But Shulman described OPM’s guidance to agencies as an “unqualified overstatement” of a Federal Labor Relations Authority caselaw.

“As noted by the union, telework and remote work arrangements do not address what work duties employees are to perform, which employees will perform the work, how they are to do so, or when,” he wrote. “Instead, these arrangements simply discuss where employees will perform assigned work. As such, FLRA and the courts have held these arrangements do not affect an agency’s rights to determine mission or to assign work.”

Shulman ruled that the agency must restore bargaining unit employees’ telework and remote work agreements, as well as rescind any adverse personnel actions stemming from the cancellation of the workplace flexibilities. IRS has 30 days appeal the decision to the FLRA.

In a statement Monday, NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald argued that telework and remote work are programs that are beneficial to employees, management and ultimately the public.

“Not only does telework save taxpayers money through reduced leasing costs, reduced energy expenses and increased productivity, it also boosts employee recruitment and retention, reduces traffic congestion and helps ease rising commuting costs,” she said. “NTEU is ready and determined to continue fighting to enforce our win on behalf of the employees we represent.”

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Pentagon closes cyber apprenticeship applications early after receiving over 15,000

Edward Graham — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:22:46 -0400

The Pentagon prematurely closed the job listing for its new Cyber Registered Apprenticeship Program after receiving more than 15,000 applications, according to a Department of Defense official, although the agency is planning to announce additional opportunities in the coming weeks.

The 12-month apprenticeship is overseen by DOD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, which announced that the application window for the program went live on July 6. Although applications for the first opportunity were slated to be accepted through July 17, the Pentagon ultimately moved up the end date to July 13.

The official said the number of interested applicants “demonstrates there is not only an immense interest in cyber careers but also a real need for the federal government to provide alternate pathways for individuals to learn hands-on cyber skills and join the cyber workforce.”

The Pentagon first announced the launch of the program in April and said the pilot would help fill relevant cyber vacancies across its operations by, in part, emphasizing skill-based hiring. That focus aligns with the Trump administration’s overall effort to prioritize job experience over academic backgrounds in the federal hiring process.

The now closed job posting for the apprenticeship highlighted this lower bar to entry by only requiring that candidates be over 18 years of age, are U.S. citizens and have the ability to obtain and maintain a government security clearance. The program is designed to train apprentices for entry-level DOD positions, including as cyber defense analysts, cyber defense infrastructure support specialists and cyber defense incident responders.

Even before the posting went live, however, the Pentagon reported overwhelming interest in the apprenticeship. Speaking at the SAP NOW summit in Washington, D.C., last month, DOD Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said the program had “already generated more than 70,000 inquiries,” even though it had not yet officially launched.

The Pentagon official told Nextgov/FCW on Thursday that opportunities to participate in the program will continue moving forward.

“As one of the nation’s largest employers of cyber talent, the [Pentagon] recognizes the critical need for cyber training and education, especially now that the digital domain is integral to our national defense,” they added. “We are rolling out additional apprenticeship positions over the next few weeks and encourage applicants to apply for open positions, which will be posted on USAJobs.gov.”

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A year after State layoffs, ex-feds say U.S. is paying the price in Iran and Ebola crises

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:35:33 -0400

Megan Fotheringham, who served as the deputy director in the Office of Infectious Disease at the U.S. Agency for International Development before it was shuttered last year, showed a small, circular plaque to a crowd that assembled on Thursday in front of the Capitol Building.

“[The plaque] was given to a USAID foreign service advisor in 1976 after the first recognized Ebola outbreak was contained in Zaire. For me, it represents 50 years of U.S. commitment to stop Ebola at its source before it reaches our shores,” she said. “This plaque was on my desk during what became USAID's last Ebola response effort. When I was allowed back in my office for 15 minutes to collect my things, this was the very first thing that I grabbed because it is just symbolic of everything that was being lost.”

There’s currently an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa, and public health experts have argued that the Trump administration’s decision to fold USAID into the State Department, which pushed out nearly all USAID employees, has hindered response efforts.

Fotheringham was one of several former federal employees who shared their experiences at the event recognizing the one-year anniversary of layoffs at the State Department, which impacted 1,350 individuals. Speakers, including union officials and members of Congress, contended that the staff reductions are damaging the standing of the U.S. around the world.

“[The layoffs were] unfair to individuals who had built up experience and careers over a period of time. It disrupted their lives in a way that they should never have had to experience and hurt their families,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “But they would be the first to tell you that, most of all, what it did was hurt our country. It hurt our capacity to advance our interests and values overseas.”

In particular, speakers cited negotiations to end the war in Iran as a process that is being hampered by there being fewer career foreign affairs staffers.

“Instead of sending someone that's competent that knows how to write an [a memorandum of understanding], they sent two real estate developers — who have no idea what diplomacy is about — to write an MOU,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, both of whom are real estate developers, are spearheading the peace negotiations with Iran. Hostilities recently resumed in that war after the collapse of a ceasefire.

While the Trump administration has argued that cuts to the government workforce in general are necessary to improve efficiency, Maryum Saifee, a former foreign service officer, said that feds with relevant expertise have been ordered not to work.

“When war broke out in Iran, many of us — foreign service officers — [our jobs] were still sitting in limbo. I'm fluent in Arabic. I served in Baghdad. So some of us volunteered to staff the evacuation task force,” she said. “Guess what the department did? They said ‘No thank you.’ So we just sat on the sidelines.”

Additionally, an information panel set up next to the press conference speakers reported that, as result of job cuts at State’s Bureau of Energy Resources, “the office built to weaken Iran’s oil leverage and keep [the Strait of] Hormuz open was shuttered seven months before the conflict that saw gas prices spike.”

In response to a request for comment, the State Department praised career employees’ roles in responding to 2025 Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean and upholding a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand.

"The RIFs have not had any negative impact on our ability to respond to operations, our ability to plan and our ability to execute in service to Americans,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive. “In fact, we have been able to respond quicker and more effectively, which was the entire point of the reorg — to empower personnel in the field while allowing us to move at the 'speed of relevancy.'"

At Thursday’s press conference, Democratic lawmakers also expressed optimism that laid off State and USAID employees could rejoin the federal workforce in the future.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., touted new legislation that would exempt foreign service officers who were involuntarily separated or retired between Jan. 20, 2025, and Jan. 31, 2030, from having to take any written or oral test if they want to rejoin.

“There’s no reason you have to take the [Foreign Service Officer Test] again when you come back in,” he said. “But I’m sure you’d pass it.”

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More than 50 Dem lawmakers demand more Schedule F transparency

Erich Wagner — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:34:34 -0400

More than 50 congressional Democrats on Wednesday called on President Trump to produce more detailed information about last month’s conversion of roughly 8,000 federal jobs into Schedule Policy/Career, a new job category in which career employees serve on an at-will basis.

The group, which is led by Rep. James Walkinshaw and Tim Kaine, both D-Va., oppose the policy, formerly known as Schedule F, by which career positions in purportedly “policy-related” areas are removed from the federal government’s competitive service and the employees filling them stripped of most civil service protections.

“These federal employees are best able to fulfill [their] duties without fear of the politicization of their positions,” they wrote in a letter to Trump. “We are concerned that the thousands of positions and federal employees who were reclassified through Schedule Policy/Career will face political pressures that undermine the integrity of their critical work and be subjected to greater threats of termination without just cause or due process. All of this will greatly weaken the nonpartisan nature of the civil service.”

The lawmakers questioned how “completely apolitical” jobs like those in HR and procurement have been targeted for reclassification and said it is difficult to understand the true scope given the only limited disclosures regarding Schedule Policy/Career’s implementation. As of press time, the only documentation provided by the administration has consisted of a list of reclassified jobs, without any information regarding where jobs sit in agencies’ organizational charts or how many employees were associated with each job.

“The lack of transparency into the Schedule P/C process compounds our concerns about the intent and impact of the policy,” they wrote. “To date, only an appendix listing the agencies, position titles and corresponding position description codes that were classified to Schedule P/C has been made public. But that appendix does not include the exact total number of positions affected, how many employees are affected within each position, the seniority levels of the different positions, or their governmentwide occupational series numbers, leaving the public and Congress without a clear understanding of the exact extent to which the federal workforce is being politicized.”

The lawmakers demanded more—and more granular—data regarding the first tranche of Schedule P/C conversions, including the total number of employees impacted for each agency and subagency and their demographic information. They also requested details on whether any agencies’ requested reclassifications were denied, how agencies will handle adverse action appeals that began prior to an employee’s reclassification, and what safeguards are being put in place to protect whistleblowers from retaliation.

The lawmakers’ letter comes as, despite the White House’s claims to the contrary last month, agencies may be prepping for a second round of reclassifications in Schedule Policy/Career. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Bloomberg Law in an interview last week that a new round could focus on GS-13 and GS-14 posts, and NOTUS reported a new list of jobs could be sent to the White House for conversion by the end of September.

“This policy change opens the door for corruption and inefficiency in government, the likes of which we have not seen since before passage of the Pendleton Act [in 1883],” the lawmakers wrote. “When the people tasked with carrying out the law can be fired for telling the truth, waste goes unreported and bad actors go unchecked, it’s the American people who will suffer as a result.”

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Arbitrator restores telework and remote work at the Forest Service

Erich Wagner — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:02:59 -0400

Some 20,000 U.S. Forest Service employees could soon get their telework and remote work agreements restored—and for some ex-workers, their jobs back—after an independent arbitrator last week found the agency violated union contracts when it canceled those deals last year.

In April 2025, Forest Service management unilaterally canceled the two workplace flexibilities en masse, as part of the agency’s implementation of President Trump’s January 2025 directive that federal employees report to agency offices on a full-time basis. The National Federation of Federal Employees, a union that represents around 20,000 Forest Service workers, filed a grievance, asserting violations of its contract with the agency, which mandated that telework could only be canceled because of an employee’s performance, changes in eligibility or because of a “business need.”

Office of Personnel Management guidance issued in 2025 said that agencies should implement Trump’s return-to-office mandate “in accordance” with their collective bargaining obligations but advised without evidence that telework provisions of union contracts were “unlawful and unenforceable.”

In proceedings before an independent arbitrator, NFFE argued that the agency’s disregard of its CBA amounted to an unfair labor practice, as well as a violation of merit systems principles, which bar “arbitrary” personnel actions. Union officials testified to a chaotic rollout of return to office, as the agency struggled to cobble working arrangements for jobs that traditionally had little in-office component.

“Our Forest Inventory and Analysis employees—their job is to go out to the field and count trees literally, and go back to their office and record those data...those were often remote employees because, if you have a unit that has to cover a dozen states, it does not make sense for the agency to have, you know, little, tiny offices or rental arrangements,” said Carl Houtman, negotiations chairman for NFFE’s Forest Service Council, per the arbitrator. “It’s just the way it has been for a very long time. And employees have built their lives around this type of remote work.”

The agency, for its part, argued that the cancellation of telework and remote work agreements constituted an evocation of management rights, and argued that implementation of a presidential directive constituted a “business need” for the purposes of the CBA.

“The agency denies that it committed an unfair labor practice by failing to bargain the change and by unilaterally implementing a change tor remote assignments,” arbitrator Robert T. Simmelkjaer wrote. “From the agency’s perspective, it ‘had no choice regarding whether or not it implemented the directives set forth in the presidential memo and therefore had no duty to bargain over the changes.’”

But Simmelkjaer disagreed, finding that Trump’s return-to-office memo was legally akin to an executive order or change in federal regulations, which courts have found do not take precedent over pre-existing provisions of collective bargaining agreements. That means that the Forest Service should have waited until the next set of contract negotiations to broach the issue, he wrote.

“Absent express contract language granting the agency unilateral authority to terminate the individual remote and telework agreements, irrespective of supervisory input, and assuming arguendo that the agency purportedly had no choice except to implement the president’s memorandum, this arbitrator cannot construe the PM and its RTO as preempting the terms and conditions of a legally binding CBA,” Simmelkjaer wrote.

Simmelkjaer ordered the Forest Service to reinstate telework and remote work agreements that existed prior to Trump’s memo, as well as to offer those who left the agency due to the return-to-office mandate their old jobs back.

In a statement, NFFE Forest Service Council President Genny Kotyk said the decision could serve as a needed reprieve from the Trump administration’s plan to reorganize the agency and move its headquarters to Utah.

“This favorable decision could not have come at a better time,” she said. “Our employees are currently being threatened to move across the country and uproot their lives—supposedly to cut costs—or being forced to leave the agency. With telework and remote work agreements lawfully reimplemented, many employees will be relieved of having to make that difficult decision, while also saving taxpayers the substantial cost to relocate.”

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The biggest story in the federal workforce cuts isn't how many left, it's who wasn't replaced

Ali Akram — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:31:40 -0400

The story of the 2025 federal workforce reduction has been told in headcount. In September 2025 alone, about 121,000 civilian employees left federal service, nearly six times the figure for the same month a year earlier, the bulk of them through a governmentwide deferred resignation program with an end-of-September deadline. The number is large, and the debate about whether the government is now too small or right-sized will continue. But headcount is the wrong number to watch. What determines whether agencies can still do their work is not how many people left. It's who got replaced.

I looked at public Office of Personnel Management data on federal separations and accessions, and I want to be precise about the window. This is a snapshot of one unusual month, the month the deferred resignation deadline fell, compared with the same month in 2024 to strip out the seasonality in federal hiring. It is not a yearlong trend. It is a close look at what happened during a single, intense contraction. For every occupation, I computed a simple replacement ratio: hires divided by departures. A ratio near 1 means departures are being refilled. A ratio near 0 means they are not.

In that month, replacement broke sharply along skill lines. The occupations that went barely replaced were the analytical, technical and acquisition roles. The ones that kept being refilled were frontline service roles. Behind the percentages are stark raw counts, all for September 2025. Among management and program analysts, 8,218 people left and 106 were hired, a 1% replacement rate. In information technology, 7,456 left and 181 were hired, a 2% replacement rate. Contracting, the function that runs federal procurement, saw 3,520 departures and 174 hires, a 5% replacement rate. Statisticians saw 319 departures and three hires. By contrast, nurses saw 1,185 departures against 731 hires, a 62% replacement rate. Medical officers were replaced at 58%, while criminal investigators were replaced at slightly above one-to-one.

How do we know this is unusual and not just how these jobs always hire? Because a year earlier, hiring followed a much more typical pattern. In September 2024, management analysts saw 497 departures against 608 hires, information technology workers saw 645 departures against 814 hires and statisticians saw 16 departures against 27 hires. In an ordinary month, these roles refill at or above replacement. The single-month comparison is one baseline, not a law of federal hiring, but it is a clean one, and it shows that what happened in 2025 was a break from the prior year, not the normal rhythm of these occupations.

A word on how I separated higher-skill from lower-skill work, because it matters. I ranked occupations using a simple composite of attributes the OPM data already report: share with a bachelor's or advanced degree, share in STEM or health fields, average tenure and average pay. The conclusion does not hinge on the exact recipe. The same split appears if you rank occupations by any one of those measures alone, for instance degree level or salary. The composite is a convenience, not a black box on which the finding depends.

Why did the break fall this way? Two policies acted at once, and here the data are clear about the mechanism even where they cannot prove intent. A near-total hiring freeze shut off replacement across the board, which is why hiring fell from hundreds to handfuls. At the same time, the deferred resignation program drove departures, and it drew most heavily on the technical occupations. Between 86% and 94% of the 2025 departures in management analysis, information technology, contracting and statistics came through that program, compared with roughly 20% for nurses and medical officers. Frontline roles, with statutory or operational staffing floors, continued hiring. An across-the-board instrument produced a sharply uneven result.

What the data show is the replacement gap. What they do not directly measure, but what reasonably follows, is the consequence. When a contracting shop loses most of its officers and refills almost none, the expected result is slower procurements and thinner oversight. When information technology replacement stops, modernization and security work are the likely casualties. When analysts and statisticians leave and are not refilled, leadership has less capacity to answer its own questions with evidence. These are inferences about capability, not measurements of it, and they should be read that way. But they are the natural reading of a contraction that hit hardest exactly where expertise is most concentrated and slowest to rebuild.

The narrower, defensible point is this. Headcount, vacancy rates and attrition all registered a smaller workforce. They did not show that the composition of what remained had shifted away from the hardest-to-rebuild skills. But that shift is measurable in close to real time with data the government already publishes. A replacement ratio computed by occupation and checked against the prior year is a simple early indicator that a chief human capital officer could act on through targeted hiring exceptions, retention or knowledge transfer while the expertise can still be recovered.

A workforce reduction is a policy choice, and reasonable people will disagree about its size. But there is a difference between deciding to be smaller and, without quite meaning to, deciding to be less capable. In this one episode, the numbers point to the second. That is the kind of thing worth measuring before it becomes the kind of thing you only notice in hindsight.

Ali Akram is a data scientist and independent researcher in Minneapolis who studies public sector workforce capacity and staffing. He previously served as the Human Resources Workforce Data Analyst for the City of Minneapolis. He holds an M.S. in Data Science from the University of St. Thomas.

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Fired EPA dissenters sue for reinstatement, alleging First Amendment violations

Erich Wagner — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

More than half a dozen former Environmental Protection Agency staffers, fired last summer over their participation in an open letter criticizing agency leadership, sued last month over their removal, alleging illegal retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights.

In June 2025, hundreds of EPA employees signed an open “declaration of dissent” addressed to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, criticizing him for abandoning science and environmental justice efforts and instilling a “culture of fear” at the agency. In response, EPA suspended 150 employees who signed the letter by name in their personal capacities, eventually meting out punishments from letters of reprimand through termination.

Twenty employees ultimately were fired for their role in signing the dissent letter. While the majority have begun pursuing appeals before the Merit Systems Protection Board, seven lack that avenue as they were fired while still on their one-year probationary period, before most civil service protections vest.

Across two lawsuits, one filed in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., and another for eastern Illinois, the seven former probationary workers accuse EPA leadership of ignoring both the advice of legal counsel and the results of an investigation into the letter—which found none of the employees signed it while at work or using agency resources—to retaliate against them.

“The speech at issue did not disrupt the workplace, impede plaintiffs’ ability to do their work, or harm the mission of the agency,” they wrote. “The agency had no evidence of any such disruption or harm when it decided to terminate plaintiffs. Instead, the agency’s own investigation concluded that there was no interference with plaintiffs’ work. Nevertheless, the agency selected plaintiffs for termination—not based on any assessment of the impact of their conduct on the agency, but rather because they lacked the right to appeal their terminations to the Merit Systems Protection Board.”

Ordinarily, probationary employees seeking to appeal their termination must instead go to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to request an investigation. The seven employees said they did so last December but implied that the office has informally tabled any investigation.

“Plaintiffs’ counsel discussed the complaint with the OSC investigator via email and phone on numerous occasions, including phone calls on December 19, 2025; January 28, 2026; February 23, 2026; April 24, 2026; and May 18, 2026,” the lawsuit states. “[During] the calls, the investigator indicated that OSC was investigating plaintiffs’ complaints but that he could not provide details regarding the steps taken in the investigation or a timeline for its completion . . . As of the filing of this lawsuit, it has been nearly seven months since plaintiffs filed their OSC complaints. Plaintiffs have received no indication from OSC of whether it intends to seek corrective action on their behalf.”

A group of 22 Democratic senators lent their support to the fired staffers’ cause last month, urging Zedlin in a letter to reinstate them due to the “lack of any evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever.”

“In early April, E&E News reported that an EPA personnel lawyer warned EPA political management that disciplining the employees for speaking out would trample their First Amendment rights,” they wrote. “EPA leadership pursued discipline anyway. When the legal investigation into these employees failed to produce a valid case, the agency resorted to a vague charge of ‘conduct unbecoming of a federal employee’ to justify retaliation against an employee for speaking out.”

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Judges block Trump effort to narrow public service loan forgiveness

Benjamin Leff, The Conversation — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:08:46 -0400

Two federal judges in different courts have blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to deny employees of nonprofits that oppose the Trump administration’s political agenda access to a program through which they could avoid having to pay off all of their student loans. Both issued their judgments on June 30, 2026.

As a law professor who studies the nonprofit sector, I believe that both judges made the right decision because the historical strength of the nonprofit sector in the U.S. is its independence from government control. The First Amendment requires that laws governing nonprofits be neutral, and that no administration can punish an organization merely because its actions or views are at odds with the White House.

Forgiving student debt owed by public service workers

Congress approved the legislation that created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program in 2007. This program cancels the remaining balance on federal student loans after eligible borrowers consistently make payments on their student debt for 10 years.

Only borrowers with public service jobs may participate and be eligible to have some of their student loan balance canceled. That is, they need to work for the government at any level, including public schools, or at any charitable nonprofit.

One of the program’s goals was to encourage young Americans, especially those with significant student debt, to do jobs that serve the public good but pay less than what they might earn in the private sector.

The government does not cancel any student loan debt until the Education Department verifies that eligible borrowers have met all requirements, including a decade of steady payments from public school teachers, government officials and employees of nonprofits of all kinds – such as food banks and museums.

But that promise of debt relief for borrowers at some nonprofits was jeopardized prior to these two rulings.

To date, the program has canceled more than US$87 billion in student loans for nearly 1.2 million Americans. On average, borrowers have seen about $74,000 in debt erased.

Trump administration’s attempt to revise the program

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on March 7, 2025, directing the Department of Education to change who can be eligible for public service loan forgiveness.

In the order, he complained that some of the program’s participants may have worked for organizations that “actually harm our society and American values, sometimes through criminal means.” The order does not name any of those nonprofits, but it named some examples: aiding immigrants, treating minors’ gender dysphoria, advancing diversity, equity and inclusion goals, and helping to organize left-wing protests.

Trump said he wanted the government to refuse to forgive loan balances of borrowers who work for those employers. The order itself was not legally binding, but it guided the drafting of a new regulation the Education Department issued on Oct. 31, 2025. The regulation ordered the exclusion from the debt forgiveness program of employers that “engage in specific enumerated illegal activities such that they have a substantial illegal purpose.”

The phrase “substantial illegal purpose” comes out of nonprofit law; organizations with an illegal purpose can’t be tax-exempt charities. But the doctrine has been employed in very limited circumstances in the past, and the government has never developed rules to ensure that it is not abused.

Instead of developing those rules, the regulation identifies specific issues that the Trump administration objects to and has treated as high priorities.

Doing those activities would disqualify an employer from participation in the program under that regulation, if the Education Department determined that those organizations employed illegal means to advance their goals.

A group of 22 state attorneys general and a coalition of nonprofits, municipal governments and labor unions filed separate lawsuits on Nov. 3, 2025, to block the regulation. Those lawsuits were later combined. Another group of nonprofits filed a similar lawsuit the next day.

Why the judges struck Trump’s revised rules

On the day before the new rule was set to go into effect, , in Massachusetts, and , in Washington, D.C., struck it down – preventing the Department of Education from implementing it.

More than a year after Trump’s executive order, both judges found that the statute that Congress passed was unambiguous about which employers qualified for the program: all nonprofits with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. And because the statute was so clearly written, the Education Department has no authority to change the eligibility criteria to exclude particular organizations, the judges found.

Because organizations that serve an illegal purpose already can’t have tax-exempt status, no such organization may participate in this loan forgiveness program. Both judges held that the Education Department exceeded its authority by granting itself the power to determine which nonprofits’ employees can’t be eligible.

In short, judges Joun and Ali said the Trump administration can’t change federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program rules to punish people who work for certain kinds of nonprofits that the administration doesn’t like – or to use the program to advance its agenda.

What this means for borrowers and nonprofits

These rulings are good news for borrowers who work for nonprofits whose missions are at odds with the Trump administration’s agenda.

Both rulings vacated the new regulation, which means the federal government cannot implement its revised rule anywhere in the country.

The U.S. Supreme Court held in 2025 that district court judges couldn’t impose nationwide injunctions. But that ruling does not affect court rulings that strike down agency regulations.

If the administration appeals, an appellate court could restore the new regulation.

The Supreme Court could even get involved at some point. But although the court has been expanding executive power in some situations, the justices have reduced the leeway administrative agencies have to issue regulations that add additional requirements to clear statutes.

In my view, the Supreme Court would therefore be unlikely to side with the administration if it were to hear this case.

Implications for everyone else

Both judges held that the revised rule exceeded the Education Department’s authority. Joun in Massachusetts went further than Ali in Washington.

Joun held that the new regulation “is facially unconstitutional because it discriminates on the basis of viewpoint.”

That’s important because he recognized that “selectively targeting” organizations because their goals are contrary to those of the administration is very different from trying to prevent the employees of criminal organizations from having their student loans forgiven.

The Trump administration has been aggressively jumbling these two things together. Because organizations’ viewpoints are protected by the U.S. Constitution, the government can’t discriminate in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program against an organization that advocates for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, for example – or one that seeks to have them removed.

On the other hand, violent or illegal tactics are not protected by the Constitution or eligible for tax-exempt status. That means an organization that employs them can be denied benefits.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program regulation that the Trump administration has sought to implement expressly blurs these lines. I think it’s reasonable to interpret this jumbling as a tactic intended to chill protected activity by instilling fear in those who disagree with the Trump administration’s policies. And I see Joun’s opinion as a bulwark against that type of intimidation.

These rulings should give Americans of all political stripes more confidence that their rights will be respected, no matter who is in office.

Benjamin Leff, Professor of Law, American University

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

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Unions sue to restore DOD collective bargaining rights, asserting ‘chaos’

Erich Wagner — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

A pair of federal employee unions last week sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his April directive that the department terminate most of its collective bargaining agreements, alleging he violated the Administrative Procedure Act and exceeded his statutory authority when he sought formal implementation of President Trump’s anti-union executive order.

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to strip roughly two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights on national security grounds. Unions and the Justice Department have engaged in pitched legal battle ever since, across more than half a dozen court cases.

Agencies have since moved to implement the order, along with an August 2025 sequel banning unions at more agencies, in fits and starts, in part due to the litigation. While many agencies took informal steps to comply, such as cancelling the automatic collection of union dues, they largely refrained from terminating their contracts with labor groups until last August.

At that point, the Office of Personnel Management changed its guidance regarding the executive orders and suggested agencies could “choose” to terminate their CBAs. OPM again changed course in February, then recommending that agencies “should” take that that step.

A new lawsuit filed by the American Federation for Government Employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees in the U.S. District Court for Maryland accuses Hegseth of violating the Administrative Procedure Act for ordering the department to cancel its union contracts with just 24 hours’ notice and no plan to carry it out in an orderly fashion. The result, the unions say, was “chaos.”

“DOD did not have any uniform process for implementing the termination of CBAs, and in many cases there were virtually no notification or communication at all about what actions were being taken, if any,” the lawsuit states. “Some local union leaders were informed by phone that their unions’ CBAs were being terminated; others were informed by email, or by letter; others received no communications at all—their agency counterparts just went ‘radio silent,’ or started refusing to answer routine questions. Beyond these ‘official’ notifications (or lack thereof), Secretary Hegseth’s memorandum begat a firestorm of confusion and misinformation at facilities nationwide—about who still did or did not have collective bargaining agreements, and why, and since when.”

The unions argued that the slapdash rollout also resulted in employees losing their union rights despite being ostensibly exempt from Trump’s executive order. While the order states that the “local employing offices” of police officers, security guards and firefighters will continue to be covered by federal sector labor law, in practice the Pentagon has continued to recognize the union rights only of first responders, not the dispatchers, IT workers and other staff they work alongside.

“Yet DOD failed to prepare any list of subdivisions that are not covered by the EO because they employ police officers, firefighters or security guards before issuance of the Hegseth memorandum, nor did the Hegseth memorandum provide for such a list to be created before implementation of the memorandum,” the unions wrote. “[Thus], across DOD, subdivisions have declared that employees who work alongside police officers, firefighters and security guards—workers in the same ‘local employing office’ within the meaning of the EO—no longer have the protections of their CBAs or any rights under the [federal labor statute], in direct contradiction of the EO.”

AFGE and NFFE’s lawsuit mirrors a similar legal challenge filed last year by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees, which successfully resulted in a court order blocking the Defense Department from terminating their contracts. It sets aside the broader question of whether Trump’s executive orders are lawful and focuses on how the Defense Department sought to implement them.

The unions argued that since Hegseth neither moved to terminate CBAs either last August when OPM first said agencies could elect to do so, nor in February when OPM said they “should” take that step, he was required by the Administrative Procedure Act to explain the change in policy.

“For nearly a year after the issuance of EO 14251, DOD continued its longstanding policy of honoring the CBAs into which it has entered,” they wrote. “The DOD’s April 9, 2026 decision to terminate those CBAs within 24 hours irrationally and improperly failed to explain why the DOD would no longer honor existing CBAs, or why termination was necessary within 24 hours notwithstanding the agency’s prior honoring of CBAs and the predictable chaos that would result from DOD’s abrupt reversal.”

They also asserted that by stripping employees who work alongside departmental policy officers, firefighters and security guards of their collective bargaining rights, Hegseth exceeded the authority granted him by the executive order, since the edict exempted those employees’ entire offices from its coverage.

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Some disabled veterans say losing telework accommodations is making it harder for them to keep working at the VA

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:13:01 -0400

Many disabled veterans serve in agencies. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2024 about one-fifth of employed veterans with a service-connected disability worked for the federal government.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Veterans Affairs Department is one of the most common agencies where veterans work. It employs more than 105,000 vets, according to federal workforce data from the Office of Personnel Management, which is nearly a quarter of the department’s workforce.

Several disabled veterans who work at the VA told Government Executive, however, that they feel the department is pushing them out of their jobs.

At the start of his second term, President Donald Trump terminated work from home for the civil service, arguing that the workplace flexibility had been abused following the COVID-19 pandemic. But his directive exempted qualifying feds with disabilities — many of whom are eligible for telework through a reasonable accommodation, which agencies are required to provide under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 unless doing so would result in an “undue hardship.” Other examples of reasonable accommodations include interpreters for people who are deaf and accessible work stations.

Multiple VA employees interviewed by Government Executive said that since the department undertook a review of reasonable accommodations in response to Trump’s directive that officials have denied and rescinded telework accommodations, which is impacting many veterans with disabilities.

“There's a joke within the VA that the VA supports disabled veterans, unless you work for the VA,” said Galen Wheless, the president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1594 in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“I guess they fully expect me to quit or lose the job”

Kevin Price medically retired from the Army after a particularly bad helicopter landing during training that has led to flare-ups of pain in his legs. Oftentimes, he works from bed for half of the day.

“I treat it like a slow computer. Sometimes it takes my body — not all the time — but sometimes it takes my body a little bit longer to wake up,” he said.

Because Price was on a telework reasonable accommodation, he and his young family in 2024 were able to move more than three hours away from his office to live closer to relatives. He received permission from his supervisors for his relocation, with one saying in an email Price shared with Government Executive that the reasonable accommodation allows him “to live anywhere in the state of Florida.”

In February, however, the VA rescinded his reasonable accommodation. While Price appealed — emphasizing his move and that he’s limited to driving no more than 30 minutes because of his disability — department officials responded in an email that an “employee’s commute to and from the worksite is generally considered outside the scope of the position’s essential functions; therefore, the agency is not responsible for providing accommodations related to commuting.”

Cheri Cannon — a partner at Tully Rinckey who specializes in federal employment law — said the VA’s contention regarding accommodations and commuting is “not a lawful justification.”

“The Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act require employers to accommodate known disabilities if a person could otherwise perform their job duties,” she said. “So if you can perform your job duties at home and you need a reasonable accommodation in order to do that, driving is a life function just like walking, talking, reading, hearing and seeing. Driving is a life activity covered under the statute.”

VA press secretary Quinn Slaven disputed that characterization in a statement to Government Executive, calling claims that the department is violating the Rehabilitation Act "absurd." He pointed to guidance stating that agencies may review previously granted telework accommodations and replace them with "an effective alternative reasonable accommodation."

Based on department emails reviewed by Government Executive, the VA offered Price alternative accommodations onsite, including extra breaks, a wellness room and an ergonomic chair. He said that several coworkers received the same suggested accommodations, even though they have different disabilities.

Those emails also show that VA officials said there wasn’t any space in an office closer to Price’s new home.

“So they fully expect me to drive over 150 miles one way, Monday through Friday,” Price said.

Price hasn’t yet had to undertake the approximately six-hour total commute because he started parental leave around his mandated return-to-office date. But he said the rescission of his reasonable accommodation has already taken a toll on his health.

“I had an urgent doctor's appointment because my blood pressure was skyrocketing,” he said. “I was in hypertension. I wasn't sleeping. I was stressed out of my mind.”

And Price’s parental leave ends later this month, so he’s unsure if he’ll be able to stay at the VA.

“I guess they fully expect me to quit or lose the job,” he said.

“It’s extremely draining”

Daniel Solee — a VA employee and Navy veteran with PTSD and a traumatic brain injury — had been working under a telework reasonable accommodation since 2021. It was rescinded, however, in July 2025 in what he believes was retaliation for criticizing his management.

“[My supervisor’s] reasoning was that [Trump’s] order requested all employees return back to the office, which is correct, but it did not say that the Rehabilitation Act is revoked,” he said.

Solee said that he continued to work remotely, but his supervisor eventually revoked his access to systems that he needs for his job and he was terminated in October 2025 for not showing up in person.

With support from his union, he challenged his firing before the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears federal employees’ appeals. Ultimately, Solee was reinstated as a result of a settlement agreement viewed by Government Executive under which the VA also agreed to participate in a new reasonable accommodation process and provide backpay that Solee said totaled $30,000 before taxes.

After returning to his job in March, the VA offered Solee telework two days per pay period as an alternative reasonable accommodation, according to documentation viewed by Government Executive. But he declined, saying his doctor argues that he requires full-time telework. Now in a standoff, Solee said that he is continuing to work remotely every day, but his supervisor is again limiting his access to systems. And he’s only receiving about half of his normal paycheck due to being deemed AWOL, he said.

“It's extremely draining. It usually increases my TBI with a headache,” he said. “It's constant stuff daily that I go through. I used to have a mental health appointment every three months. Now I have to do it every two weeks because of the stress level.”

He emphasized, however, that he does not want to leave the VA, arguing that the MSPB settlement shows his supervisor is at fault.

“I should leave my job for a person that just cost the VA money? For a person that illegally tried to terminate me? For a person that illegally tried to revoke my reasonable accommodation?” he said.

VA’s Slaven also defended the department’s broader return-to-office policy.

“Under President Trump, VA took thousands of employees off remote work and brought them back to the office, where they can work as a team to better serve veterans,” Slaven wrote. “At the same time, VA is ensuring accommodations are granted to employees who need them the most.”

Regarding Price’s and Solee’s experiences, Slaven said the VA cannot provide information about employees unless they sign a “Request for and Authorization to Release Health Information” form. Government Executive relayed this information to both individuals who declined to sign, citing concerns about sharing their health information.

In addition to the alleged professional and medical harms, disabled vets who work at the VA say the return-to-office directive has caused other consequences for them.

One such employee, who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation, estimates that he is spending an additional $500 per month on transportation and clothing. This individual said that he previously teleworked because it was department policy at the time rather than a need due to a reasonable accommodation.

“This is a moral issue”

Government Executive previously reported on a June 2025 VA memo that outlined a new policy to provide stricter scrutiny of reasonable accommodations as part of an effort to “maximize” in-person work. Similar processes have played out since the start of the second Trump administration at other agencies, including the departments of Treasury, Health and Human Services and Justice as well as the National Science Foundation.

But Douglas Massey, president of AFGE Local 17 for VA’s Central Office in Washington, D.C., said that he received reports of department employees across the country getting their telework reasonable accommodations denied as early as spring 2025.

“This is a moral issue,” he said. “These are veterans. We’re supposed to be serving veterans.”

Wheless, the local president from Florida, said that union officials from other areas have not reported widespread reasonable accommodation recissions. But his local is currently representing nearly 150 impacted individuals.

“These are people with, for example, epilepsy. It's illegal for them to drive, so they can't come into the office. We have stories of a person missing half a lung who is immunocompromised that can't be in an office environment,” he said. “We have folks with PTSD that literally were blown up in wartime that need to be out of an office environment. They’re still valid, capable workers that can still do all the essential functions of their job, but they just shouldn't be doing it in an office environment, per their doctor's orders.”

Another disabled veteran who works at the VA said that she requested a short-term telework reasonable accommodation after a major car accident exacerbated a service-connected mental health disability that temporarily prevented her from driving. While she used to regularly telework in her position, officials denied the request, contending that the department is not responsible for her commute.

“So I talked to my husband, he went to his job and they changed his schedule. They accommodated him for me, so he could drive me to work and pick me up,” she said. “The VA — my VA, my military, my country — basically would not help me, but his work would. That really bothered me.”

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Trump wants to scrap a key framework for federal employee discipline

Erich Wagner — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:46:02 -0400

The Trump administration last week proposed new regulations that would nullify a decades-old legal framework agencies use to mete out and justify federal employee discipline in favor of what critics say will be a vaguer and less fair standard.

In a proposed rule published in the Federal Register, the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board jointly called for “retiring” the Douglas factors, a list of 12 criteria agencies are expected to employ when they consider disciplinary measures, developed in a 1981 MSPB case shortly after the implementation of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. They include, among other things, the severity of the offense, an employee’s past performance and conduct and their potential for rehabilitation.

But OPM and MSPB argued that rubric had grown too restrictive, and that agencies had taken a “mechanical” approach to apply each factor to a given disciplinary case, disincentivizing managers from pursuing adverse actions against their employees.

“In proposing this departure from the 12-factor Douglas test, MSPB acknowledges that Douglas has long been a cornerstone of federal employment law,” the agencies wrote. “However, over the ensuing decades, agencies and, occasionally, MSPB, have applied Douglas in a rigid, mechanistic way that the original decision never contemplated or prescribed. For the reasons set forth in this proposed rule, and in conjunction with OPM’s streamlining of performance management policy, the board proposes to correct this rigid application and reaffirm the board’s commitment to adjudicating disciplinary action appeals under a more flexible standard in conformance with its statutory authority.”

Raymond Limon, who served as a Democratically appointed member of MSPB from 2021 until February 2025, said that while he agrees that the Douglas factors are designed to be “illustrative” rather than rigid, the administration’s description of how they are applied doesn’t jibe with his experience adjudicating employees’ appeals, particularly given agencies better than 80% success rate before the board.

“It’s possible that some agencies on their own have created a more formalistic approach requiring supervisors to complete it like a checklist and address every issue,” he said. “But to me, if they’re doing that, that’s because they’ve developed a poor policy or don’t understand the law correctly . . . I feel like the proposed regulation assumes that Douglas is the disease, but it may simply be the stethoscope.”

OPM and MSPB’s new standard—to simply consider the “totality of circumstances” when considering a disciplinary measure—is vaguer and ripe for abuse, said Michael Fallings, managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, a firm specializing in federal employment law.

“’Totality’ is just a vague way of saying that we’re going to consider factors, but what they’re trying to say is, ‘We don’t have to consider certain factors that may some times be in favor of the employee,’” Fallings said. “What we’ve seen [in my practice] over the past year are employees proposed for removal for one instance of misconduct and no prior discipline. We’ve seen some where the alleged event occurred years ago, with no prior discipline and good performance since then. It’s a way to say, ‘We’ll consider the circumstances, but we don’t have to.’”

The regulations would require additional training for managers and supervisors on performance and misconduct issues, something long requested by good government groups. And it formally reintroduce a number of policies from Trump’s first term aimed at making it easier to fire poor performers, including reducing the length of performance improvement plans to 30 days, banning settlement agreements that remove documentation of poor performance or misconduct from an employee’s record, and barring the use of union official time to help an employee pursue adverse action appeals.

The that the administration’s latest proposal was jointly offered by OPM and MSPB undermines a key tenet of the Civil Service Reform Act, Limon argued.

“The MSPB was designed by Congress to be an oversight body over OPM and that also to be an independent institution,” he said. “That’s why the Civil Service Reform Act was created: to split up the Civil Service Commission. The policy wing became OPM, and MSPB would do the commission’s adjudication work. Good fences make good neighbors, but they’re collapsing that.”

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