Government Executive - Management

Appeals court clears the way for DOGE to access Social Security data despite new red flags

Natalie Alms — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:50:43 -0400

A federal appeals court vacated a court order limiting the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to sensitive data at the Social Security Administration on Friday, handing the Trump administration a victory in its quest to reverse the restrictions.

A majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said that three organizations suing SSA weren’t able to show that irreparable harm was likely without action from the court, reversing a lower court’s preliminary injunction from last year that had blocked DOGE from accessing data.

This follows a January court filing in which the government conceded that DOGE associates may have improperly accessed sensitive data at the agency.

A DOGE employee signed an agreement to share SSA data with an unnamed political advocacy group that wanted to overturn election results in certain states, the government said in a correction to the record. That filing also revealed that much of DOGE’s data access occurred outside of official protocols — and that SSA still doesn’t know the full scope of DOGE’s data access and sharing, which included the use of an unauthorized server.

“The government’s recent acknowledgments are alarming and raise serious questions about its earlier conduct before the district court,” the Friday opinion reads.

The court called recent reports about another SSA whistleblower accusing an ex-DOGE associate of planning to take sensitive data on U.S. citizens with him to his job at a government contractor “even more alarming” in its majority decision written by Judge Toby Heytens.

The court made its decision to reverse the limit on SSA’s data access based on the record before the district court at the time it issued the preliminary injunction, Heytens wrote, noting that the new revelations can be considered by the lower court down the line.

The Supreme Court already temporarily gave DOGE access to SSA data again last summer in an unsigned decision. On Friday, the Fourth Circuit deferred to the Supreme Court and sent the case back to the district court.

Judge Robert King argued in a partial dissent that the court should have assessed the merits of the preliminary injunction on the basis of the new, corrected record.

“We now know that SSA and the other defendants provided patently false information to the district court in the preliminary injunction proceedings,” wrote King. He said prior rulings were “rendered on a materially erroneous record. And we know that, going forward, we should not accord the defendants any benefit of the doubt or readily trust in anything they say.”

The government also admitted in its correction to the record that two DOGE associates were also granted access to sensitive data after a court issued a temporary restraining order last March blocking DOGE’s access to SSA data.

SSA houses sensitive information like the addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth of millions of Americans.

The coalition of unions and retiree advocates suing SSA argues that DOGE got unauthorized access to this information, violating privacy laws and putting Americans at risk.

“We look forward to continuing this case in the district court, seeking discovery, and getting to the bottom of this harmful conduct, including demonstrating the harms of DOGE’s actions that now appear to extend to the integrity of U.S. elections,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case.

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SSA union fears field offices could shutter under new building occupancy law

Erich Wagner — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:28:34 -0400

Officials with the nation’s largest federal employee union on Friday raised concerns that a 2024 law enabling the General Services Administration to offload federal property based on low occupancy rates could mistakenly target busy Social Security Administration field offices for closure.

In recent months, SSA has implemented a “badge in/badge out” system for measuring how many employees work at the agency’s various offices around the country. That’s part of the federal government’s broader effort to implement the provisions of the 2024 Utilizing Space Efficiently and Improving Technologies Act—USE IT, for short.

The USE IT Act requires federal agencies track the occupancy rates of their various buildings, with a goal of at least 60% occupancy. If a particular office consistently fails to hit that threshold, GSA is empowered to take steps to shrink that agency’s physical footprint.

GSA released its first tranche of federal office utilization data last month. Though the agency noted that there may be inconsistencies or inaccuracies in this initial release, it said no agency had hit the 60% occupancy benchmark between Jan. 12 and March 6.

AFGE Council 220 President Jessica LaPointe, whose union represents field office and teleservice center employees, told Government Executive that basing whether or not to offload an office solely on employee occupancy data could have unintended consequences at an understaffed agency like SSA. Without additional data, such as non-employee foot traffic or customer demand, a busy but understaffed could be erroneously targeted for closure.

“[If GSA makes property decisions just on employee occupancy rates] it’s not based on what the customer needs, it’s based on how many workers are left,” LaPointe said. “We saw with an office in southeastern Cleveland [in 2024] close organically, because they had too few workers to keep it open. They were going to consolidate it and send the remaining employees to surrounding areas until [then-Commissioner Martin] O’Malley stepped in and created details to move workers back into that area. We’ve already seen it happen organically, but now under this law and how [the Office of Management and Budget] is interpreting the law, this could be a real issue for communities.”

At the close of the Biden administration, staffing at the agency responsible for millions of Americans’ retirement and disability benefits was at a 50-year low; in 2025, the agency shed an additional 7,400 workers.

LaPointe said that currently, field offices in towns like Decorah, Iowa, Logan, W.Va., and Bloomsburg, Pa., have been temporarily closed for more than a year, not due to lack of demand but lack of staff. And some of SSA’s recent efforts to relieve high workloads at understaffed offices would not show up in the occupancy data submitted to GSA.

“Reassignments are only happening virtually, so the 2,000 workers who have been reassigned to help with field office work are still ‘badging in’ at headquarters, not the field offices,” she said.

Though SSA did not respond to a request for comment Friday, LaPointe said management has told her union that it is working to increase hiring in “distressed” areas. The agency’s fiscal 2026 appropriation includes $50 million for targeting hiring efforts, and President Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal calls for the hiring of around 600 additional employees next fiscal year.

“If a full-time equivalent costs anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000 per worker annually, including pay, benefits and overhead, that’s about 300 more workers,” she said of the 2026 hiring money. “That’s the issue. Even if we do hire, we’re not hiring at a rate that would solve this crisis . . . This is a problem we need to fix through emergency appropriations, sustained hiring and support, and benefits and pay adjustments for the workforce. But in the meantime, until we can rectify that, we need to get an exemption from [the USE IT Act]."

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DHS plans major intel shake-up, but its intelligence office would still be overseen by the nation’s spy chief

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:15:44 -0400

A significant White House plan to fold the Department of Homeland Security’s primary intelligence unit into DHS headquarters for the coming fiscal year would not affect its oversight under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an administration official told Nextgov/FCW.

The new reporting structure, unveiled last week in the president’s FY27 budget request, would combine the Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the department’s Office of the Secretary and Executive Management, Management Directorate and Office of Situational Awareness into a single unit reporting to the DHS secretary.

But I&A would still be considered a member of the intelligence community, said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the changes.

“The planned, internal DHS structural changes noted in the president’s budget submission will not impact I&A’s membership in the [intelligence community] and will not impact ODNI’s oversight over I&A as a member of the IC,” the administration official said.

I&A’s status as an official U.S. intelligence component under the budget proposal has not been previously reported. ODNI, led by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, manages the nation’s 18 spy agencies.

The intent to keep I&A under ODNI management could be a reprieve for lawmakers and stakeholders concerned about future oversight of the office. The reorganization of the intelligence shop, which would require congressional approval in upcoming appropriations talks, would mark the most significant change to the office to date, following efforts made last year to sharply scale it back.

I&A was slated for major workforce reductions in President Donald Trump’s second term, as Nextgov/FCW first reported last July. Those plans, which would have only kept some 275 people working at the office, drew major pushback from law enforcement organizations and Jewish groups that long relied on the agency to disseminate timely intelligence about threats that concern state, local, tribal and territorial communities. One international organization privately warned Congress that the proposed cuts would create “dangerous intelligence gaps.”

The downsizing was put on hold just days later, but I&A reignited efforts soon after to more gradually shed its workforce. As of late last year, the office had around 500 full-time employees, a figure that preserved more staff than the initial plans to cap the workforce at 275, though that still halved the 1,000-person operation in place earlier last year. It’s possible that more people have since departed.

The office falls within the purview of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, but its status as a DHS component also subjects it to oversight from the Homeland Security panels in both chambers.

In November, Nextgov/FCW reported that the House Intelligence Committee privately weighed a measure in the annual intelligence community authorization bill to significantly curtail the size and scope of I&A. The provision would have barred the office from gathering and analyzing intelligence, effectively turning I&A into a clearinghouse for intelligence findings produced elsewhere and stripping it of standard spy agency collection authorities.

As part of its mission, I&A helps manage a series of fusion centers around the country that facilitate intelligence sharing between federal agencies and state and local law enforcement, raising questions about stakeholder engagement under the proposed restructuring.

I&A was born as part of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to coordinate intelligence on homeland threats and expand information sharing with state and local authorities. For years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have sought to reform the unit amid concerns about domestic overreach and partisanship.

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Why the federal government needs to stop obsessing over process

Robert J Choi — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Federal managers are under intense pressure to prove accountability. That is reasonable. But in practice, too many government systems now treat process compliance as a substitute for actual public results. The result is an administrative paradox: the more aggressively agencies try to document fairness, precision and oversight, the more they risk making programs harder to use, harder to manage and less effective for the people they are supposed to serve.

This problem is especially visible in benefit administration. In 2025, the Government Accountability Office reported that, according to an estimate cited by the Office of Management and Budget, eligible Americans forgo claiming more than $140 billion in federal benefits each year, in part due to administrative burden. GAO also found that federal requirements often do not consistently capture the learning, time and psychological costs imposed on the public. In other words, the state often measures what is easy to count rather than what matters most to citizens: whether they can actually access services without being worn down by the process.

Federal agencies are not blind to this. In 2024, GAO found that the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration had created customer experience offices and had begun integrating burden reduction into some strategic and performance goals. That is a positive development. But it also reveals the deeper problem: administrative burden has become so normalized that agencies now need separate institutional machinery just to reduce the friction created by their own rules.

The lesson for federal managers is larger than customer service. Government performance systems often reward activity, documentation and procedural defensibility more than real-world impact. A program can meet reporting deadlines, clear internal reviews and generate favorable implementation statistics while still failing the public. A process can be legally sound, procedurally complete and operationally dysfunctional at the same time.

That same problem is visible in current federal workforce management. In March 2026, the Office of Personnel Management moved to centralize HR services through a new shared service center in the name of efficiency and stronger execution, while GAO reported that OPM and most of the agencies it reviewed were not using the cyber workforce dashboard that had been created to support evidence-based workforce planning. That combination matters because it captures the article's central concern in concrete terms: federal systems often continue adding structure, tools and administrative layers even when the underlying information is not being used well enough to improve decisions, performance or execution. Federal managers should take that lesson seriously across government, especially in programs and operations that depend on usable data, public uptake, repeated eligibility decisions or coordination across agencies and contractors.

This is why today's debate over federal management should not focus only on head count, compliance or tougher performance rules. The more important question is whether agencies are measuring outcomes that citizens actually experience. OPM's recent push for stronger performance distinctions and alignment with organizational results points in the right direction in one respect: performance management should be connected to outcomes, not administrative rituals. But if agencies translate that goal into more checklists, more documentation and more internal signaling, they will deepen the same problem they are trying to solve.

Federal managers need a more disciplined standard for deciding when a process has become counterproductive. Three questions should guide that assessment:

Does the requirement produce information that supports meaningful decision-making, or does it mainly protect the organization from criticism?
Does the step improve service quality and delivery efficiency, program success or public trust enough to justify the burden it imposes on citizens and staff?
If a requirement were to disappear tomorrow, would mission performance decline in a measurable way?

If leaders cannot answer those questions clearly, the requirement should be redesigned, simplified or eliminated.

GAO's broader work on evidence-based policymaking reinforces the same concern. Federal decision-makers need credible evidence about whether programs are producing intended results, yet the government has made only uneven progress in building that evidence and using it well. That weakness has practical consequences for management. When agencies cannot reliably show what is working, the process becomes a stand-in for proof.

The federal government does need accountability. It does need oversight. But it also needs the confidence to admit that every layer of procedure is not a public good. Sometimes the most responsible act of management is to stop measuring what is convenient, stop defending what is performative and start removing the barriers that prevent programs from working as intended.

Robert J Choi is a former government executive and public-sector consultant. He previously served in the Central Intelligence Agency and as deputy chief people officer at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

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Insights from the inside: How former feds think we ought to reform the federal government

Donald F. Kettl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

We surely haven’t suffered from a lack of ideas for fixing what ails the federal government. There was DOGE, with its campaign to take a chainsaw to federal employment but which in the end saved little money. The conservative Cato Institute’s analysis concluded that its impact on federal spending was negligible and, in fact, that anyone looking at the long-term trend in federal outlays wouldn’t be able to tell when DOGE started.

In a January deposition, former DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh was asked, “Did you reduce the federal deficit?” Cavanaugh replied “No, we didn’t.” Never was so much blood shed for such little result. The Office of Management and Budget is now back with a Presidential Management Agenda to take another crack at the problem — in one page.

But despite the problems with DOGE, there’s no doubt that the federal government needs serious fixing. Last December, seven former senior feds gathered to ask, given their decades of experience, what it would take to fix it.

“Or in other words, what would we have changed if we had the power entrusted to DOGE but defined efficiency in terms of effectively delivering value?” they asked.

They marked the first anniversary of the launch of DOGE on Jan. 20, 2026, with a remarkable 39-page report, written by April Harding, entitled “We the Doers.” Their goal was to write a game plan on “how to achieve real government reform in a post-DOGE world.”

Outsiders’ perspectives on reform are easy to come by, from the right, left and center, in which I happily implicate myself. But we’ve never seen anything quite like We the Doers. As Government Executive profiled them back in January, Harding, Maureen Klovers and five other former feds felt “sort of unleashed,” now that they no longer work for the federal government, and they’ve produced a truly important report. A former IRS employee, Harding was told “as a favor” that the administration was eliminating her position. The real favor is to us.

They identify four big problems that the system must, in their view, confront:

The bottom line is undefined: We have lots of performance data, but the data we’ve got doesn’t drive meaningful results because, in their view, the leading current performance system, the Government Performance and Results Act, “has devolved into a bewildering, uncoordinated profusion of metrics, siloed by program and not validated by a uniform methodology that is understood or valued by the American public.” The key, they concluded, is to identify what citizens want and then measure how well the government delivers programs in ways that demonstrate a return on taxpayers’ investment.
There’s no feedback loop with Congress: Legislation tends to be overly prescriptive, with requirements that pile on instead of producing results. Congress has the need for effective oversight but, by the same token, it ought to listen to the doers about whether what it wants is doable. The key, they concluded, is to link what’s desired with what can be done.
The budgetary process is broken: Congress’s budgetary dysfunction, meanwhile, undermines the ability of the doers to manage contracts because the start/stop, lather/rinse/repeat saga of budget battles makes it impossible for government managers and their private partners to deliver value. The key, they concluded, is to focus on the metrics that the public wants and to focus on a return on the public’s investments.
The bureaucratic culture is built around compliance, not delivery: The report sadly concludes, “Even though the members of We the Doers were part of the federal bureaucracy, the truth is we spent much of our time battling it”. There’s grand policy, emanating from OMB and OPM, but the policy often bounces against implementation barriers that the top agencies had never considered. The result is a system increasingly trapped in rules that spin off unintended consequences and lack common sense, especially in the hiring arena, where the result too often is that no one gets hired for important positions. “Government is a gullible customer” in dealing with contractors, and too often “leadership doesn’t lead.” The key, they concluded, is to rebuild a culture based more on delivery than on compliance.

And then, toward the end of their report, the Doers point to the need to “get good at technology.” That’s a need growing exponentially, and it’s a place where the government needs to run to catch up. Government needs to smash the boundaries that too often separate the budget, people power, decisions and measurement and focus all of them toward the outcome the government wants to produce. It needs to grow past cool websites to an experience that weaves together the people with the service the government is providing. It needs to bring more of its IT work in-house, so it’s no longer as captive to private contractors, and to boost its cybersecurity. It needs to make data sensible to ordinary members of the public, to reinforce its clarity on the inside. And it needs to “declare bankruptcy” on existing, sprawling IT systems, both hardware and software.

This is a broad and ambitious agenda. Some of the points are familiar; all of them, as the Doers lay out in the report, have a real-world grounding that’s reinforced by the experience that backs them up. It’s all the more ambitious because it stretches so far what the 2027 budget proposes. When it comes to the “results” of the budget, it focuses on “Buy America.” When it comes to people, it calls for “removing poor performers and limiting hiring to essential jobs”.

For anyone truly interested in reforming what ails the federal government, this report is essential reading. It provides insights from the inside about how to make changes from the outside in. The authors certainly aren’t circling the wagons in defense of the current system. And their report shows what DOGE done right would look like.

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Privatization, eliminations and consolidations: Major reforms from Trump's budget

Eric Katz — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:30:11 -0400

President Trump’s fiscal 2027 contains fewer cuts than most of his previous proposals, but still suggests significant overhauls to agency operations and structures.

The blueprint would provide $2.2 trillion for the year while slashing non-defense agencies by 10%. It also includes dramatic workforce reductions, agency relocations, privatization pushes, dozens of program and grant eliminations and other major reforms.

The White House previously included some of the ideas in prior proposals, only for Congress to install roadblocks or reject them entirely. Some of the changes are new and not all will require legislative action.

Trump continued his war on “woke” federal projects and programs and research focused on climate change, leading to proposals to slash billions of dollars in spending. He is looking to slightly grow the size of the civilian workforce, though most agencies would still face cuts.

Here are some of the most significant changes the president put forward:

Privatization and staffing cuts at TSA

The Transportation Security Administration said it will look to privatize airport security at more airports across the country, an initiative it has piloted to date at a handful of mostly small locations. That would lead to job cuts of around 4,500 employees. It would eliminate another nearly 5,000 jobs by reallocating resources that it said will lead to more efficiency, as well as by tasking states and localities to staff exit lanes. The administration has for the last two months decried that a lack of funding for the Homeland Security Department has forced unpaid TSA screeners to call out at record rates, leading to exceptionally long lines at airports and damaged morale within the workforce.

Reshuffling DHS

The Homeland Security Department also proposed a major reorganization, suggesting it merge its Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Office of the Secretary and Executive Management, Management Directorate and Office of Situational Awareness into a single office reporting to the DHS secretary. The department said the restructuring will “yield efficiencies and would enable better communication throughout the department and with external partners.”

Slashing grants

The Trump administration is looking to save billions of dollars by eliminating or significantly scaling back dozens of grant programs at the departments of Health and Human Services, State, Commerce, Labor, Housing and Urban Development and others. The cuts would impact programs focused on scientific and medical research, climate change, job training, housing, energy costs for low income Americans, refugees and migrants, disaster preparedness and many other areas across government. Many of the proposals were previously submitted to and rejected by Congress, such as the McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program, the Food for Peace Program and the Community Services Block Grant, which Trump has now pitched eliminating six times.

Office eliminations

Trump is hoping to close the Education Department entirely, but only proposed trimming its budget by 3%. The agency is in the midst of transferring much of its responsibilities to other agencies and proposed eliminating Adult Education within the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, and moving the rest of the office transferring it to the Labor Department.

At HHS, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, all within the National Institutes of Health, would all be shuttered. DHS Is looking to close the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. In the Interior Department, the U.S. Geological Survey would eliminate its Ecosystems Mission Area. Interior previously considered issuing layoffs to the vast majority of staff there.

The Justice Department is hoping to eliminate its Community Relations Service and the Office of Access to Justice, which the White House called “woke enterprises.” Labor would close Job Corps, a $1.6 billion program and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The Commerce Department is again looking to close the Minority Business Development Agency.

Fraud crackdown

Several agencies asked for a surge in funds to prevent individuals from misusing their programs. The Agriculture Department is looking to boost efforts at identifying fraud, such as in food assistance programs, and requested $119 million for the efforts. HUD said it requires $30 million to fight fraud in housing programs and would use the money to boost financial reporting and oversight of recipients. The DOJ also requested $30 million for the National Fraud Division, an office it stood up earlier this year, to fund prosecutors who would aim to combat “the rampant and pervasive problem.”

FEMA reforms

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would eliminate 1,000 positions that it “expected to be vacant” by the end of the current fiscal year. The agency would focus on its “core mission” of emergency response and disaster recovery, while requesting states and localities take on more financial responsibility. It would slash non-disaster and training grants by $600 million and eliminate the Shelter and Services Program, which provides temporary housing to migrants awaiting DHS processing.

USDA reorganization

The Agriculture Department noted it will follow through on its plans to shift much of its headquarters to regional hubs in North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Utah, requesting $55 million for the cost of relocating staff and preparing buildings for sale. The changes will ensure USDA employees “are closer to the farmers and ranchers they serve” while avoiding maintenance costs.

Further Cuts at HHS

After cutting nearly 20,000 employees last year, HHS is now looking to slash programs across the department as it consolidates various offices into the Administration for a Healthy America. Those would include some in the Health Resources and Services Administration, such as Healthy Start; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as Firearm Injury and Mortality Prevention; and a slew of programs within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, such as Homelessness Prevention and Mental Health Children and Family Programs. HHS briefly sought to terminate thousands of SAMHSA grants earlier this year before quickly walking it back.

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IRS can’t fully verify in-person work compliance, IG says

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:05:17 -0400

The inspector general for the IRS in a recent report flagged several issues with how the agency is ensuring compliance with President Donald Trump’s in-person work requirement for federal employees. But the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration also emphasized that the number of IRS staffers who report teleworking has declined significantly over the past year.

On his first day back in office, Trump signed a directive largely ending telework and remote work for the federal workforce. Most IRS employees were required to report for in-person work by March 10, 2025.

Between March 9 and May 3, 2025, TIGTA found about 70,000 IRS employees worked a total of roughly 2 million daily time charges (i.e. days) in-person. Investigators determined that 89% of those time charges were supported by building access card data.

IRS officials looked into around 700 employees who consistently reported working in an office without corresponding access card data. They found that, in most cases, the staffer either incorrectly entered their time charges or had issues with their access card, leaving only 30 staffers who appeared to be flouting the return-to-office directive.

Likewise, the IRS found that employee compliance with such a directive averaged 91% between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2025. In a letter attached to the report, agency officials wrote that recent internal reviews have determined that 93% of in-person work is backed by building access card data.

Overall, TIGTA found the percentage of IRS employees who reported teleworking decreased from 65% for the pay period ending March 8, 2025, to 25% for the period that concluded on May 3, 2025.

Still, TIGTA noted several challenges to assessing whether employees are working in-person including:

A worker could scan into an office but not spend the entire day working from there.
About 4% of IRS staffers were assigned to around 160 buildings that, as of May 14, 2025, did not have access card data.
Many IRS employees regularly work outside of an office (e.g. field interviews) and “verifying potential noncompliance is a resource-intensive process that requires manual investigation.”

The IG recommended that the IRS coordinate with the Treasury Department on setting expectations for continued quarterly monitoring of telework use and finalize the processes and procedures for such evaluation. IRS officials agreed with the recommendations and said they’d be implemented by summer 2026.

Similarly, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Defense Department in recent years has likely inaccurately reported how many of its civilian employees worked from home because officials were not appropriately recording data on eligibility for telework or remote work.

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Scammers posing as federal officials drive complaints up and rack up $800 million in losses

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:31:47 -0400

The number of complaints filed with the FBI that described cyberscammers impersonating government officials nearly doubled between 2024 and 2025 and resulted in some $800 million in losses last year, FBI data released Monday shows.

Recorded government impersonation complaints rose from some 17,300 in 2024 to nearly 32,500 in 2025, the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center report shows. The center, dubbed IC3, documented some $797 million in losses in 2025 from those efforts, up from around $405 million in the year prior.

That type of scam was listed among the top five cyber-enabled fraud crimes by both number of recorded occurrences and amount of money lost. Other major cyber crimes include romance, tech support and investment scams.

The spike comes amid a broader surge in impersonation-based fraud, fueled by artificial intelligence-driven voice and messaging tools that can allow scammers to convincingly pose as government officials at scale.

AI was referenced 260 times in complaints involving government impersonations, the report shows, with $7 million lost in cases with those AI references. AI involvement was documented the most in complaints involving investment scams.

Government impersonation can be especially effective because scammers often exploit the built-in authority people associate with official institutions, prompting victims to act quickly out of fear of penalties, legal trouble or loss of benefits.

“It has never been more important to be diligent with your cybersecurity, social media footprint, and electronic interactions. Cyber threats and cyber-enabled crime will continue to evolve as the world embraces emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence,” the IC3 report says.

The increase coincides with a period of upheaval across much of the government’s workforce, though IC3 did not detail any evidence linking the rise in complaints to mass federal layoffs.

Cyber threats, additionally, continue to become more prevalent. Data breaches and ransomware were among the most prominent cyber threat complaints documented in 2025. Over 60 new ransomware variants — modified versions of ransom malware crafted by hackers to evade detection — were discovered last year, the report says. Government facilities also remain a top target of cyber adversaries.

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DHS to fold intelligence office into headquarters under Trump's 2027 budget plan

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:06:24 -0400

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis would be absorbed into DHS headquarters under a consolidation plan proposed in President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget, setting up a potential showdown with Congress in the coming months over the office’s organization and authority.

The new structure would shed some $53 million to combine the intelligence unit with the department’s Office of the Secretary and Executive Management, Management Directorate and Office of Situational Awareness into a single office reporting to the DHS secretary, the budget proposal says. It argues the restructuring of DHS HQ “would yield efficiencies and would enable better communication throughout the department and with external partners.”

The move, which would require congressional approval in upcoming appropriations talks, would mark the most significant change to the intelligence office to date, following efforts made last year to sharply scale it back.

I&A was slated for major workforce reductions in Trump’s second term, Nextgov/FCW first reported last July. Those plans, which would have only kept some 275 people, drew major pushback from law enforcement organizations and Jewish groups that long relied on the agency to disseminate timely intelligence about threats that concern state, local, tribal and territorial communities. One international organization privately warned Congress that the proposed cuts would create “dangerous intelligence gaps.”

The downsizing was put on hold just days later, but I&A reignited efforts soon after to more gradually shed its workforce. As of late last year, the office had around 500 or so full-time employees, a figure that preserved more staff than the initial plans to cap the workforce at 275, though that still halved the 1,000-person operation in place earlier last year. It’s possible that more people have since departed.

The move proposed in the FY27 budget would likely raise questions from some lawmakers about the independence of DHS’s primary intelligence arm, as well as congressional oversight and how threat information is shared with state and local partners. Any concerns may be buoyed by ongoing fears about oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol.

As part of its mission, I&A also helps manage a series of fusion centers around the country that facilitate intelligence sharing between federal agencies and state and local law enforcement, raising questions about stakeholder engagement under the proposed restructuring.

For years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have argued that I&A needs major reform.

Democrats have faulted the office for overstepping its domestic surveillance authorities and for failing to maintain robust civil liberties protections, especially during the 2020 racial justice protests. Republicans, meanwhile, have accused it of drifting into partisanship and falling short in providing timely intelligence to state and local partners, particularly on border threats.

A 2022 DHS oversight report also assessed that I&A had advanced visibility into online threats before the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot but failed to elevate or share that information in time to be useful.

The Intelligence and Analysis unit holds a unique place in the federal oversight landscape.

As one of 18 intelligence agencies managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it falls within the purview of the Senate and House Intelligence committees. But its status as a DHS component also subjects it to oversight from the Homeland Security panels in both chambers.

It’s not clear whether the proposed consolidation would formally reduce the number of U.S. intelligence agencies statutorily managed under ODNI. Nextgov/FCW has asked ODNI and DHS spokespeople for comment.

Its placement in DHS has put it at the center of recurring jurisdictional tensions with the FBI, which drives much of the nation’s domestic intelligence, counterterrorism and counterintelligence work under the Justice Department. Researchers have long argued the division of labor creates a fragmented architecture that splits operational responsibilities across agencies whose missions too often overlap.

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Civilian agencies face 10% cuts in Trump’s 2027 budget

Eric Katz — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:16:36 -0400

President Trump on Friday proposed a $2.2 trillion fiscal 2027 budget, an overall increase on current spending that would include cutting non-defense agencies by 10%, or by $73 billion.

The proposed reductions were far less severe than the 22% in non-defense spending that the White House suggested chopping in his fiscal 2026 blueprint after Congress largely ignored those suggestions, though most major agencies would still see their budgets reduced under the new submission.

As Trump previously touted, defense spending in the new plan would spike by 44% to $1.5 trillion. A handful of other agencies would also see an increase compared to current spending: The Justice Department would receive a 13% boost mostly to supplement law enforcement efforts. The Veterans Affairs Department would receive a 9% bump, including an additional $800 million for electronic health records modernization. The Transportation Department would see a 6% increase, including a $1.3 billion increase for infrastructure and an additional $481 million for the Federal Aviation Administration to support air traffic controller hiring and additional modernization efforts. A 2% bump for the Energy Department would go toward the National Nuclear Security Administration; the rest of Energy would see an 11% spending decrease.

While nearly all agencies would experience a cut, those reductions were, nearly across the board, less than Trump proposed in his first budget. The biggest cuts would be the most significant at the Small Business Administration at 67%, the National Science Foundation at 55% and the Environmental Protection Agency at 52%. The president requested cuts of more than 25% to the departments of Health and Human Services, Interior and Housing and Urban Development in his first spending proposal last year, but he is now seeking reductions of 12%-13% for those agencies.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said the fiscal 2027 budget builds on the cuts the administration secured in the fiscal 2026 appropriations bills.

“These final appropriations bills rooted out wasteful spending that the administration had identified across federal agencies,” Vought said. “The enacted bills also put us on a path to eliminate ineffective federal agencies that do not serve a useful purpose.”

The budget would eliminate 11 federal programs the administration deemed “woke,” such as the Education Department’s Teacher Quality Partnerships, HUD’s Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing and the EPA’s Environmental Justice Program. EPA, HUD and the Internal Revenue Service would face additional cuts in areas the administration said amounted to the “weaponization of the federal government.”

All told, the budget would eliminate dozens of grant and assistance programs focused on scientific and medical research, climate change, job training, housing, energy costs for low income Americans, refugees and migrants, disaster preparedness and many other areas across government.

The proposal would provide $50 million to the Agriculture Department to carry out its reorganization and mandatory relocations of thousands of employees and make investments to help HHS stand up its Administration for a Health America. Other major agency reform proposals in the budget included unifying federal firefighting into one agency, privatizing airport screenings at small airports, consolidating offices within DHS, eliminating an office focused on federal contractor oversight and slashing “layers of bureaucracy” at VA.

The White House said its budget would boost funding for federal law enforcement by 15% compared to current spending, including for more Homeland Security Department agents and additional federal prosecutors. The Drug Enforcement Administration, Secret Service and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security would all see increased funds for law enforcement hiring. The White House also highlighted a 12% increase for the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review to support more courtroom space for deportation hearings.

Vought said the federal government has entered a new era of budgeting. OMB projected the government would slash spending at non-defense agencies by 24% in the next decade.

“A historic paradigm shift in the budget process is occurring and is producing real results for the American public,” the OMB director said. “Fiscal futility is ending. Now that our fiscal ship has turned to face in the right direction, I look forward to working with you to continue moving forward.”

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Trump plan to shift student loan oversight to Treasury draws Senate Democrats' backlash

Shauneen Miranda, States Newsroom — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:06:00 -0400

Senate Democrats this week blasted the Trump administration’s attempts to shift management of federal student loans from the Education Department to the Treasury Department, saying it would contribute to dysfunction in the student loan system.

In a Wednesday letter, the ranking members of five Senate panels — the committees covering banking, finance, education, federal spending and the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Education Department — called on Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to “immediately” rescind the interagency agreement announced in March.

The letter is part of Democrats’ efforts to stop President Donald Trump and his administration from outsourcing Education Department responsibilities to other agencies as part of the administration’s attempts to dismantle the department, which Congress created and only Congress can abolish.

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Patty Murray of Washington state and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, along with independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who caucuses with the Democrats, penned the letter.

They are the respective ranking members of the Senate committees on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Finance; Appropriations; the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing Education Department funding; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

They argued the transfer would introduce “more dysfunction into the federal student loan system, worsening the ongoing student loan default crisis that the Trump administration has already exacerbated.”

An illegal scheme

Under the agreement, Treasury will take over Education’s responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt, the first step in a multistep process toward Treasury taking on the entire, roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.

The senators called the move an “illegal scheme” that “threatens to trap student loan borrowers, students and families in chaos and bureaucracy, all while American taxpayers are left to foot the bill for Treasury to administer programs that [the Education Department] can and should administer itself, likely costing more money and burying borrowers and families in unnecessary red tape.”

The lawmakers also emphasized the spending package Trump signed into law in February rejects the president’s calls to axe the agency, funding the Education Department at $79 billion this fiscal year.

The senators point to the joint explanatory statement accompanying the measure, which states that “no authorities exist for the Department of Education to transfer its fundamental responsibilities under numerous authorizing and appropriations laws, including through procuring services from other federal agencies, of carrying out those programs, projects and activities to other federal agencies.”

The lawmakers gave McMahon and Bessent two weeks to respond to their inquiries on the logistics, timing, costs and implementation of the transfer.

A hard reset

Education Department spokesperson Ellen Keast said in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Thursday that the current approach to student loan management was not working.

“With the student loan portfolio approaching $1.7 trillion and defaults nearing 25%, now is the time for a hard reset in how the federal government provides and services student loans,” Keast said.

“We are confident that our partnership with the Treasury, an experienced and proven fiduciary, will strengthen program administration and better serve American students, borrowers and taxpayers,” she added.

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

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Critics argue new federal workforce rules increase the risk of politicization, not accountability

Courtney Mickman and Nekeisha Campbell — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

On March 5, 2026, Government Executive published an op-ed by Ronald Sanders titled “The ‘new’ Policy/Career Schedule does not (necessarily) politicize the federal workforce.” Sanders urges readers to “take a deep breath,” arguing that the new Policy/Career Schedule (Schedule P/C) does not mean the “end of democracy as we know it” and does not automatically politicize the civil service. But framing the issue in terms of what Schedule P/C does “necessarily” or “automatically” misses the point and tacitly concedes the risk. The better question is whether Schedule P/C materially increases the likelihood of politicization of the federal workforce, and we believe the answer to that question is undoubtedly yes.

Sanders says that, if properly implemented, these rules are all about more accountability. That claim is hard to square with a regulatory approach that removes the very mechanisms that make accountability meaningful. Ordinarily, when a position is reclassified into an excepted-service category, an employee may appeal that reclassification to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). However, shortly after OPM finalized the Schedule P/C rules and without notice and the opportunity for public comment, the MSPB amended its regulations to eliminate appeals challenging reclassification into an excepted-service category.

According to Pew, when President Trump won the 2024 election there were about 2.4 million federal workers (nearly 3 million including U.S. Postal Service employees). Roughly two-thirds (about 1.5 million) were in the competitive service and, after a one-year probationary period, had due process protections, meaning agencies generally must provide written notice and an opportunity to respond before imposing serious adverse actions. Most of those employees also have the right to appeal the ultimate decision to the MSPB. The remaining third (about 735,000) served in the excepted service. While some excepted-service employees — VA medical professionals, those in the intelligence community, non-appropriated fund employees — have fewer civil-service protections, many excepted-service civilian employees, such as most general attorneys, have due process rights. The purpose of due process is to protect covered employees from removal from their positions based on arbitrary, political, discriminatory or retaliatory reasons. The conversion of competitive service employees to Schedule P/C inherently makes the federal workforce more susceptible to politicization if an agency’s decision to convert a particular position is not reviewable by a third party. Indeed, an agency could ultimately determine that all of its positions are Schedule P/C and would not have to justify its decision.

Sanders points to OPM’s January 2025 guidance, which says career civil servants need not personally support the president so long as they carry out the president’s policy agenda faithfully and to the best of their ability. This framing undercuts the rationale for Schedule P/C, which is to make it easier for agencies to terminate federal employees in policy-influencing positions if the agency unilaterally determines that any such employee is not performing adequately (i.e., hindering the president’s policy agenda). If policy-influencing career employees can remain in their roles without personal political loyalty so long as they competently execute their duties to the best of their abilities, then why convert their positions to the excepted service and strip away due process protections? If an employee fails to perform, agencies already have tools: performance improvement plans, followed by proposing removals for failure to meet performance expectations and sustain the removal based on documented poor performance. Due process is not the opposite of accountability; it is what makes accountability legitimate, especially for career employees who often accept lower pay than private-sector counterparts to serve the public.

Accountability matters, and opponents of Schedule P/C are not asking for less of it. A significant accountability concern is that Schedule P/C employees will lose the ability to file complaints with the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Most executive-branch employees can bring prohibited personnel practice (PPP) complaints to OSC, including claims of whistleblower retaliation. Schedule P/C employees will not. “Taking a deep breath” does not answer the practical problem this creates: employees would be forced to raise allegations of merit-system violations within the same agency it alleges engaged in those actions. Because OSC sits outside the agency, it provides a measure of independence and protection against retaliation. For these employees, that backstop will be eliminated. Of course, Mr. Sanders rightfully points out that employees do have the option of resigning based on their conscience. Employee resignation under these circumstances affirmatively reinforces a lack of accountability, leaving PPPs unchecked, insulating agencies from OSC’s impartial investigation.

Call us naïve, but we do not believe the public objects to removing employees who fail to do their jobs. And on that point, nothing has changed: executive-branch agencies have long had authority to discipline and remove poor performers. What has changed is the creation of a civil service category that, overnight, changed large swaths of career civil servants to at-will employees for the purpose of assuring the executive branch the ability to quickly terminate those employees.

The civil servants whose positions were and are to be reclassified are supposed to hold positions that help shape or carry out presidential policies or involve a high level of policy influence. Nearly 50,000 executive-branch employees are being reclassified into excepted-service positions. While some of the positions being reclassified are inherently policy and/or legislative in nature, many individuals have been told that they are at risk for reclassification who hold positions having little to no level of policy influence. A deep breath will not resolve the lack of accountability in the reclassification process as there is now no opportunity to hold agencies accountable to ensure they are appropriately reclassifying these positions. Mr. Sanders seems to agree that reasonable statutory guardrails are necessary to mitigate risk. Civil service rules may be imperfect, but they are guardrails that protect both the workforce and the public’s interest in a professional civil service rather than a system of political spoils. Schedule P/C weakens those guardrails and increases the risk of politicization of the federal workforce.

The fact that Schedule P/C may not spell the end of democracy does not mean that deep breaths are more appropriate than sounding the alarm.

Courtney Mickman and Nekeisha Campbell are shareholders at Alan Lescht & Associates, P.C. in Washington, D.C., where they represent federal employees in claims of discrimination and adverse appeals. Prior to their roles as shareholders, Mickman was an administrative judge at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Campbell was an attorney for the Health and Human Services Department.

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Forest Service to move HQ out of DC, shutter regional offices in sweeping overhaul

Eric Katz — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:56:33 -0400

The U.S. Forest Service is moving its headquarters out of Washington and closing dozens of facilities across the country in a move the agency said will streamline its work but that employees cautioned could lead to a mass exodus of staff.

The Agriculture Department agency will shift around 260 employees to its new headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, and move around a to-be-determined number of employees in soon-to-be-shuttered regional offices. The reshaping of the agency is part of a larger USDA reorganization that will see 2,600 employees shifted from the capital region into new regional hubs around the country.

USFS leadership said it was shifting from its decades-old regional-based model to one organized around states, though it will maintain only 15 state directors and many of them will oversee multiple states. The Forest Service will maintain 20 research and development stations across the country, while closing 57 others. It will close all nine of its regional offices and 130 employees will remain in Washington.

“Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment," USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said.

Employees experienced various stages of grief upon learning the news, according to those who spoke to Government Executive on the condition of anonymity.

“Reactions range from crying to anger to silence,” one midwest-based employee said after Tuesday's announcement.

Washington-based employees will receive information about timelines for relocations in “the coming days and weeks,” USFS Chief Tom Schultz told employees in an agency-wide email. The full reorganization and office closures will play out over the next year. Schultz promised “clear guidance to employees and partners” along the way.

“I know this transition raises questions about roles, locations, reporting structures, and timelines,” Schultz said. “Change of this magnitude affects people, families, and communities--not just organizational charts. We are committed to approaching this work with transparency, empathy, respect, and an understanding of the real impacts on your lives.”

Employees told Government Executive those words offered little comfort due to the remaining uncertainty and potentially life-altering impacts. Staff across the country who were in the field without access to computers missed the announcement and various town halls offering additional information.

“We have no clue how this will affect us on the ground,” said one employee based in a northwestern regional office. “I have no idea what is in store for my program.”

While USFS is eliminating all of its nine regional offices, it will maintain facilities in most existing locations and the bulk of those employees will not have to relocate. In regions six, eight and nine, however—located in Portland, Ore., Atlanta and Milwaukee, respectively—the facilities themselves will shutter and employees will have to move, according to a notice obtained by Government Executive. The exact locations for the staff there has not yet been determined, employees said, but management told staff they will be placed in Utah, Colorado or New Mexico.

Government Executive first reported plans for this reorganization were underway last April and USDA made the official announcement in June, though it told employees on Tuesday the makeup for the restructured Forest Service “is currently being developed.”

“Your position is subject to reorganization, and your duty station will change,” Schultz told regional staff set to be relocated in an internal memorandum. “You will be relocated to a new duty station to one of the locations identified above. The specific details, exactly where, when, and into what position, have not yet been determined.”

In a statement, Schultz took a less conciliatory tone.

"Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found—not just behind a desk in the capital,” Schultz said.

Rollins added the changes would enable boosted timber production, a key priority for the Trump administration.

Employees will relocate between this summer and next, with bargaining taking place with unions in the coming months. Schultz said the agency will hold informational sessions in the coming months and all employees required to relocate more than 50 miles will receive assistance to do so. One employee said they were told to expect “individual assignment letters” in May or June.

“There is a position in the restructured Forest Service for every permanent employee willing to accept reassignment,” Schultz said, though he added there may be opportunities for buyouts or early retirements. USDA shed more than 15,000 employees last year through various incentive programs.

Employees reassigned to a new location must either accept it or lose their job. Some USFS employees will be assigned jobs in Fort Collins, Colo., another of the new "hubs" USDA is establishing. The others, in addition to Salt Lake City, will be in Raleigh, N.C.; Kansas City, Mo.; and Indianapolis.

The Forest Service plans previously received particularly negative feedback during the public comment period from lawmakers, employees and local governments on the larger USDA reorganization, as well in meetings the department held with tribal governments. Tribal leaders, for example, said the elimination of USFS regional offices would diminish working relationships, lead to the loss of institutional knowledge related to treaty obligations and result in less coordination with agency leadership.

Employees expressed skepticism that most relocated staff would agree to stay with the agency. Trump in his first term relocated two USDA’s offices to Kansas City, which resulted in the loss of more than half of their staff and significant drops in productivity.

“Most I've talked to will not move, but we'll see when it's time to make their final decision,” one staffer said.

In a separate email to staff, Schultz acknowledged the value of the existing regional structure, noting it “served the agency well” for decades and “helped us form strong relationships and carry out a mission that has only grown in importance.” Growing budget constraints and demands on employees, he added, have made it more valuable for staff to move closer to the constituencies they serve and for the agency to empower local leadership to make more decisions.

The northwest-based employee, however, said it was “obvious” to employees on the ground that the plan was poorly thought out.

“It is a completely pointless exercise that is going to cause more problems than there already are,” the employee said.

Another western employee said he found the larger reorganization “incoherent,” but said the push to move employees out of the nation’s capital was prudent. Still, he called the elimination of regional structure a “radical change.”

“The regions are where the real work gets done and those reporting chains will be totally upended by the new state forester system,” the employee said.

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Underused federal offices targeted as GSA releases utilization data

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:20:27 -0400

The General Services Administration on Tuesday released federal office space utilization data, which officials said would aid the Trump administration in its effort to reduce the government’s real estate portfolio.

“Exposing these inefficiencies empowers us to fix them. We cannot afford to delay,” wrote GSA head Edward C. Forst and Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., the chairman of the subcommittee over public buildings, in a commentary for Government Executive. “Now that we have this information, it is time we get to work. We can and we must do better. We will look to reduce excess property and realign our nation's real estate portfolio around a stronger, more efficient core.”

The data was released pursuant to a provision in a 2024 law that requires GSA to flag any federal building or leased space with a utilization rate that is less than 60% on average and to then take steps to shrink the agency’s property.

This information, which GSA described as “the first government-wide snapshot of space utilization,” lists thousands of properties that did not meet the 60% benchmark between Jan. 12, 2026 and March 6, 2026.

GSA reported that some of the data, which comes from the Cabinet departments as well as larger agencies such as NASA and the Social Security Administration, could be “incomplete, outdated or contain inaccuracies.”

“As this information has been compiled from partner agencies and third-party sources, GSA cannot opine on its accuracy or completeness,” officials wrote on the web page that contains the data.

Agencies used several methods to collect the information, including analyzing badge scans to get into a building, sensors to to track occupancy and aggregated and anonymized mobile location data.

Forst and Perry wrote in the Government Executive commentary that they would prioritize offloading buildings that need significant repairs; GSA reports that the maintenance backlog for federal buildings is between $26 billion and $50 billion.

The duo also said that GSA would try to co-locate agencies with similar missions and maintain “historic, well-located federal buildings that promote civic architecture.” On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum adopting a policy that federal buildings should be “visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional and classical architectural heritage.”

Forst previously reported that the release of the utilization data was delayed by the fall government shutdown. Last week, GSA announced the sale of a vacant building in downtown Washington, D.C., which officials said was the first major sale of a federal property in the capital during the second Trump administration.

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States say ICE pulled Medicaid data despite court order

Anna Claire Vollers, Stateline — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

A coalition of 22 states told a federal court that the Trump administration appears to have violated a court order that limited the types of health data that could be shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation proceedings.

Back in December, a court allowed ICE to pull some basic information from Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program that primarily covers people with low incomes, to help the agency find people who are in the country illegally.

That ruling was a partial win for the administration in a lawsuit in which the 22 states and the District of Columbia had sued to block information sharing between ICE and Medicaid.

But the court also placed restrictions on ICE, saying it could only pull basic data such as addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and citizenship or immigration status. And the ruling barred ICE from collecting information on lawful permanent residents or citizens.

Advocates warned that even the sharing of that partial information would prompt immigrants, including those in the country legally, to forgo health coverage for fear that enrolling in Medicaid could make them or their family members easier for ICE to find.

Now, in a new filing, the states say the Trump administration appears to have ignored the court’s order limiting what information ICE is allowed to have. They claim the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicaid, has admitted to sharing with ICE “a large and complex” set of data on Medicaid recipients, even though the court said the data of citizens and lawful permanent residents is off limits.

The states claim the federal government hasn’t clarified how it determines who is “lawfully present,” nor has it confirmed whether it’s filtering out protected individuals from the data it gives to ICE.

The states are asking the court to formally bar the sharing of protected health care information for people lawfully residing in the United States. They’re also asking the court to confirm that “lawfully residing” includes noncitizens who have legal status, such as refugees and asylees. And they want the court to allow the states to examine the data that’s been shared with ICE so far, and how it has been used.

The Trump administration has not yet responded. The plaintiff states are scheduled to appear in a San Francisco federal court on April 30 for a hearing.

The states involved in the suit are those with Democratic attorneys general: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin.

The court’s orders preventing Medicaid data sharing won’t apply to states not involved in the lawsuit.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

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

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NASA wants to build a base on the Moon by the 2030s. How and why it plans to get there

Michelle L.D. Hanlon, The Conversation — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

The next U.S. trip to the Moon isn’t about planting a flag. It’s about learning how to live and work there.

NASA has just reset its Artemis program, marking a clear strategic shift: Space exploration is moving away from a race to achieve milestones and toward a system built on repeated operations, a sustained presence and lunar infrastructure that could become part of the technology networks we rely on here on Earth.

That shift is reflected in newly announced plans to invest billions of dollars in building a long-term lunar base, with habitats, power systems and surface infrastructure designed to support ongoing human activity. The message? Humans have already normalized travel to space. The next step is normalizing living beyond Earth.

Artemis is NASA’s plan to return people to the Moon with the goal of staying. Unlike the short Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, it consists of increasingly complex missions: flying around the Moon, landing on its surface and eventually establishing a base near the lunar south pole. The program aims to create a reliable way for humans to live and work there, develop technologies useful on Earth and prepare for the journey to Mars.

Rather than moving straight from the upcoming Artemis II crewed lunar flyby to a surface landing, the new road map adds an intermediate mission in 2027. Astronauts will test docking, life-support systems and communications with commercial lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin, but in low Earth orbit, where rescue remains possible.

The first landing near the lunar south pole is now targeted for 2028. This timeline may sound delayed, but in reality, it has been deliberately reset to prioritize building reliable systems that can operate long into the future over speed.

As a professor of air and space law, I’ve been watching these developments closely. The United States is still in a race – particularly with China – but it is choosing to compete on its own terms. Rather than chasing the fastest possible landing, NASA is focused on building a system that can support repeated missions and a lasting human presence.

From sprint to system

The original Artemis plan aimed to leap quickly from test flights to a crewed landing while simultaneously developing new rockets, spacecraft and landing systems. That approach carried risk. Artemis I, an uncrewed mission, flew successfully in 2022. After a few delays, Artemis II is now nearing launch, with windows planned for early April 2026. But the further jump to a safe and reliable landing remains significant.

NASA’s new road map slows the transition deliberately. Instead of stand-alone milestones, NASA is now building a sequence of repeatable steps to gain hands-on experience.

This change includes a substantial new investment, with a multiphase plan for a lunar base with habitats, power systems and the surface infrastructure needed for a long-term human presence on the Moon. Consistent launch cadence and repeatable operations are how teams develop the expertise needed for safe, reliable spaceflight and eventually for traveling to Mars.

Decision to pause the planned lunar Gateway station reflects this shift, prioritizing infrastructure on the lunar surface itself, where astronauts will live, work and build over time.

The new changes also emphasize a shifting role for commercial companies. SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s lunar landers are integrated into the mission architecture.

The 2027 test mission, for example, will practice docking between crewed spacecraft and new commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit. NASA is coordinating a network of public and private partners rather than running a single government-run Apollo-like program.

This method spreads risk across partners, lowers costs and speeds development, though success now depends on multiple players working reliably together.

Law follows activity

NASA’s road map is not just about lowering technical risk. It is also about shaping the future environment of lunar activity.

International space law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, sets out broad principles to guide space activities, like avoiding harmful interference with others’ activities. But those rules only gain real meaning through repeated, coordinated activity, especially on the lunar surface, where desirable landing sites are limited.

Countries and companies that maintain a sustained presence on the Moon will shape the practical expectations everyone will share while living and working there. One-off demonstrations don’t shape lunar activity like continued operations would.

Why this matters – even if you never go to space

It would be easy to see these changes as purely technical, but they are not. The structure of a space program shapes what technologies are developed, how industries grow and which countries influence how space is used. Technologies developed for sustained lunar activity have applications on Earth, from medicine to disaster response.

There are economic effects as well. The Artemis program supports jobs across the United States and among its international partners.

And there is a strategic dimension. As more countries and companies operate in space, the question is no longer just who arrives first, but who helps define how activity is carried out.

Communications, navigation, supply chains and scientific data already depend on space-based systems. As activity expands to the Moon, facilities there will become integrated into those networks.

The Moon is becoming a place where infrastructure, industry and rules for human activity are taking shape. NASA’s updated plan signals that the United States intends to be present there consistently.

The updates to the Artemis program are a statement about how the United States intends to engage in the next phase of space exploration. Rather than pursuing a single dramatic landing, the U.S. is committing to the steady, repeatable work of building a lasting foothold on the Moon.

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Trump admin uses Kid Rock and football to recruit young people to government

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:11:44 -0400

After a year spent cutting the civil service, the Trump administration is now launching a talent network to recruit early-career employees to work for the federal government.

“Public service is one of the best ways to build real skills while making a real impact,” wrote Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor in a Monday X post announcing the initiative, which he said his agency will lead in collaboration with the White House.

According to the portal, participants in the Early Career Talent Network can be connected with agency recruiters, who will send alerts about job openings across government to the potential applicants. Likewise, a website for the initiative spotlights internships as well as open entry-level contracting, human resources and technology positions.

Visitors to the website are greeted with a message that agencies need America’s “best and brightest” as part of a minute-long video that features several non-governmental subjects, including football players and country singer and Trump supporter Kid Rock.

The Partnership for Public Service, an organization that assists agencies with recruitment, argued that the new talent network “runs headlong into problems of the current administration’s own making.” Specifically, the nonpartisan nonprofit referenced last year’s mass firing of newly hired and promoted federal employees, which impacted many early-career workers.

“Smoother entry points into federal service are welcome, but they won’t be enough if the job also comes with heightened instability, attacks on civil servants and the recurring threat of unpaid work during government shutdowns,” the organization’s president and CEO, Max Steir, said in a statement to Government Executive.

The Partnership previously reported, based on federal workforce data, that the percentage of federal employees younger than the age of 30 went from about 8.9% to 7.9% over the course of 2025. Additionally, Trump has weakened job protections for newly hired civil servants who are in their probationary periods.

Despite this recent history, the early-career website lists “job security” as a benefit of a federal job.

The Trump administration also recently established Tech Force to recruit early-career technologists for two-year stints at agencies.

The White House's National Design Studio, led by former Department of Government Efficiency associate Joe Gebbia, created the early-career website for OPM, according to the agency. Gebbia's team is working to reshape the design standards behind websites across the federal government and use artificial intelligence to implement them at scale.

Natalie Alms contributed to this report

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A call to action: Shining the spotlight on public building utilization

Edward C. Forst and Rep. Scott Perry — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0400

The federal government has no shortage of office space, but on any given day, these buildings sit largely empty. Every American knows real estate is both a valuable and expensive asset, yet the U.S. House of Representatives held a subcommittee hearing in July 2023 titled, “the lights have been on but no one is home” in federal buildings.

This isn’t just a punchline, it’s a crisis.

For too long, the government has been paying for ghost buildings it does not use and cannot afford to keep or continue to neglect. This issue has remained hidden in plain sight, buried under layers of bureaucracy. By releasing the numbers today on the usage of these properties and shining a light on this once illusive issue, we are delivering the transparency American taxpayers deserve.

Currently, the General Services Administration manages close to 8,000 federally owned and leased properties on behalf of approximately 400 agencies and bureaus. Vast portions of federally-owned real estate sit underutilized while delinquent maintenance costs have ballooned to at least $26 billion to as much as $50 billion in backlogged maintenance and repair liabilities.

Congress took an important first step by passing the bipartisan Thomas R. Carper Water Resources Development Act of 2024, which included the USE IT Act, requiring agencies to measure and publicly release information on how their space is actually used.

In short, the objective is to obtain data to inform better decision making about our nation’s real estate holdings and ensure that taxpayers are not footing the bill for underutilized property.

Today, we are releasing the results of the inaugural utilization metrics. This provides the first top-line, government-wide snapshot of space utilization. While this initial data remains imperfect, it is critical to unlock transparency and accountability.

Now that we know where we stand, we can make informed decisions about where we need to be. Based on the data, the federal footprint must shrink. Currently, no agency hits the 60% occupancy benchmark legislated in the USE IT Act. In any well-run organization, whether it be public or private sector, that should be a cause for concern.

In fact, the private sector is similarly sounding the alarm as the 2025 JLL Global Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report revealed the top priority for corporate real estate leaders was portfolio optimization as they look to refine the approach to physical space.

No private-sector company would tolerate futile and wasteful spending. Taxpayers should not be asked to either.

Exposing these inefficiencies empowers us to fix them. We cannot afford to delay. Now that we have this information, it is time we get to work. We can and we must do better. We will look to reduce excess property and realign our nation's real estate portfolio around a stronger, more efficient core.

This is our call to action.

First, we must aggressively dispose of underutilized and high-cost properties, especially those burdened with significant delinquent maintenance backlogs. Keeping them hurts us all. Transitioning these assets to the private sector and local governments can revitalize communities while relieving federal liabilities.

Second, we must fundamentally rethink how the remaining space is used. Co-locating agencies with similar missions just makes good sense. We will reduce duplication, foster collaboration, and maximize the value of every square foot.

Third, we must invest strategically in a smaller, stronger portfolio. Historic, well-located federal buildings that promote civic architecture should anchor this effort, serving as efficient hubs for modern, multi-agency operations.

Now is the moment to act, decisively and without hesitation. Together under President Trump's leadership, the executive branch and Congress have the mandate to transform what was once a fiscal drain of empty space into an engine of economic opportunity.

The American people expect their government to utilize resources wisely. The path forward is clear: reduce excess, consolidate intelligently, and invest in the core assets that truly support our mission.

Edward C. Forst is the administrator for the U.S. General Services Administration.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., is chairman of the House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management.

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Most government leaders say they outpace private sector on AI adoption, survey says

Chris Teale — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

More than half of government leaders believe they are ahead of the private sector when it comes to adopting artificial intelligence and agentic AI tools, according to a recent survey.

Research by IDC for Salesforce released last week found that 82% of government organizations surveyed have already adopted AI agents, which can reason and act without human intervention. Sixty percent of those government leaders believe they are significantly or somewhat ahead of the private sector in adopting agentic AI.

And it would appear there is more to come, as 83% of those surveyed said AI agents are key to transforming their organizational structure and operations.

“Government leaders no longer see AI as a back-office experiment,” Paul Tatum, Salesforce’s executive vice president of public sector solutions, said in a statement. “They see it as a critical pillar of national competitiveness and service delivery. In today’s landscape, integrating agentic AI is now mission critical.”

Agentic AI has been seen for some time as a new frontier for technology companies and their public-sector clients, who say they want to augment their employees’ capabilities and change their workflows away from menial tasks towards more meaningful work. And while some government leaders appear to have approached this new phase of AI with some caution, adoption looks likely to accelerate.

The IDC survey found that 71% of government organizations plan to increase their use of agentic AI in the next year, and they believe it will be transformational. More than half said AI will have a greater impact than the internet and cloud computing, 51% said it will have a greater impact than the PC and 46% said it will be more transformative than the smartphone.

The vast majority — 94% —said they believe AI agents will fundamentally transform the nature of work, while 83% believe agentic AI will transform service delivery and operating models.

Some governments are already leaning in hard, like the city of Kyle, Texas, which launched its “Agent Kyle” last year to help with 311 customer service calls. AI agents are already deployed in other governments supporting caseworkers with on public benefits and helping them spend less time on menial administrative tasks, with other leaders promising there is more to come after they spent time readying themselves for the technology.

“I definitely think one of the things that's driving public sector innovation here is a combination of things that came before,” James McClain, acting chief technology officer for the All of Us program at the National Institutes of Health, said during a press briefing at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in Washington, D.C. last week. “We put a lot of energy into technology readiness, technology enablement, cloud adoption, things that were getting us positioned for being able to take the next step and use tools like this.”

McClain said it may be easier for government agencies at all levels to use AI and adopt agents as they have a more limited amount of uses for the technology and can share them across agencies and departments. Doing that, he said, cuts across agency portfolios and missions.

“The private sector has got a million different things they have to deliver on,” he said. “There's a critical mass of concentration of common use cases [in government]. What you end up seeing is we can gain some acceleration, because we're all working on a suite of commonalities of use cases, whether they be around data automation, process automation, customer support, those things are a place where there's tremendous opportunity, and it goes across sectors.”

And there is evidence that adoption and continued use of technology will dramatically shape the future of government work. The IDC survey found that 89% of government leaders believe that, by 2030, humans will work side-by-side with AI agents, while 74% said they expect most human employees to have an AI agent reporting to them within five years.

Majorities said they believe agentic AI will transform their organizational structure (83%), and spur the creation of entirely new teams and departments (74%). More than half (59%) also said they believe the technology will increase the size of certain teams and departments, while 57% believe AI will increase the need for people in leadership positions. Most (91%) said they think around three-quarters of their workforce will step into brand new roles, while 92% expect a similar number of jobs to be fundamentally transformed.

If government agencies are to be successful in using AI to its full potential and realizing some of those ambitions, it needs buy-in from leaders who must see its use as a “core competency,” said Mia Jordan, Salesforce’s global go-to market AI executive and industry advisor.

“Contrast that with how government has typically operated when some new technology becomes available, and it's based on a very small use case, or maybe a large use case in an agency, but only the people directly involved with that grant program or that loan program or that benefit program actually get to use and touch that technology,” Jordan said during the media briefing. “Everyone else in the government or in that department is excluded from ever leveraging that technology.”

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At the National Science Foundation, 'climate change' is disappearing from proposals

Kate Yoder, Ayurella Horn-Muller, and Clayton Aldern, Grist — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

At the Department of Agriculture’s research division, everyone knows there’s one word they should never say, according to Ethan Roberts. “The forbidden C-word” — climate.

Roberts, union president at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Ill., has worked for the federal government for nearly a decade. In that time, the physical science technician has weathered several political administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term. None compare to what’s happening now.

The sweeping transformation became apparent last March, after a memo from upper management at the USDA Agricultural Research Service instructed staffers to avoid submitting agreements and other contracts that used any of 100-plus newly banned words and phrases. Roughly a third directly related to climate change, including “global warming,” “climate science,” and “carbon sequestration.”

Roberts met with his union to figure out how to respond to the memo. They concluded that the best course of action was just to avoid the terms and try to get their research published by working around them. Throughout the federal agency, “climate change” was swapped for softer synonyms: “elevated temperatures,” “soil health,” and “extreme weather.”

It’s part of a bigger trend. Across federal agencies and academic institutions, scientists are avoiding words they once used without hesitation. When Trump took office last year — calling coal “clean” and “beautiful” while deriding plans to tackle climate change as a “green scam” — a so-called “climate hushing” took hold of the United States, as businesses, politicians, and even the news media got quieter about global warming. There’s a long list of supposedly “woke” words that agencies have been discouraged from using, many tied to climate change or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

The language changes were accompanied by larger shifts in how the federal government operates. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, laid off hundreds of thousands of federal workers last year. The Trump administration also slashed spending on science, cutting tens of billions of dollars in grants for projects related to the environment and public lands. Researchers are adapting to the new landscape, with some finding creative ways to continue their climate research, from changing their wording to seeking out different sources of funding.

For federal researchers studying, say, the interplay between weather patterns and soybean diseases, the key is to reframe studies so they don’t clash with the Trump administration’s politics. “Instead of making it about the climate, you would instead just make it about the disease itself, and be like, ‘This disease does these things under these conditions,’ rather than ‘These conditions cause this disease to do this,’” Roberts added. “It’s just changing the focus.”

You can see how federally funded research has changed by looking at the grants approved by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, an agency that provides roughly a quarter of the U.S. government’s funding to universities. Grist’s analysis found that the number of NSF grants whose titles or abstracts mentioned “climate change” fell from 889 in 2023 to 148 last year, a 77% plunge. Part of that’s a result of NSF staffers approving fewer grants related to climate change under Trump. But researchers self-censoring by omitting the phrase in their proposals also appears to play a role, evidenced by the corresponding rise of “extreme weather” — a synonym that gets around the politicized language.

Trent Ford, the state climatologist for Illinois, said he’s started using terms like “weather extremes” and “weather variability” in framing his proposals for grants.

“It’s sort of a weird thing, because on principle, if we’re studying climate change, to not name climate change feels dirty,” said Ford, who’s also a research scientist at the Illinois State Water Survey at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But it’s more of a practical decision than anything else: “We’ve seen where grants that say everything but ‘climate change’ and are obviously studying the impacts of climate change get through with no problem.” He only uses the phrase in grant proposals when he thinks it’s absolutely necessary and when efforts to steer around the term would look too obvious to a reviewer.

Researchers have always had to tailor their framing to align with a funder’s priorities, in this case the federal government. Near the end of President Joe Biden’s term in late 2024, when Ford’s team applied for an NSF grant to study how climate conditions could affect Midwestern agriculture, it made sense to include a line about talking to a diverse group of farmers. But that word became a problem after Trump returned to office.

“By the time the proposal got reviewed by the program manager at NSF, that same language that was required four months ago was now actually a death sentence on it,” Ford said. The NSF liked the proposal, but wanted the researchers to remove the line about reaching a diverse set of agricultural stakeholders and confirm that they would talk to “all American farmers,” Ford said. The team sent it back in, and the NSF approved it last April.

Others weren’t so lucky. Another scientist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said DOGE eliminated major research programs at the agency and, in the process, wiped out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds for an initiative to grow plants without soil that “really didn’t have anything to do with climate change.” The scientist said it had only been labeled as climate research to “satisfy the previous Biden administration.”

“Anything, any project, that had ‘CC’ in front of it, was eliminated. Because ‘CC’ stands for climate change,” the staffer said. “So, unfortunately, that came back to bite them during this administration.”

Though not to this extreme, researchers have found themselves staying away from politically fraught terms like “climate change” before. During the first Trump administration, Austin Becker, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies how ports and maritime infrastructure can be made more resilient to hazards like storms and flooding, started avoiding the phrase, even though it’s what motivated his research. “Everything that was ‘climate’ just became ‘coastal resilience,’” he said. “And we’ve kind of just stuck with that ever since.”

Ford initially resisted pressure to stop using the phrase from colleagues he was writing grants with, but he gave in this time around for financial reasons. “Getting a grant could be the difference between a graduate student getting a paycheck and us having to let a graduate student go, or having to let a full-time employee of the university go,” he said.

Some researchers have been looking for grants in new places as federal money dries up. Dana Fisher, a professor at American University and the director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity, has procured private funding to research ways to improve and expand communication about climate change in North America. She’s also looking overseas for funding, where she’s had success during past Republican administrations that were hesitant to approve grants for climate research.

As scarce as funding for anything related to the climate has become under Trump, some topics appear to be even more politically toxic. In Ford’s experience, and from what he’s heard from other researchers, “equity” and “environmental justice” are “actually dirtier words.” The Trump administration has closed the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice offices and continues to lay off EPA staff who helped communities dealing with pollution. Grist’s analysis of grants reveals a similar pattern: Under Trump, mentions of “DEI,” or diversity, equity, and inclusion, have vanished from NSF grants entirely. Terms like “clean energy” and “pollution” have also declined, but not as sharply as climate change.

You could view the federal government’s pressure on scientists to change their language in different ways. Is it Orwellian-style censorship, silencing dissent and policing language? Or simply the right of a funder, whose politics changes with each administration, to ask for research that reflects its concerns? Does it affect what research gets done, or will applicants simply swap in harmless synonyms to ensure the work can continue?

The answer is complicated, according to the USDA’s Roberts. Many of the climate projects at the agency’s research division that have so far avoided cancellation are stuck in funding purgatory, awaiting a fate that could hinge on a politically charged word or two. Scientists are adapting their research to better align with White House priorities, hoping to continue equipping farmers with the knowledge of how to adapt to a warming world — and scrubbing any forbidden language in the meantime.

“Clever word usage, and controlling the scope of how the research is presented, allows for scientists to keep doing the work,” Roberts said. “There’s no one going around hunting these people down, thankfully. Not yet, anyway.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/language/climate-federal-research-grants-national-science-foundation/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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As the number of political appointees surge and career SES ranks shrink, one nonprofit warns of ‘institutional consequences’

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:48:28 -0400

The political appointee workforce in the federal government is at its largest size in decades while the number of career employees in the Senior Executive Service has decreased by nearly 30% since the start of the second Trump administration, according to a new report from the Partnership for Public Service.

“The concern is not that political appointees are inherently unqualified — many bring valuable expertise and leadership — but that agencies primarily led by officials selected for political loyalty rather than managerial competence can leave agencies without the expertise and experience needed to deliver results,” the nonpartisan good government group wrote.

The Partnership found that Trump, at the end of his first year, had installed more Schedule C appointees, which are made by the president for confidential or policy roles, than any other administration in the last 40 years. In total, there were about 2,570 Schedule C and non-career SES appointees serving at agencies in January 2026, which is approximately 800 more than President Joe Biden had at the same point in his term and roughly 1,000 more than at the one-year mark of Trump’s first administration.

Going forward, the Partnership expects that the number of political appointees under Trump will increase due to Schedule Policy/Career, which will convert tens of thousands of career feds into at-will employees, and Schedule G, an additional employment classification that the president established in 2025 for political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation.

Conversely, as the Trump administration has sought to downsize the civil service, the number of career SES has gone from nearly 8,130 at the end of Biden’s term to about 5,840 a year later, which is the lowest level since at least 1998.

As a result, political appointees currently hold 11.7% of filled SES positions, even though there is a 10% statutory cap on the percentage of such roles that can be allocated to non-career senior executives.

“The institutional consequences are substantial,” the Partnership wrote. “When the bridge between the career workforce and appointees is hollowed out, agencies lose institutional memory, technical capacity and independent professional judgment that prevents mismanagement, policy failures and political overreach.”

The Trump administration also has limited the number of senior executives who can receive top performance ratings, put more weight in reviews on whether the SES member is aligned with the president’s priorities and called on agencies to redesignate more of their senior positions as being open to political appointees.

Trump administration officials have argued that initiatives like Schedule P/C will not result in politically motivated hirings and firings and that they’re necessary to root out misconduct and poor performance among the civil service.

The Partnership proposed that Congress should cap the number of Schedule C appointees, bar the president from creating new job classifications (e.g. Schedule G) and require quarterly reporting on the number of political appointees.

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New contract for background investigations raises concerns about scale and risk

Lindy Kyzer — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:25:52 -0400

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) sits at the center of one of government’s most sensitive and consequential missions: determining who is trusted to access classified information and facilities. At the heart of that mission is the Case Processing Operations Center (CPOC), a function that powers the intake, processing and quality control of federal background investigations.

As DCSA moves forward with its next-generation CPOC 2.0 procurement, recently released as a draft solicitation on SAM.gov, the agency deserves credit for continuing to modernize a mission that has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Of particular note is DCSA’s incorporation of the critical Continuous Vetting (CV) analytical services mission, a key component of Trusted Workforce 2.0 (TW 2.0), into the CPOC 2.0 draft solicitation along with the original CPOC clerical work covered by the Service Contracting Act (SCA).

But the acquisition strategy now taking shape — a total small business set-aside — raises important questions: how does DCSA balance the government’s commitment to small business participation with the need to deliver at scale for a mission that underpins national security? And how do we respond to the push for more realistic and equitable contract awards and fewer set-asides when some of the nation’s most important contracts still seem to be following acquisition business as usual?

A mission growing in complexity

Although historically CPOC has been procured as a small business set-aside, it has never been a small undertaking. The requirement supports the processing of background investigations for federal and contractor personnel, a workload that has historically included over a million cases annually and millions of investigative actions, requiring 800+ full-time equivalents to support the workload.

And it’s only getting bigger.

Based on the draft, the follow-on contract will expand into CV, a shift from periodic reinvestigations to near real-time monitoring of cleared personnel, analyzing an evolving series of threat alerts against the entire cleared population. That transformation is central to Trusted Workforce 2.0 and demands not just steady-state processing, but adaptability, technology integration and surge capacity.

The small business question

DCSA’s decision to pursue a total small business set-aside is consistent with longstanding federal priorities to expand opportunities for small and disadvantaged firms. That objective is both important and necessary, particularly in a market where consolidation and incumbent advantage can limit new entrants.

But not all requirements are created equally and suitable for small businesses. Large contracts like CPOC need established management discipline and systems, available funding to front payroll and capital expenditures and the ability to compete with large companies to recruit and retain top talent. Due to the inherent risk, most would not consider a contract of this size, complexity and criticality a viable small business set-aside opportunity.

Policy alignment and oversight

There is also a broader policy context to consider.

Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Jan. 16 memorandum, “Contract Review of All Small Business Sole Source and Set-Aside Awards Above $20 Million in Contract Value,” mandates a comprehensive review of such procurements. There is a fundamental question as to whether this acquisition strategy has undergone the appropriate level of scrutiny. Has the CPOC 2.0 procurement been evaluated in accordance with established oversight protocols to ensure alignment with mission priorities, adherence to small business eligibility intent and avoidance of de facto pass-through or structurally constrained competition?

This scrutiny is well-placed. Large, complex procurements introduce risks that must be carefully managed. But scrutiny on the backend only delays critical acquisitions. The government should be carefully considering its contract requirements and how some small business set-asides both slow progress and virtually guarantee litigation.

For a requirement like CPOC, the stakes are unusually high. Delays or performance issues don’t just affect contract metrics, they ripple across the entire personnel vetting enterprise, impacting hiring, readiness and national security. The ability to grow and scale the national security workforce is an imperative to a nation in conflict as the U.S. is today. The current policy and security reality argues for an acquisition strategy that maximizes competition among all capable providers, regardless of size classification.

Another concern raised by industry is the unusually compressed response timeline associated with the CPOC 2.0 acquisition. Requests for information and subsequent requests for purchase have been released with response timelines of just a few days, leaving little time for thoughtful industry input. While short suspense timelines are not uncommon in federal procurement, they can undermine one of the core purposes of draft solicitations: to gather meaningful feedback that improves the final acquisition.

There’s a lot of talk about acquisition reform today. But when basic business as usual, such as short suspense requests like this, is the norm, the only companies who can compete are those who already know the requirement. If the goal is to maximize competition and refine requirements, allowing sufficient time for industry to respond is not just a courtesy, it’s a strategic necessity.

Why this matters for DCSA CPOC 2.0

None of this is to suggest that DCSA’s objectives are misplaced. Supporting small businesses, advancing socioeconomic goals and fostering a diverse industrial base remain essential priorities.

But acquisition strategy should be tailored to mission needs.

The size and scale of DCSA’s mission today demands a robust and wide pool of available resources, not a single, consolidated contract, newly bucketed with additional, more complex requirements and then set aside as a small business acquisition.

DCSA has made significant progress in modernizing the personnel vetting enterprise, and the transition to CV represents a generational shift in how the government manages risk.

The CPOC recompete is a pivotal moment in that journey.

Getting the acquisition strategy right isn’t just about compliance with policy or alignment with small business goals, it’s about ensuring the resilience, scalability and effectiveness of the system that determines who can be trusted with the nation’s most sensitive information.

That’s a mission worth competing for — fully, openly and with the best capabilities available.

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Shutdown poised to continue for DHS after House, Senate take diverging paths

Eric Katz — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:16:22 -0400

The Homeland Security Department shutdown appears poised to continue after the Senate and House took diverging paths on Friday, leaving the agency unfunded as lawmakers leave Washington for a two-week recess.

The Senate early Friday morning unanimously passed a measure to fund all of DHS except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, the two agencies most central to carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE and CBP are currently operating normally and paying employees using existing appropriations and Republicans planned to separately pass a bill to fully fund the agencies.

That plan to largely end the single-agency shutdown, which began Feb. 14, was disrupted later in the day, however, when House Republicans balked at the Senate’s bill. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said the chamber will vote Friday evening on a bill to extend funding for all of DHS for 60 days. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has already declared such a bill dead on arrival and senators have left town anyway.

Johnson told reporters on Friday he was caught off guard by the Senate’s actions and he would not go along with funding DHS if ICE and CBP were not included.

The shutdown has left more than 100,000 DHS employees without immediate pay, leading to significant impacts including long lines at airports due to callouts from Transportation Security Administration employees. Trump sought to alleviate at least that concern on Friday by unilaterally opting to use funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to pay those workers. Most other furloughed and excepted DHS employees, such as those at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, civilians at the U.S. Coast Guard and others will continue to see their paychecks delayed.

Trump this week deployed ICE personnel to airports to assist TSA with security efforts.

Congressional Democrats had been holding out on funding DHS until the White House agreed to reforms at ICE and CBP. Their repeated attempts to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS had been blocked by Republicans until Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., brought up a similar measure at 2 a.m. on Friday and it passed by unanimous consent.

House lawmakers are also expected to leave Washington following their Friday evening vote on the 60-day continuing resolution with no plan for getting a DHS funding bill to Trump’s desk.

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Federal contractor DEI initiatives singled out in latest Trump executive order

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:14:41 -0400

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs at companies that are federal contractors.

While contractors are already subject to anti-DEI directives that the president enacted at the start of his second term, Trump wrote that this new order is necessary because “some entities continue to engage in DEI activities and often attempt to conceal their efforts to do so.”

Under the directive, agencies must ensure that contracts and subcontracts, within 30 days, include a clause that states the contractor:

Will not engage in DEI activities.
Agrees to provide information and reports to assess compliance.
Acknowledges that noncompliance with the order could lead to the termination or suspension of the contract and the company being barred from future government contracts.

The order defines “racially discriminatory DEI activities” as “disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity in the recruitment, employment (e.g., hiring, promotions), contracting (e.g., vendor agreements), program participation or allocation or deployment of an entity’s resources.”

While noting that racial discrimination in employment has been illegal for decades, Julia Judish, a special counsel at Pillsbury law firm, said that the inclusion of “recruitment” in the definition is an “about face” for federal contractors.

Government contractors had been required to implement affirmative action programs, but on the second day of his second term, Trump repealed an executive order from the 1960s that mandated such a requirement. Consequently, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, a Labor Department agency that enforced the directive, was significantly downsized.

“It’s the flip of what had been required of government contractors over decades,” Judish said.

She also predicted that the new order will create uncertainty for contractors.

“Does this mean that, if a government contractor participates in a career fair at a historically Black college or university, is that viewed as a racially discriminatory allocation or deployment of their resources in support of recruitment that is more likely to reach potential applicants based on race or ethnicity?” she said. “So there’s a lot of questions.”

The new directive also requires the Office of Management and Budget, in coordination with the Justice Department, assistant to the president for Domestic Policy and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to “identify economic sectors that pose a particular risk of entities engaging in racially discriminatory DEI activities based on current or past conduct and issue additional guidance to contracting agencies regarding best practices to ensure compliance with this order within such sectors.”

Additionally, the order authorizes the Justice Department to sue contractors and subcontractors that violate these requirements and mandates changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation in order to ensure the rules correspond with the new directive.

The second Trump administration has prioritized cutting employees and programs that officials determine perform work related to DEI.

For instance, the Interior Department this month reminded employees that they should report any suspected DEI activities and that doing so is considered to be a protected whistleblower activity.

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Trump moves to pay TSA agents as shutdown talks stall in Congress

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:12:48 -0400

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will sign an order allowing the Department of Homeland Security to pay airport security workers who have gone without a full paycheck since the shutdown began in mid-February.

The order does not appear to include pay for other federal employees working for DHS, including those at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Secret Service.

“It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it! I want to thank our hardworking TSA agents and also ICE for the incredible help they have given us at the airports,” Trump wrote on social media. “I will not allow the Radical Left Democrats to hold our country hostage any longer.”

Trump’s decision will give both chambers of Congress, which are controlled by Republicans, a bit of cover to leave for their two-week spring break without actually reaching bipartisan compromise to fund DHS. The Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are both part of DHS.

Democrats have held up the department’s funding bill in the Senate to demand new constraints on federal immigration actions after officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in January.

Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said talks over funding the department continue with Republicans.

“There's an active negotiation going on. I hope they don't unilaterally decide to walk away. But that's their decision,” he said. “They ultimately take orders from a higher power.”

Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said “it’s just not true that we’re not in a negotiation.”

“It may be that one person or the other has lost patience and that would be too bad,” he said. “But we’re still talking.”

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Trump made the right decision to choose to pay TSA agents as the shutdown drags on.

“I just got off the phone with the president,” he said. “The president is doing absolutely the right thing. He's showing leadership.”

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