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OPM finalizes ‘Nixonian’ rule centralizing and enabling some federal firings

Erich Wagner — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:04:42 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management this week finalized new regulations granting the agency the power to remove federal workers across government over issues of suitability or misconduct, as the Trump administration launches a new phase in its quest to sidestep decades-old civil service protections.

For decades, OPM has had the authority to rule out federal job applicants over conduct that may make them unsuitable for public service. But once someone has been hired—and completed a one-year probationary period—individual agencies have been responsible for addressing misconduct using the same procedures as they employ to remove poor performers, known as Chapter 75 procedures, which include avenues for the impacted employee to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

But last year, President Trump issued a memo instructing OPM to create a system by which the HR agency can remove employees for “post-appointment” conduct, outside of the strictures of Chapter 75. In a final rule published in the Federal Register Tuesday, OPM said going forward, both it and employing agencies may take a suitability action to remove a federal worker for alleged misconduct.

“Despite the clear intent from both Congress and the president—stretching over decades now—that agencies should not rely on Chapter 75 procedures to address post-appointment conduct covered by the factors described in [the suitability regulation], today agencies still largely must rely on Chapter 75 procedures to remove employees who engage in serious misconduct,” OPM wrote. “This means that, illogically, the government has far greater ability to bar someone from federal employment who has committed a serious crime or misconduct in the past than it does to remove someone who engages in the exact same behavior as a federal employee.”

While MSPB still has jurisdiction over appeals to suitability determinations, OPM earlier this year proposed additional regulations that would bring those appeals in-house to OPM for adjudication. The suitability regulations are set to take effect July 30; the plan to move of some employee appeals to OPM has yet to be finalized.

This week’s rule also expands the range of conduct that may attract a suitability determination to include: failure to comply with legal obligations, including the “timely” filing of tax returns; refusal to sign a non-disclosure agreement or a violation of an in-effect NDA; and theft, misuse or “negligent loss” of government resources or equipment.

Jenny Mattingly, vice president of policy and stakeholder engagement for the Partnership for Public Service, highlighted how the administration has spread pieces of its campaign to reduce the federal workforce’s civil service protections across an array of regulatory and policy changes. Complementing the addition of NDA provisions to the list of reasons for a suitability determination is OPM’s push to issue a standardized governmentwide NDA for federal workers, which critics have assailed as an attempt to chill whistleblower activity and curb employees’ constitutionally protected speech. And Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee announced last week that the panel would begin investigating tax delinquency among federal workers.

“These new criteria are very broad in some respects, and open to interpretation,” she said. “And then, when you put the determinations of what those interpretations are into the hands of the political head of an agency, our concern is that it makes it easier to politicize the removal of federal employees . . . It really centralizes everything under OPM in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

Dan Meyer, a partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, a law firm specializing in federal employment law, said this regulation, taken in concert with the Trump administration’s other civil service policies, amount to an effort to rebuild President Nixon’s political control of the workforce prior to the enactment of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

“This is a pretty aggressive agenda to roll back the Civil Service Reform Act,” he said. “[This] is what this is trying to do: to bring back centralized control . . . This administration is as if Nixon got three terms: all the agenda items from 1969 through 1971 are moving forward. That’s why [Arthur] Schlesinger called it ‘The Imperial Presidency,’ because of the centralization of power.”

And Mattingly said that even setting aside her organization’s policy concerns, it remains an open question as to whether OPM can handle all of its new authority.

“At this point there are multiple appeals processes—not just suitability—that are being pulled into OPM,” she said. “The question we keep raising is: does OPM even have the capacity or the capability to handle these types of things? It’s unclear whether OPM has the budget, the people or the skillsets to actually manage all of these things.”

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Union accuses Treasury and HHS of neglecting telework requests from employees with disabilities

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:46:17 -0400

The Treasury and Health and Human Services departments are breaking federal rules by largely ignoring reasonable accommodation requests from employees with disabilities, the National Treasury Employees Union alleged in a lawsuit filed on Monday.

“The defendants are failing to administer even basic threshold steps required by law, regulations and their own internal procedures, such as acknowledging receipt of requests, routing requests to a designated reasonable accommodation coordinator, communicating with employees throughout the request process, resolving requests promptly or considering interim accommodations while requests are under review,” the plaintiff attorneys wrote.

As a result, NTEU said that its members have been forced to use up their time off, risk their health by reporting to work in person and, in some cases, leave federal service.

When the Trump administration ended work-from-home flexibility for the civil service at the start of the president’s second term, officials exempted qualifying employees with disabilities. Nevertheless, workers across government have reported widespread denials and revocations of reasonable accommodations, which agencies are legally required to provide unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship,” that permit telework.

According to the lawsuit, Treasury in March 2025 updated its policy to require a bureau head or designee as well as the deputy secretary to review and approve each request for telework that lasts for more than two weeks. By May 2025, officials reported a reasonable accommodation backlog that exceeded 6,500.

In response, the department in June 2025 lowered the approval threshold to a bureau head, among other changes, but specified that the official couldn’t delegate the authority. The NTEU attorneys noted that this meant only a handful of individuals were responsible for reviewing potentially thousands of reasonable accommodation requests.

The IRS told employees last month, according to the filing, that it was eliminating the form that had been used to apply for a reasonable accommodation, and it’s unclear to employees with pending requests whether they need to resubmit them.

While the NTEU attorneys acknowledged that HHS overhauled its reasonable accommodation approval procedures in September 2025, they described the process as “effectively unavailable or defunct.”

Unions representing workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an HHS component, alleged in 2025 that the agency hadn’t processed reasonable accommodation requests for several months due to layoffs at its Equal Employment Opportunity Office.

In the lawsuit, NTEU spotlighted some of their members’ experiences, such as Shakira Williams, an HHS employee who has been waiting for more than a year for a response to her telework reasonable accommodation request in relation to PTSD.

Likewise, Benita Brown, an IRS worker, had her interim telework reasonable accommodation for a knee injury that caused mobility issues revoked in July 2025. She then provided the agency with additional medical information but hasn’t received a response. Due to not being able to telework, she used medical and annual leave, but when that ended, she was deemed AWOL.

The union also said that members submitted telework accommodation requests related to pregnancy and lactation that “were not processed before the need for accommodation had passed.”

“This lawsuit is about these agencies’ indifference and apathy towards employees with medical needs,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement. “It’s about treating employees with common human decency.”

Specifically, the union requests in the lawsuit that the court compel Treasury and HHS to process reasonable accommodation requests within certain timelines.

Neither department responded to a request for comment.

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Some TSP funds faltered in June

Erich Wagner — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:31:20 -0400

The federal government’s 401(k)-style retirement savings program posted mixed results in June, ending two straight months of consistent growth.

The Thrift Savings Plan’s S Fund, which is made up of small- and mid-size businesses, saw the best performance, gaining 4.34% last month. Since January, the S Fund has grown 18.41%.

The fixed income (F) fund increased 0.25% last month, bringing its 2026 performance to 0.74%. And the G Fund, which is made up of government securities, increased by its statutorily mandated rate of 0.37%. So far this year, the G Fund has swelled 2.18%.

But the I Fund was virtually flat in June, losing 0.03%. That brings the I Fund’s 2026 performance to 16.53%. And the C Fund’s common stocks fell 0.95%, bringing its gains since January down to 10.20%.

Each of the TSP’s lifecycle (L) funds, which shift toward more conservative investments as participants approach retirement age, posted muted gains in June. The L Income Fund, designed for those already making withdrawals, gained 0.30%; L 2030, 0.21%; L 2035, 0.18%; L 2040, 0.16%; L 2045, 0.14%; L 2050, 0.12%; L 2055, 0.06%; L 2060, 0.06%; L 2065, 0.06%; L 2070, 0.06%; and L 2075, 0.06%.

Since January, the L Income Fund has grown 5.24%; L 2030, 8.33%; L 2035, 9.55%: L 2040, 10.21%; L 2045, 10.77%; L 2050, 11.34%; L 2055, 13.41%; L 2060, 13.40%; L 2065, 13.40%; L 2070, 13.40%.

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Inside the competing federal efforts behind America’s 250th anniversary plans

Ashley Murray, States Newsroom — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Parties, protests, displays of historic documents and odes to the Founding Fathers, along with a large political rally by the president, will mark a divided nation’s 250th anniversary on this Fourth of July.

Pomp and circumstance will abound for the semiquincentennial as the similarly named America250 and Freedom 250 offer different slates of programming on Independence Day and beyond.

A countdown and ball drop will ring in the holiday across the eight time zones in the United States and its territories. The milestone birthday celebration will close with an “unprecedented pyrotechnic spectacle” in the skies above the National Mall, livestreamed.

In Philadelphia, a time capsule, to be opened in 2276, will be buried beneath Independence National Historical Park. The capsule contains contributions from each state and territory, sports memorabilia including an Olympic gold medal, a 1GB digital archive from the Library of Congress and a pocket Constitution signed by each Supreme Court justice, among hundreds of other items.

Visitors to the nation’s capital can watch and anyone across the country and the world can tune in to a live dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence at 10 a.m. Eastern at the National Archives.

The public also will be invited to typically restricted spaces. The Federal Circuit Center for Innovation & Law will open its doors July 3. Guests, who must register ahead of time, will get the opportunity to don a judge’s robe and take part in a mock trial inside the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s courtrooms.

Federal judges will be on hand to answer questions, and Chief Judge Kimberly A. Moore hopes the experience will “show how courts, public service, discovery and history continue to shape the American story,” she told States Newsroom in a statement.

The court complex, which is connected to the residence of first lady Dolley Madison, the wife of President James Madison, will also showcase various highlights of American history. Visitors can see Dolley’s parlor and learn that NASA was headquartered there from 1958 to 1961. Space suits and a 3.9-billion-year-old moon rock will be on display.

America250 vs. Freedom 250

Two separate celebrations of America’s big year are similarly named but feature different programs that stretch beyond Independence Day.

America250, a 24-member bipartisan commission created by Congress a decade ago, has spearheaded nationwide initiatives for school students, corporate employees and young entrepreneurs.

The commission has organized July Fourth events, including the ball drops, time capsule burial and simultaneous block parties in Charleston, South Carolina; Fort Campbell, Kentucky; and Milwaukee.

America250 also will host a benefit concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum featuring Chris Stapleton and the Smashing Pumpkins. Tickets are $17.76, and all proceeds go to nonprofit organizations to kick off “Giving 4th,” a nationwide initiative to promote midyear donations.

It is all separate from President Donald Trump’s plans for 2026. Days after beginning his second term, Trump issued an executive order creating Task Force 250, resulting in White House-led programming known as Freedom 250.

Fencing along the Freedom 250 construction site on the National Mall near Madison Drive and 7th Street NW on Monday, June 22, 2026. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

Fencing along the Freedom 250 construction site on the National Mall near Madison Drive and 7th Street NW on June 22, 2026. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

America250 Chair Rosie Rios said the parallel initiatives are a collaboration to balance events in the nation’s capital and beyond.

“You see a lot of activities that the administration is planning in D.C. It was our agreement that we would focus on ‘sea to shining sea’ and still obviously have opportunities for all Americans to participate across the board,” said Rios, who served as U.S. treasurer under the Obama administration.

State fair, car races, Trump rally

The White House initiative will take over the National Mall.

The president will kick off the Great American State Fair with a speech on Wednesday night. The fair, featuring 150 exhibits from all states and territories, a Ferris wheel and a model of Trump’s proposed “triumphal arch,” will last until July 10.

Winners of the Freedom 250 “American Heroes” student art contest will also be honored at the fair.

As part of the Freedom 250 lineup, Trump will visit North Dakota on July 1 ahead of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opening set for July 3.

A Freedom 250 firework display at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is also scheduled for the eve of Independence Day.

Trump promised the “most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” on July Fourth, featuring military bands and orchestras, military flyovers and keynote remarks from the president.

The night will culminate with the “largest fireworks show in history,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform on June 15.

Attendees also can expect an increased National Guard presence as part of the administration’s “summer surge.”

Trump’s Freedom 250 festivities will extend into August with a national high school athletic competition for 14- to 17-year-olds, dubbed “The Patriot Games.” The games are scheduled in Washington, D.C., for Aug. 9-11 and will stream on the ESPN app.

A one-hour primetime finale special will air on ABC the evening of Aug. 13. One female and one male athlete each will win a $250,000 scholarship.

“After the fireworks”

Rios said America250 also has an “after-the-fireworks strategy.”

Winners of essay, art and poetry contests at schools across the U.S. can choose an all-expenses-paid “America’s Field Trip” to one of several locations.

They include a private guided tour of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota; or Yellowstone National Park in Montana and Wyoming, among other destinations.

A national contest and expo for young entrepreneurs in San Francisco and another in Washington, D.C., this coming November awarded $25,000 in seed grants under the “America Innovates” startup initiative.

The commission also is aiming to make 2026 the “largest year of volunteer hours ever recorded by our country,” Rios said. A counter on the commission’s website displays the number of “America Gives” hours tracked, and Rios will announce a total on New Year’s Eve in Times Square.

“We’ve had great stakeholders who’ve already made their pledges, so Coca-Cola, for example, made a pledge for 250,000 volunteer hours. Not to be outdone, Rob Manfred from Major League Baseball says, ‘We’re going to do 250,000 volunteer hours,’” Rios said.

“Declaration of Interdependence”

Not all are feeling celebratory.

A coalition of organizers led by those who spearheaded the 2017 Women’s March will host a nationwide mobilization event June 27, calling for change for America’s next 250 years.

“We know the oxygen is going to be consumed by the official Trump-led commemoration on the Fourth. Kicking this off in a proactive way, if we can talk about what we want this country to look like and what it actually does look like ahead of that, it’s important that we go first,” said Angelo Greco, a D.C.-based strategist handling messaging for the event.

Progressive groups including the 50501 movement, All of U.S. 250, Next 250 and Get Free are expecting up to 5,000 people at a flagship march near the White House and thousands more at teach-ins, faith events, art installations and cultural events at 80 locations nationwide.

Organizers are collecting signatures on a “Declaration of Interdependence” outlining four principles for a nation where: “All people are treated with dignity and respect; everybody feels safe in every community; access to clean, green spaces is abundant; and every person who works earns a living wage and benefits that allow families a work-life balance.”

“We’re taking away the spotlight from those in power that want to whitewash our history and instead setting the terms of the debate about what the story of America has been, who we are and who we should become,” said Anthony Vidal Torres, communications director at Get Free.

Activists said they are ready to incorporate any relevant news events into their messaging, including a forthcoming Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship.

The future of a polarized nation

Thought leaders, lawmakers and former administration officials from both parties are marking the nation’s semiquincentennial by sounding the alarm about polarization.

Citing recent statistics, including that only four in 10 Gen Zers are more likely to describe the Founding Fathers as “villains” rather than “heroes,” an advisory board convened by the center-left Progressive Policy Institute launched the American Identity Project to guide policymakers and educators on the future of civics education.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., an adviser on the project, said he worries the liberal patriotism modeled by figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and former President Barack Obama is “vanishingly rare.”

“The central emotion of our time is not patriotic hope about America, but rage against America across the political spectrum,” Torres said at the think tank’s June 11 event.

Linda Chavez, a former Reagan administration official and chair of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, said she sees the problem on both the left and right.

“I see kids on the left who find our whole system of government, including democracy, as not important, and they seek to transform the country, they want to throw everything out,” Chavez said.

“And on the right I see young people who are falling under the sway of people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, who want to divide Americans and basically decide what an American is and who gets to count as an American.”

Other current and former lawmakers who advised include Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., and former Sens. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and Doug Jones, D-Ala., who is Alabama’s current Democratic gubernatorial candidate.

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Slaughter and the expansion of presidential power

Donald F. Kettl — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Immediately after the Supreme Court announced its decision affirming that the president could remove the heads of independent regulatory agencies at will, Trump applauded the majority. “BIG WIN,” he posted on Truth Social. “One of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”

The Court voted 6-3, in Trump v. Slaughter, that the president had the legal power to fire Rebecca Slaughter in 2025 as a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. Although Trump sometimes is prone to exaggeration, that’s not true here. Slaughter truly is one of the most important decisions ever in expanding the president’s power, for three reasons.

1. The case established that independent regulatory commissions are no longer truly independent. Although there are only about 100 officials in independent commissions, the Slaughter decision dismantles a long hands-off tradition when it comes to presidents and their work. During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, he tried to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, William H. Humphrey, a Herbert Hoover appointee who had been battling FDR on New Deal programs. In the hallmark case of Humphrey’s Executor – Humphrey had died, and his estate filed suit to get his back pay – the Supreme Court found that the law creating the FTC permitted the president to fire a commissioner only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and that FDR had acted illegally.

The FTC, established in 1914, followed the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. They were part of a string of independent regulatory commissions that emerged from the Progressive era (not to be confused with the “progressive” label applied today to left-leaning politicians). Congress made the ICC “independent” of the White House and cabinet agencies because, to be blunt, it didn’t trust the president to avoid meddling with rules trying to bring the railroad monopolies under control.

Western farmers complained that monopolists were gouging them on prices for transporting their products. Congress wanted experts to determine shipping rates and the best routes, and some of its members wanted to pull railroad cash into their own campaigns. They didn’t want the spoils system to tilt power solely to the president.

By the time Congress created the FTC, the civil service had replaced much of the traditional spoils system. Legislators wanted to make it independent like the ICC, and President Woodrow Wilson supported the idea. Since his days as a college professor, Wilson had strongly contended that “administrative questions are not political questions.” He agreed with creating staggered terms for FTC commissioners and limiting the president’s power to remove them. The Supreme Court upheld that position in Humphrey’s Executor.

Trump found himself in the same position as FDR. He wanted to remove Rebecca Slaughter from the FTC, a commissioner who he ironically had appointed during this first term, and he sent letters to her and commissioner Alvaro Bedoya saying their continued service would be “inconsistent with my Administration’s priorities.” This time, the Court agreed with the president. The independent regulatory commissions were no longer independent of the president.

2. The Supreme Court isn’t done yet. The Court is knocking on the door of an even greater expansion of the president’s power.

Slaughter advances the campaign that conservative have been waging behind the scenes to advance the “unitary executive” theory of the Constitution. The theory holds that Congress might pass laws and the Supreme Court might interpret them, but that the president has full control over the executive branch when it comes to implementing them, including the authority to fire federal employees – ultimately all federal employees – at will.

There’s no sign that the founders intended for the president to have such sweeping control over the bureaucracy because, among other things, there was no bureaucracy over which to have sweeping control. As anti-government fervor grew during the Reagan administration, however, conservatives began making the unitary executive argument with far more fervor. Since then, convinced that the left controlled the bureaucracy, they have been building their legal arguments to dramatically increase the president’s power over the bureaucracy. Slaughter marks their biggest victory yet and follows on the heels of a previous decision in 2020, Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had already chipped away at claims for agency independence.

In his concurring opinion to Slaughter, Justice Neil Gorsuch says very clearly that this is only one more step in the Court’s journey toward expanding presidential power. “It is time to return, all the way, to the Constitution,” he wrote. As he argues at length,

Open-ended delegations of legislative power have not gone away; now they will just be exercised by agency officials who answer to the President. The power to write new regulatory crimes still exists, but now the pen ultimately rests in the President’s hand. The ability to judge disputes in-house remains, but now the house is white.

The Court is sure to be back to ratify an even greater expansion of presidential power.

3. The Federal Reserve might be next. In a separate case decided the same day, the Court tossed out Trump’s effort to fire Lisa Cook, a governor of the Federal Reserve. Trump had charged Cook with fraud in claiming a second home as her main residence to get a more favorable interest rate. The Court’s majority, in the 5-4 decision, said that the administration had not afforded Cook due process and could not then be removed. The administration geared up to press the facts of the case again, and several members of the Court signaled they would be willing to reconsider the ruling with a stronger case.

When Congress created the Fed in 1913, it made its policymaking independent of the president. There’s a good reason for that. Easy money and lower interest rates are always more politically popular, and Congress was afraid that political pressure might lead the Fed to drift constantly into inflation.

That’s just what happened during the Nixon administration, when the president leaned on Fed Chair Arthur Burns to loosen the money supply before the 1972 presidential election. As presidential advisor John Ehrlichman told me, soon after Nixon appointed Burns, he brought him into the Oval Office and lectured him. “You see to it: no recession,” he said. A few weeks later, Nixon told Ehrlichman and advisor Bob Haldeman, “The Fed must loosen—it must risk inflation.” Burns go the message and complied.

This is the stuff of the nightmares that plague Fed chairs: political pressure for easier money going into elections risks inflation that, once unleashed, becomes extraordinarily painful to control. Trump has been pressuring the Fed to lower rates leading into the congressional midterms and dismissed Cook as part of his pressure campaign. A near-majority of the Supreme Court now believes that the president ought to have the power to remove Fed governors at will, and we are tiptoeing up to an even more substantial expansion of presidential power.

4. Trump is right. In arguing that Slaughter is “One of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers,” Trump is right. It pushes aside the last barrier against the president’s power to remove the heads of independent agencies with which he disagrees. That, in fact, makes the agencies no longer independent.

The decision in Cook could well extend presidential power into the most sensitive questions of economic policy. The central banks in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom all operate independently from politicians in setting their monetary policy. That could change in the US on the next case that hits the Thomas Court.

The Supreme Court is paving the road to the unitary executive approach to presidential power and, of all the actions during the Trump administration, this could well prove the most important in the long run.

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America at 250: What the Census reveals about our journey

John Breeden II — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday, a milestone that belongs to all 342 million of us. But one of the more interesting ways to think about that anniversary is through the federal institution that has spent almost the entire life of the republic trying to count, describe and understand who “we” actually are. The Census Bureau’s new Freedom 250 Project frames the semi-quincentennial as a chance to look back at 250 years of “measuring America’s journey,” which is a pretty good way to describe what the agency has been doing almost from the start.

The decennial census itself is nearly as old as the country. The first one was taken in 1790, only 14 years after the Declaration of Independence. It took 18 months to complete and counted 3,929,214 people, including 697,624 enslaved people, or 17.8% of the total population. It covered our 13 original states along with Kentucky, Maine, Vermont and the Southwest Territory, which later became known as Tennessee. That first count was not just a bureaucratic exercise. It was one of the earliest ways the new nation tried to understand its own size, shape and future.

That first census also reminds us how much the country has changed, and how much of today’s changes were already underway right from the start. For example, the Census Bureau’s America 250 story notes that people’s westward movement showed up early in the counts. By the time the 1890 census rolled around, officials who studied the totals concluded that the so-called “frontier line” no longer existed because people had already spread deeply into the American West. In other words, the census was not just recording static numbers on a page. It was documenting the physical movement of the country as Americans pushed outward, claimed more land and reshaped the map.

The scale of the nation’s growth is still striking. According to Census Bureau estimates for July 2025, about 342 million people now live in the United States, almost 123 times more than in 1780, the closest population benchmark to when independence was declared in 1776. That number alone says a lot. The United States did not simply get older over the past 250 years. It grew, spread and multiplied on a scale the founders could not have possibly predicted.

Just look at the number of people who lived in the original 13 colonies compared with today. Georgia had one of the biggest population swings, going from just 82,548 people in 1790 to 10.7 million today. Virginia had the largest population of the 13 colonies at 691,737, growing to 8.6 million as of the 2020 Census. Meanwhile, New York was a middle-of-the-road colony in terms of population with 340,120 residents in 1790. Today it’s the fourth most populous state in the country with 20.2 million residents.

And yet even with all of that growth, some things are oddly durable. One of the more humanizing details in the Census Bureau’s recent names data is that eight of the nation’s top 15 last names in 2020 were also among the most common in 1790. If your last name happens to be Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller, Davis or Wilson, then you are carrying a name stretching back to the earliest days of the republic. Despite a more than 84-fold increase in population since then, those names remained among the top 15 in the 2020 Census. Today they are joined by others at the top of the list including Garcia, Rodriguez, Lopez and Anderson.

That mix of change and continuity may be the most American part of the story. The census has recorded territorial expansion, urban growth, industrialization, migration and the long movement of population toward new regions and opportunities. At the same time, it has preserved quieter patterns that make the country feel connected to its own past. Names endure. Places rise and fall. New populations arrive, move and settle. And every 10 years, the census catches another snapshot of a nation that is never entirely still.

There is also something fitting about using the Census Bureau as a lens for the nation’s 250th anniversary because the agency’s work has always been about more than population alone. Its Freedom 250 materials emphasize both people and the economy, and that broader mission helps explain why census data has been so useful for understanding the nation over time. It does not just tell us how many Americans there are. It helps tell us where they are, how the country has expanded and how one generation’s America gradually turned into another’s.

That is why the Census Bureau feels like such an appropriate federal companion to the nation’s 250th birthday. For almost 236 years, census-taking has helped document how the United States kept becoming itself. It has counted the country’s growth, tracked its movement and quietly preserved the evidence of how far America has traveled. And as the nation gets ready to celebrate a quarter millennium of independence, that may be one of the clearest ways to see both where our country began and how much of our journey is still unfolding.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

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IRS agrees to stop stealing workers’ pro-union decorations

Erich Wagner — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:00:02 -0400

The Internal Revenue Service has agreed to cease policing employee workstations and communal spaces for union paraphernalia, in an apparent victory for the National Treasury Employees Union, who sued to stop the practice earlier this month.

Last month, IRS leadership issued a directive to its Facilities Management and Security Services personnel instructing them to confiscate NTEU-related materials from agency facilities using “whatever steps are necessary” short of vandalizing non-union property, purportedly to conform with President Trump’s executive order banning collective bargaining at the agency. Since then, the union has collected multiple reports of the agency taking NTEU-blazoned materials out of employees cubicles and literally papering over communal bulletin boards with union literature and decorations.

NTEU filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the practice, contending that the directive and the agency’s subsequent enforcement actions amount to a violation of union members’ First Amendment rights.

But according to a stipulation filed to the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, IRS officials have agreed to halt its campaign, at least for now. The document, submitted jointly by the agency and NTEU, states that management would “pause further implementation” of its directive and that employees may resume displaying union materials both at their desks and in common areas.

The agency also agreed to return any NTEU materials that it had previously confiscated, provided that they were not already thrown out, destroyed or otherwise lost. Under the deal, NTEU’s lawsuit would be held open, albeit in abeyance. If IRS moves to re-implement its directive, it would be required to give the union five days’ notice, giving labor leaders a chance to renew its request for an injunction.

In a statement Tuesday, NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said the agency’s swift retraction of its anti-NTEU order indicates that it “plainly” violated union members’ free speech rights.

“Now, after NTEU’s motion for a preliminary injunction and a subsequent conference before a federal district court, the IRS has agreed to halt its illegal actions,” she said. “It has likewise agreed that IRS employees can once again proudly display NTEU materials in common spaces and at their workstations and that it will return the NTEU materials that it brazenly confiscated from employees . . . This victory achieves what NTEU would have gotten through its motion for emergency relief. And it shows, more broadly, that NTEU will do whatever it takes to defend its members’ rights.”

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Judge halts Trump administration effort to exert political control over union elections

Erich Wagner — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:40:30 -0400

A federal judge in Massachusetts on Monday struck down an effort by the Trump administration to exert greater political control over union elections at federal agencies, finding that the agency’s regulatory changes were “arbitrary and capricious” under federal law.

Since 1983, representational matters—like requests to conduct a union election or for workers to choose from between multiple labor groups—have been primarily handled by the Federal Labor Relations Authority’s cadre of regional directors and their career staff. Appeals stemming from a petition—or subsequent election—are handled by the FLRA’s three-member board of political appointees, who are subject to Senate confirmation.

But in March, the FLRA issued an interim final rule that stripped its regional directors of their authority to act in these cases, stating that beginning the following month, regional directors would work “collaboratively” with political leadership to process representation petitions, with the three-member board having the final say. Under the new regulations, appeals would only be available in instances when the FLRA’s board lacks a two-member quorum, which the agency claimed would be more efficient.

A coalition of federal employee unions sued to block the new rules in April, contending violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal law requiring agency policy changes to be well-reasoned and communicated, arguing that saddling the three-member authority with hundreds of new cases would make the union election process less, not more, efficient. And since unlike most FLRA cases, those involving representational matters may not be appealed to federal appellate courts, the rule leaves unions without redress in the face of a wrongful decision.

U.S. District Judge Denise Caspar on Monday sided with the labor groups, finding that the FLRA’s justification for the rule was undercut by the agency’s own data. In 2025, 277 representation petitions were filed with agency regional directors, of which only six were appealed to the authority’s three-member board. And by the agency’s own admission, it anticipates only five appeals in representation cases for all of 2026 and 2027.

“Although in the realm of procedure, agencies are presumed to have special competence and, accordingly, are held to less exacting standards of explication . . . courts are not willing to ignore matters that are common knowledge,” Caspar wrote. “Here, it is a matter of ‘common knowledge’ that changing from a system in which multiple regional directors are deciding matters to one in which the authority must reach a collective decision on all representation matters will increase not just the authority’s caseload, but the processing and adjudication times for representation matters as well. The FLRA has provided neither an explanation nor data to suggest otherwise.”

Caspar also found that the FLRA failed to take into consideration the fact that unions and federal employees have to come to rely on the existing union election process—and the ability to appeal a regional director’s decision to the three-member board—over the last four decades. While agencies are not required to preserve a regulation or process due to those “reliance interests,” the Administrative Procedure Act requires agencies consider and address them when making changes.

“The FLRA only states that ‘because the authority will be performing the [representation] functions itself, rather than delegating them to the RDs, an appeals process will no longer be necessary,” Caspar wrote. “There is no indication from the record that the FLRA considered the reliance interests that plaintiffs raise here. While the FLRA was, of course, under no obligation to conclude that these reliance interests outweighed any particular policy concerns, making that difficult decision was the FLRA’s job, but the FLRA failed to do it.”

Caspar’s ruling effectively nullifies the FLRA’s March rule and amendment to its delegation of authority, and tasks the agency and unions with collaborating on a final order formally vacating the regulations.

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Despite criticism of Trump’s SES reforms, senior executives group backs recent updates to training program

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:20:13 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management on June 25 issued a final rule to overhaul a Senior Executive Service preparation program in order to “enhance training and development for aspiring SES and accelerate the development of well-prepared leaders to ensure leadership continuity.”

The Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program helps agencies identify and prepare federal employees who wish to join the cadre of the highest-ranking career staffers. Qualifying graduates of the program can receive an SES appointment without further competition.

Some of the changes that the new rule makes to the program include:

Authorize OPM to create a governmentwide SESCDP.
Specify that an agency SESCDP must last between 12 to 24 months and increase the number of executive training hours from 80 to 100.
Require a minimum of 10 hours each for coaching and mentoring as well as a continuous 180-day assignment outside of the scope of the candidate’s “position of record.”

OPM officials argued in the rule that these changes are necessary to promote standardization across agency SESCDPs.

“Inconsistencies among SESCDPs have yielded mixed results across participating agencies. That variability has resulted in different training and development experiences for SESCDP participants and leads to some programs that are more effective than others in preparing their leaders,” they wrote. “This causes fluctuating levels of candidate placement rates and creates challenges in supporting governmentwide succession planning efforts.”

While the Senior Executives Association has criticized several of the reforms that the Trump administration has made to the SES, the professional organization backed the training updates.

“The Senior Executives Association welcomes OPM’s final rule on SES Candidate Development Programs,” SEA President Mary Kate Whalen said in a statement. “Preparing the next generation of federal executives is essential work, and we appreciate OPM’s sustained attention to building a leadership corps that is capable, accountable and ready to serve.”

The organization warned, however, that the new training requirements could lead to costs that “fall unevenly across agencies” and urged OPM to help agencies share resources.

The Partnership for Public Service nonprofit reported recently that the number of career employees in the SES has decreased by nearly 30% since the start of Trump’s second term.

The Trump administration 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.

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Pentagon launches ‘War Force’ initiative to onboard tech talent

Edward Graham — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:36:50 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management and the Pentagon jointly announced the launch of a new initiative on Tuesday to bring top software engineering talent into the Department of Defense, part of a broader governmentwide push to hire more skilled technologists.

The recruitment effort, called War Force, operates under OPM’s larger Tech Force program. That initiative launched in December 2025 to onboard tech and cybersecurity professionals across federal agencies, although it notably followed Trump administration moves to let go of thousands of tech-focused workers and shutter several innovation-focused units.

OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement that War Force “builds on the momentum of Tech Force by connecting outstanding engineers with opportunities to solve complex challenges alongside the War Department.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last September that authorized DOD to use the “secondary title” of War Department — framing that is also reflected in the initiative's name.

OPM said the War Force recruitment effort “will launch with a targeted hiring campaign,” with a focus on bringing in applicants who have experience “deploying and integrating advanced technologies — including frontier AI, machine learning, automation, and data systems — and designing, building, and maintaining reliable software solutions that directly support operational needs on behalf of the American warfighter.” Job applications will be accepted through July 10.

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said in a statement that the War Force will help with “executing the key tenets of the War Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy.” That guidance was released in January and outlines the department’s plans for rapidly integrating AI capabilities into its operations.

The War Force recruitment effort also comes after DOD announced in April that it was launching a cyber apprenticeship program this summer to bring more skilled personnel into the agency.

During public remarks at the SAP NOW summit in Washington, D.C., last week, Pentagon Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said the apprenticeship program “has already generated more than 70,000 inquiries,” despite the effort not officially launching until July.

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Lawmaker warns of administration’s ‘fetishization’ of Silicon Valley startups

Alexandra Kelley, Ross Wilkers, Edward Graham, and David DiMolfetta — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:30:00 -0400

Rep. James Walkinshaw has big plans for the federal government’s sprawling tech stack, including scrutinizing the contracting practices of the current administration.

In an extensive sit-down interview with Nextgov/FCW and other GovExec reporters, the Democratic congressman from Virginia said that he wants to help rebuild the federal government’s capacity after sweeping disruption carried out by the Department of Government Efficiency — from strengthening civil service protections and tech talent pipelines to tightening cybersecurity guardrails on AI and reviving oversight tools like the FITARA scorecard and FedRAMP.

“I’m starting to talk to my colleagues about a comprehensive and robust agenda to rebuild the capacity of the federal government, an American capacity agenda, for lack of a better term,” he said in the Monday interview.

“We’re obviously in this post-DOGE era, where, in my view, a lot of damage has been done, 300,000 federal workers lost,” he said, adding that many of the staff lost at offices across the federal enterprise were those experienced with technology and understood how their agencies worked.

His plan, he added, is focused around three pillars — talent, technology and delivery — that center on rebuilding a battered federal workforce, speeding secure AI and tech modernization, and pushing agencies to measure success by whether people actually receive services and mission tools on time, not just whether they satisfy oversight checklists.

Contractor oversight

Walkinshaw said that if Democrats take the House majority in this year’s midterms, there will be “heavy scrutiny of the contracting practices” of the current Trump administration. Contracts with the Defense and Homeland Security departments would fall under that purview, he said.

So too would any contractors who donated to the White House ballroom renovation and other ancillary projects pushed by the Trump administration, he added.

“Those companies that continued to do things by the book, the way that they did before this administration, maybe they lost some business in the last couple years, but they're going to be happy that they continued to do things by the book,” Walkinshaw said. “Those that played by the Trump rules … those companies and the contracts they received are going to face a lot of scrutiny.”

Watchdog groups and Democrats have raised questions of late about whether companies with federal business interests are helping bankroll Trump-backed projects while also receiving or seeking government work. The White House ballroom project has become a particular flashpoint, after several reports and analyses tied some donors to major federal contractors and raised concerns about donor anonymity, conflict-of-interest safeguards and the use of public funds.

On defense contracting, Walkinshaw also took aim at what he called the Trump administration’s “fetishization” of Silicon Valley firms, saying he fears the current White House has leaned too much into startup culture to solve defense tech problems that also require sustained oversight, procurement standards and basic IT management.

“I do worry that with this administration, especially, there might be too much of a fetishization of a certain kind of company, the Silicon Valley-based startup,” he said.

The comments reflect a broader debate amid the Trump 2.0 push to swiftly bring more commercial technology firms into national security work, particularly as both defense and civilian agencies look to buy software, AI tools and other evolving technologies more quickly.

Supporters have seen that shift as a necessary challenge to slow-moving acquisition systems and legacy prime contractors. Critics, however, warn that speed and startup culture are not substitutes for procurement safeguards, cybersecurity requirements, long-term maintenance and oversight of how those tools are actually used.

Cybersecurity

Walkinshaw noted that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency stands as a prime example of the Trump administration making sweeping cuts and then later having to reverse course. The agency’s workforce has been significantly cut over the past year under efficiency-driven efforts and other prevailing GOP misgivings about the cyberdefense shop.

CISA acting director Nick Andersen recently said the agency intends to hire around 330 people in the coming months. Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the cyber unit likely needs around 600 hires and that it might take a year to bring them on.

But the congressman argued restaffing will be more difficult than many anticipate.

“I don’t think that there’s a lot of high-level introspection at the highest levels of these agencies about the negative impacts,” he said. Staffing up at CISA again is a “very difficult thing to do after you’ve just attacked people, abused them, denigrated their service, and then said ‘we want you to want to come back.’”

Cybersecurity has long drawn bipartisan support in Washington, but CISA has become a recurring target of Republican scrutiny over its past work countering election-related disinformation. Since last year, Trump officials have sought to “refocus” the agency’s mission, arguing that CISA had strayed too far from its core mission set.

On other government cyber matters, Walkinshaw said he’s especially concerned about shadow IT — tech and AI tools used without management approval — inside federal agencies, and he plans to introduce amendments in upcoming appropriations measures that would address basic “blocking and tackling” cyberdefense, which he says is “even more important now in an advanced AI world.”

He is also planning amendments focused on event logging — digital records that show what happened on a system and when — to “try to get agencies to actually follow the law and log those cyber incidents when they occur.”

Walkinshaw, along with Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., introduced legislation on June 25 that would require the Department of Homeland Security to provide lawmakers with a report on identified gaps that prevent the agency from fully meeting event logging requirements.

FITARA scorecard

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who died last year, was one of the original sponsors of the 2014 Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, meant to help the federal government better onboard and use new technologies. Walkinshaw previously spent over a decade working as the chief of staff for Connolly, and he was elected last September to finish the rest of Connolly’s term.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in collaboration with the Government Accountability Office, released its first FITARA scorecard in November 2015 to grade agencies’ tech modernization and oversight efforts on an A to F scale. Since then, the biannual scorecard has served as an oversight mechanism for many agencies, although the most recent iteration of the scorecard was released back in September 2024.

Walkinshaw said the committee’s current Republican leadership “has kind of walked away” from releasing the scorecard, citing the lack of hearings held by the Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation Subcommittee panel, in particular. He attributed this to the GOP majority’s desire to avoid subpoena fights over multiple Trump-era controversies.

But that public grading system is important, Walkinshaw stressed, because “it’s necessary and valuable to have an outside forcing mechanism to push for change and innovation.”

The rapid pace of technological change, he said, means “there’s an opportunity to incorporate technologies that were not available three years ago or five years ago that could make many of our functions more effective and more efficient, but if it’s not done thoughtfully and intentionally, it could also go horribly, horribly wrong, and Congress has a huge stake in ensuring that we get it right.”

In addition to resuming the scorecard — something the congressman posited would likely happen if Democrats retake the House in the upcoming midterm elections — Walkingshaw said the current grading scale should be modernized to account for advances in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity threats.

“The question is obviously, ‘how do you develop those metrics in a way that’s objective?’ But I think that scorecard proved to be over time a good forcing mechanism to nudge agencies to modernize,” Walkinshaw said.

When it comes to further AI use across the federal government, Walkinshaw said a grade related to the adoption of the capabilities could also be helpful for better understanding if agencies are effectively leveraging the technologies and not locking themselves into potentially expensive programs, noting that it is “very hard to unwind after you’ve committed to it.”

FedRAMP modernization

Walkinshaw noted that the government’s cloud security assessment and authorization initiative — the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP — will need to be reauthorized next year. GSA is in the process of rolling out a FedRAMP 20x initiative to modernize the authorization process for cloud providers.

He said continuing the program is “100% necessary” — a process he expects to be bipartisan — and added that “if it’s not reauthorized, any administration could basically shut down the program, and then we go back to every cloud provider for every service for every agency starting their [authorization to operate] process from scratch.”

He similarly expressed concerns about the program’s long-term financial backing, pointing out that it is supported through the General Services Administration’s Federal Citizen Services Fund, which means “it’s basically what GSA decides, so it doesn’t really have stable funding.”

He also said he believes “there should be in statute stronger requirements for the FedRAMP office to engage with industry and with the public,” noting that “they do it right now but it’s been sporadic over the years.” And streamlining agency adoption of cloud services, he added, is another area where he believes the program can be tweaked for the better.

Walkinshaw noted that providers still need to receive an ATO from agencies after receiving FedRAMP authorization and said “those agencies need to retain some responsibility for what’s operating on their networks,” but added that “I’d like to explore ways to close that gap, because I still hear from businesses that feel like they’re redoing some of the work that they did during their FedRAMP certification when they’re going to get their ATO at their at their agency.”

AI legislation forecast

Despite Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-N.Y., releasing a discussion draft of AI legislation earlier this month that would, among other things, preempt state AI laws, Walkinshaw said that finalization of a national AI regulatory framework is unlikely until early next year.

“I don’t think you’ll see traction on any kind of large AI package before the election,” he said. “I think both sides are in a kind of ‘wait-and-see’ mode.”

Walkinshaw added that House Republicans are broadly happy to let the White House take the lead on developing and disseminating an AI regulatory framework, and that Democrats are not confident they can get a satisfactory bill passed at this time.

“In terms of big picture packages, it’s going to be next year,” he said. “Then the question will be, ‘If Democrats are in control of Congress, is there a compromise between what we develop –– which will come out of our commission –– and what the president will be willing to sign?’”

Among potential provisions that could make it into national AI regulation, he added, standards export controls placed on AI products could become a notable feature, given the federal government’s recent decision to restrict the release of certain Anthropic products, following conflict over the company’s decision to limit how its products could be used.

“Companies like Anthropic deserve to have some certainty as to what the process is going to be, so they can make investments, and the American people deserve some sense that there’s a process to ensure safety with respect to advanced models, so hopefully we’ll get there early next year,” Walkinshaw said.

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OPM’s new suitability authority blurs the line between hiring vetting and employee discipline

Brett Mencin and Bill Pedersen — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

For decades, federal agencies faced a familiar challenge: what do you do when a trusted employee breaks your trust by engaging in serious misconduct? The long-standing answer has been that you navigate the adverse action process, many view as cumbersome, time-consuming and often falling short of resolving the problem. The process leaves some involved wondering about an apparent incongruity: if a job candidate with a recent past of employment misconduct, such as time theft, would be found unsuitable by the agency’s security office and never even allowed to start working for the government, why is time theft by a trusted employee not considered a suitability concern?

The reason is that legal and regulatory authorities have historically drawn a distinction between suitability authorities and adverse action authorities based on when an individual’s misconduct occurred. If conduct occurred before hiring, suitability authorities could come into play. If it happened after an employee entered federal service (post-appointment), suitability authorities were generally not available and agencies typically relied on traditional adverse action procedures.

A recent Office of Personnel Management (OPM) update to the federal suitability regulation at Title 5, Code of Federal Regulations, part 731 (5 CFR 731) has now flipped the script. OPM’s update to 5 CFR 731 gives the agency authority to take suitability actions based on post-appointment conduct. While the change may sound technical, it has the potential to reshape how agencies respond to misconduct identified through continuous vetting and other personnel security programs.

The timing is significant. As agencies continue to implement Trusted Workforce 2.0 and expand continuous vetting enrollment across the federal workforce, they are receiving more timely information about employee misconduct and risk indicators. Continuous vetting identifies potentially concerning conduct using automated records checks, traditional investigative activity at certain time intervals or in response to certain life events and information maintained locally at the agency, like disciplinary complaints or security incidents. The question is no longer whether concerning conduct will be identified; it is how agencies and OPM will respond when it occurs.

For the approximately 1.1 million federal employees who serve in the competitive service, OPM’s implementation decisions could determine whether the new suitability authority becomes an infrequently used enforcement tool or a significant new component of the federal personnel vetting landscape.

The regulatory change: What changed in 5 CFR 731?

OPM’s authority to take suitability actions against employees in the competitive service and career Senior Executive Service (SES) is not new. Historically, however, suitability actions were tied to conduct that occurred before appointment.

Once an individual entered federal service, agencies generally relied on adverse action procedures to address misconduct. This remained true even when concerning information surfaced through periodic reinvestigations or continuous vetting. Agencies could evaluate the conduct using suitability adjudicative standards, but they lacked authority to take a suitability action based on newly discovered post-appointment misconduct.

The revisions to 5 CFR 731 change that framework.

OPM can now take suitability actions based on conduct that occurs after an employee has already entered federal service. Importantly, OPM reserved this authority for itself. While agencies can identify employee misconduct and refer the matter to OPM for action, only OPM has the authority to pursue a post-appointment suitability action.

For employee relations and personnel security offices, that distinction matters. Agencies may identify conduct they believe renders an employee unsuitable for continued service, but OPM retains sole discretion regarding whether to pursue a suitability action.

If OPM declines to act, agencies must rely on traditional adverse action procedures.

Why agency referrals matter

A suitability action can carry significant consequences, including removal from federal employment, cancellation of certain employment eligibility and debarment from future federal employment for up to three years.

Historically, OPM has exercised its suitability authority only in cases where it determined a government-wide debarment was warranted. Across the personnel security community, many practitioners have viewed OPM’s threshold for government-wide action as relatively high. In fact, in response to OPM’s proposed rule, one comment claiming to represent the Veterans Health Administration stated that when suitability referrals to OPM are made, OPM has “rarely assumed jurisdiction or taken action,” and that OPM declines to act in many cases where it’s warranted due to limited resources, using a “bigger fish to fry” approach.

As a result, agencies have frequently expected OPM to decline action unless the conduct was particularly serious, prompting some personnel security practitioners to question the value of even sending OPM a referral.

That historical practice becomes especially important when evaluating the potential impact of OPM’s new authority.

Understanding the traditional framework

Consider an applicant from a state where recreational marijuana is legal who admits to using marijuana for several years during a background investigation for a federal police officer position. Imagine he states he was aware that marijuana use is illegal federally and that he will stop using marijuana if he gets the federal police officer job. The marijuana use in question would be considered pre-appointment conduct.

The agency may find the applicant admitting to routine marijuana use over several years concerning and can refer the case to OPM for a government-wide suitability evaluation. OPM may find the conduct troubling and may even agree with the agency’s assessment that the individual should not serve in a law enforcement position where a willingness to disregard federal laws is at odds with the core duties of the job. OPM may find, however, that given evolving societal norms around marijuana, the conduct still does not warrant a government-wide debarment from all federal jobs.

In that situation, the agency still retains authority to act on its own. If the agency’s mission places special emphasis on drug enforcement, for example, it may determine that the applicant is unsuitable for employment within that organization and impose an agency-specific debarment under suitability authorities.

That flexibility largely disappears in the post-appointment context.

Because OPM reserved authority over post-appointment conduct for itself, agencies lack the same agency-specific suitability fallback option. If OPM chooses not to pursue a suitability action, the agency must use standard adverse action procedures through human resources or employee relations channels.

Two possible paths forward

The update to 5 CFR 731 does not require OPM to limit post-appointment suitability actions to cases warranting government-wide debarment. In fact, it never has. OPM’s practice of setting that high threshold for acting has been a choice, not a regulatory requirement.

With its new authority for post-appointment suitability actions, OPM could continue following its historical practice and reserve suitability actions for only the most egregious cases. If that occurs, agencies will likely see only a modest increase in suitability action activity, while traditional employee relations processes remain the primary mechanism for addressing misconduct discovered through continuous vetting.

However, OPM could choose a broader approach.

OPM could use suitability authorities in cases that warrant removal but not government-wide debarment. If that happens, personnel vetting offices may become involved in substantially more misconduct cases than they are today.

Misconduct matters that historically remained within HR or employee relations offices could increasingly move into personnel vetting channels before being referred to OPM.

For security managers and personnel vetting professionals, that would represent a substantial operational change.

There is a wildcard factor worth noting: OPM has wide latitude in defining what conduct warrants a government-wide debarment. The traditional threshold for debarment-worthy conduct is included in OPM’s Suitability and Fitness Processing Manual. OPM includes tables in the manual to help agencies identify situations that may warrant government debarments. For example, OPM identifies the following conduct as potentially debarment-worthy:

Homicide, drug or alcohol addiction or gross misconduct or negligence in employment
Two or more instances of grand theft, assault or prescription fraud
Three or more instances of shoplifting, driving under the influence or minor disruptive behavior (e.g., disorderly conduct, criminal mischief)

OPM could redraw the line in the sand, if it desired. It could decide that a single instance of an offense like shoplifting or driving under the influence warrants a government-wide debarment.

To be clear, there has been no indication that OPM intends to lower the bar and impose debarments for minor infractions. The simple fact that it could, though, raised serious concerns among those who submitted over 1,400 public comments when OPM first proposed the regulation update.

OPM normally updates its suitability manual after a significant update to the regulation. If it does, any updates to the tables within could indicate whether the thresholds might change.

Key considerations for federal agencies

If OPM ultimately adopts a broader implementation approach, taking suitability actions in situations that do not warrant government-wide debarment, agencies will need additional guidance on:

Referral thresholds and case-selection criteria
Information sharing between personnel security and employee relations offices
Evidence requirements supporting suitability referrals
Coordination best practices among HR, employee relations and personnel vetting functions
The relationship between continuous vetting findings and suitability actions

Trusted Workforce 2.0 has already increased the speed at which agencies receive information about potential risk indicators. OPM’s implementation decisions will determine whether the government’s response mechanisms evolve at a similar pace.

The real impact

The regulatory update to 5 CFR 731 answers only part of the question. The larger question is how frequently OPM will use the authority and what types of cases it chooses to pursue.

As agencies continue to implement Trusted Workforce 2.0 and expand continuous vetting programs, OPM’s early decisions will provide the first indication of whether post-appointment suitability actions become an enforcement tool that is the exception to the norm or a routine part of the federal personnel security landscape.

The rule is final. The practical impact will depend on how OPM chooses to use its new authority.

And the story may soon have a next chapter. Today, both adverse actions and suitability actions come with the right to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board (Merit Systems Protection Board). In February 2026, OPM proposed a separate update to 5 CFR 731 that would change the venue where appeals of suitability actions are heard. Instead of appealing to MSPB, individuals subjected to suitability actions would appeal to Office of Personnel Management.

Could moving suitability appeals from MSPB to OPM alter OPM’s implementation approach to post-appointment conduct actions? If OPM elects to take actions even in cases that do not warrant a government-wide debarment from the beginning, the outcome of its suitability appeals proposal is unlikely to change that approach. If, however, OPM initially takes a conservative approach and uses its post-appointment suitability authority only in the most egregious cases warranting debarment, a move of suitability appeals from MSPB to OPM could embolden OPM to revisit that conservative approach and adopt the more aggressive approach.

The rule is final.

Its practical impact remains to be seen.

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

Brett Mencin is the President, Enterprise Vetting & Analysis, and Chief Security Officer at Xcelerate Solutions, where he leads a diverse portfolio supporting the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army, the Intelligence Community, and other federal agencies. Brett has played a key role in advancing federal vetting programs, reengineering business processes, and strengthening organizational performance across government. He is a recognized subject matter expert in personnel vetting and security and a frequent speaker at industry conferences and professional forums.

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Lawmakers, unions and civil society groups urge withdrawal of governmentwide NDA plan

Erich Wagner — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:21:58 -0400

Federal employee groups, lawmakers and good government organizations in recent days have announced their formal opposition to the Trump administration’s plan to require federal workers sign non-disclosure agreements, arguing the measure would violate employees’ First Amendment rights and chill whistleblower activity.

The Office of Personnel Management first announced its plan in May, issuing a notice in the Federal Register and soliciting public feedback. In its one-month comment period, the initiative has attracted more than 30,000 comments, the bulk of which appear to oppose it.

OPM has argued that leaks of information, primarily to the press, have been disruptive to executive branch operations, citing Government Executive reporting on internal criticism of a then-planned regulatory proposal to overhaul federal performance management.

“Unauthorized disclosures of confidential government information disrupt agency operations and erode public trust,” OPM wrote. “In recent months, unauthorized disclosures have included internal government materials not intended for public release such as pre-decisional documents and interagency comments exchanged during internal coordination processes . . . Such disclosures risk chilling candid interagency feedback, disrupting orderly decision-making and weakening trust within and among federal agencies.”

But in a series of filings before the comment period closed over the weekend, federal stakeholders excoriated the draft NDA as an effort to intimidate federal workers into silence rather than report instances of waste, fraud or abuse. The National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association took issue with OPM Director Scott Kupor’s comparisons to NDAs in the private sector.

“The federal workforce is not a private-sector workforce accountable to private owners or shareholders,” wrote NARFE National President William Shackelford. “Career employees swear an oath to the Constitution, serve the public, and often carry statutory duties to report wrongdoing, provide information to Congress, cooperate with inspectors general, participate in grievance and labor processes, and adhere to professional and evidentiary standards. Layering a broad new NDA on top of these existing obligations risks shifting the culture of public service away from accountability and toward secrecy.”

The American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest union representing federal workers, said the administration’s arguments fail to explain why the myriad existing rules governing the disclosure of confidential government information are insufficient or how this new measure would alleviate those purported deficiencies.

“OPM claims that the proposed NDA does not impose any additional legal obligations on federal employees, and is instead merely an attempt to promote consistency across government and to inform employees of their obligations regarding confidential information,” the union wrote. “But if this were genuinely the case, there would be no need for the proposed NDA at all. It would be unnecessary because federal employees are already routinely informed of their obligations regarding confidential information. In truth, the Proposed NDA goes far beyond existing legal requirements and seems plainly designed to intimidate federal employees and chill their lawful and legally protected speech, including speech about personnel matters and matters of public concern that is a vital part of the Unions’ work.”

The union warned that the NDA could also infringe on labor officials’ and members’ rights and duties under federal sector labor law.

“The First Amendment problems of the proposed NDA are manifold: it is an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech; it is unconstitutionally overbroad; it violates constitutional principles prohibiting vagueness and viewpoint discrimination; it conditions a public benefit based on a waiver of a constitutional right; and it restricts members’ right to associate for expressive purposes,” AFGE wrote. “For example, by broadly restraining the content of the communications made between the unions and their members—and also communications made between the union’s members in connection with their union—on matters relating to those members’ conditions of employment, the proposed NDA impedes one of the unions’ core functions and infringes on their and their members’ associational rights.”

Lawmakers of both parties were also critical of OPM’s proposal. A group of 44 House Democrats called the measure an effort to “hide this administration’s waste, fraud, abuse and corruption from the American people,” while Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, warned that the NDA plan’s current protections for whistleblowers are insufficient.

“The OPM draft nondisclosure agreement form includes a partial anti-gag provision, but it is not the exact same as the version required by existing law,” he wrote. “While the form does provide that the nondisclosure agreement does not prohibit an employee from making a whistleblower disclosure to Congress and inspectors general, it fails to include the Office of Special Counsel. Accordingly, OPM must immediately update the draft nondisclosure agreement form to include disclosures to the Office of Special Counsel.”

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What an ICE leadership pick signals about the next phase of immigration enforcement

Ariana Figueroa, States Newsroom — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:42:35 -0400

President Donald Trump has nominated a former Oklahoma state trooper to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency tasked with carrying out the president’s mass deportation campaign.

Richard “Lance” Schroyer’s nomination on June 27 comes on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed the Trump administration to strip legal status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, a move that opens them to deportation.

“Lance Schroyer has what it takes to DETAIN AND DEPORT Illegal Alien Criminals …,” Trump wrote on social media June 27. “...he LOVES the men and women of ICE.”

He will have to be confirmed by the Senate and, if he is, he will be the first Senate-confirmed ICE director in 11 years.

The current acting director of ICE is David Venturella, a longtime federal immigration official and former vice president of the private prison company GEO that rakes in billions through federal contracts it holds to detain immigrants at facilities across the United States.

Former acting ICE Director Todd Lyons stepped down in May following the shooting of two U.S. citizens by immigration officials in Minneapolis earlier this year.

$70 billion in new funding

Schroyer will come into an agency that Congress recently funded through fiscal 2029 at $70 billion, not including a separate funding stream of billions Republicans included in the president’s signature tax cuts and spending bill in 2025.

Richard “Lance” Schroyer, nominated by President Donald Trump as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Photo courtesy of Department of Homeland Security)

Schroyer does not have much experience working for the Department of Homeland Security, but serves as an adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who previously served as Oklahoma’s U.S. senator.

Schroyer also worked to establish Oklahoma’s law enforcement partnership with the federal government to assist with immigration enforcement through the 287(g) program. He served in law enforcement for nearly 30 years.

Mullin noted Schroyer’s work with the 287(g) program.

“Lance is coming straight from the operational field where he ran large-scale operations and worked alongside state and federal partners to remove illegal aliens from Oklahoma under the 287(g) program,” Mullin said in a statement. “With over 29 years of law enforcement experience, Lance will play a vital role in helping deliver on the President’s mandate from the American people to target, arrest, and deport illegal aliens.”

Oklahoma praise

Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt also praised the announcement, along with Schroyer’s career in law enforcement.

“He was a huge asset to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and now he’ll continue to make us proud at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Stitt said in a statement. “Oklahoma yet again leads the nation. We have consistently supported President Trump’s work to keep our border secure, and we have led in enforcement actions against those here illegally who engage in criminal behavior.”

Schroyer also received the Chief’s Award for his actions in 2015 when he assisted a woman whose car crashed outside his district in the jurisdiction of the Tulsa Police Department.

“He found her face down with her head pinned between the end of the dashboard and the passenger door. The woman was choking and was unable to speak,” according to a press release from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.

Schroyer called first responders and stayed with the woman, according to the release. “In order to enable her to breathe, he moved the car seats and kicked open a jammed door in order to reposition the woman allowing her to breathe,” the release said.

For his actions, he received the Chief’s Award, “honoring his dedication to the protection of lives and service to the public.”

Oklahoma Voice Editor Janelle Stecklein contributed to this report.

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One federal research network got a reprieve. Others may not

Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, Grist — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:58:33 -0400

Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration said it was going to pull hundreds of scientific instruments out of ocean waters near the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea, south of Greenland. It was part of the administration’s plan to roll back funding from a multimillion dollar research program dedicated to studying complex ocean and planetary dynamics, including climate change.

Then, last week, it put the brakes on that decision. The National Science Foundation said it would stop dismantling the sensors after a bipartisan group of senators pushed back and passed a measure blocking the agency from doing so. The federal agency also plans to put back the equipment it had already removed.

The attempt to dismantle the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, or OOI, was “supreme stupidity,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who sponsored the measure along with Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican representing Alaska, in a statement. “We’ll keep fighting to ensure scientists, fishermen, and coastal communities can continue to utilize the critical data the OOI provides.”

This is not the first time that outrage and bipartisan support have saved climate-related research from the sweeping cuts enacted by the Trump administration. Sometimes to little fanfare, lawmakers have moved to preserve funding for scientific research at a number of agencies, as well as some environmental programs like Energy Star, which provides consumer rebates for purchasing energy-efficient appliances. Given their success, it’s likely that the administration’s anti-science agenda will continue meeting more backlash.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative had already been protected by lawmakers twice after the Trump administration proposed cutting the majority of its funding in 2025 and 2026 budgets. For now, the program, which began in 2016, is slated to continue operating for at least another decade.

But the initiative is not the only important ocean monitoring effort run by the United States. Researchers say other large cutting-edge ocean and climate research programs are facing a funding cliff with no plans in place to make sure they continue operating.

“We are seriously looking at the possibility of going dark,” said Lynne Talley, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Talley has been one of the scientists helping lead the Argo program, an international effort that has deployed thousands of underwater floats that bob up and down throughout ocean depths equipped with a variety of data-collecting sensors.

Since the first floats were deployed more than 25 years ago, the Argo program has provided scientists with an unprecedented ability to track changes in temperature, salinity, and heat throughout the oceans. Even when scientists use data from other ocean projects, they often combine or check it against data from the Argo program’s floats. A recent addition to the program expanded the network with biogeochemical sensors that measure oxygen, acidity, chlorophyll, and other indicators of ocean health.

This helps scientists piece together the carbon cycle of oceans and how climate change is influencing it. “Those measurements have become essential to understanding the ocean,” Talley said.

The United States has deployed about half of the Argo program’s floats, which are battery powered and need to be replaced about every five years. But stagnant funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency leading the international initiative, means the pace of deployment has been too slow to maintain the program’s full coverage. The biogeochemical part of the network, backed by the National Science Foundation, ran out of funding last year, and will deploy its final floats this fall, with no plan in place to continue.

That means the Argo network could fail to remain fully operational in the future, even if other governments, such as the European Union’s, increase their contributions to it. “We have been the leaders in these ocean observations for many decades, and we are losing ground,” Talley said.

In the next few years, two other U.S.-led initiatives studying one of the most pressing, and uncertain, climate threats lurking in the ocean could run out of federal funding, too. That threat is known as AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: a massive conveyor belt in the Atlantic Ocean that brings hot water to the north and cold water to the south. The system of currents is responsible for the climate many Europeans know today and is one of the reasons that Quebec experiences far more freezing days a year than London, despite sitting at a similar latitude.

Scientists think that climate change could cause it to slow down or collapse, which would result in dramatic and deadly weather changes in Europe and faster sea level rise along the eastern coast of North America. It has happened in the past, such as during the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago.

But for now, a scientific understanding of how likely that is to happen remains elusive. Strong year-to-year changes in ocean currents make it difficult to detect trends in how AMOC might be changing, and scientists remain divided on when and how soon the system might slow down. That makes studying it all the more important, said Susan Lozier, an oceanographer and the dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech University.

Lozier co-leads OSNAP, one of two large research programs dedicated to studying the circulation system. These teams, which include researchers from the U.S. and six other countries, have placed dozens of moorings, outfitted with a variety of scientific instruments, across the North Atlantic, to capture changes in the water. OSNAP, in combination with the other program, RAPID, represent the best shot researchers currently have at getting to the bottom of the AMOC mystery, Lozier said.

But funding for U.S. participation in the projects depends on federal grants, which are on course to run out after next year, Lozier said. “We’re on pins and needles, waiting for what happens after that,” she said.

More than a year has passed since the program’s leaders submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation for more funding. So far, Lozier said, they haven’t heard anything definitive. (The National Science Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the meantime, the Trump administration has slashed funding for science across the federal government, often targeting climate-focused research. Funding for geosciences like oceanography has fallen by more than half from last year. “We are really concerned about the possible continuation,” Lozier said. But it was heartening to hear about the reversal of the planned cuts to the OOI program, she said.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative also faced cutbacks in 2018 during Trump’s first term. That time, the downsizing was handled through a deliberate process that involved extensive input from scientists, engineers, and the National Science Board, said Jaime Palter, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, in an email. The savings, she said, were redirected to support other ocean science work.

Commenting before learning that the funding to OOI was restored, Palter said the Trump administration’s recent actions were “fundamentally different” from last time. The speed of the planned dismantling of the initiative wouldn’t have given the scientific community time to adapt, she said.

Now that the decision has been reversed, it feels hopeful to know that people care about studying the ocean enough to push back on funding cuts, Palter said. But, she added, the uncertain future for programs like Argo make it “important not to let down our guard.”

“Destroying those capabilities can happen swiftly,” she said. “Rebuilding would be the work of a generation.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/oceans/trump-nsf-cuts-ocean-research-senate-amoc/.

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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President can fire independent agency heads without cause, Supreme Court rules

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:54:30 -0400

The Supreme Court on Monday overturned a nearly 100-year-old legal precedent, which is expected to enable the president to fire bipartisan board members of agencies that were established by Congress to have some degree of independence from the White House.

The case began in March 2025 when President Donald Trump removed two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission before the end of their terms. The FTC is led by five commissioners; no more than three can be from the same party.

Shortly thereafter, the ousted Democratic officials — Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter — filed a lawsuit, arguing that, under current law, the president can only remove an FTC commissioner “for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” They also cited the 1935 Supreme Court case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in which the justices determined that dismissing an FTC member for differences in policy is unconstitutional.

During oral arguments before the Supreme Court in December 2025, however, the Trump administration contended that Humphrey’s Executor “must be overruled,” contending that it shields independent regulatory agencies from oversight.

“[Humphrey’s] continues to tempt Congress to erect at the heart of our government a headless fourth branch insulated from political accountability and democratic control,” said Solicitor General D. John Sauer.

The Supreme Court sided, 6-3, with the White House.

“The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the chief executive, in whom such power is vested,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority’s opinion. “It follows, then, that Slaughter served as the president’s subordinate at the FTC — and that the president was entitled to cut her tenure short.”

The court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter is expected to apply to other lawsuits filed by leaders of independent agencies fired by the president, including Democrat Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board. That agency — which is led by a three-person board, no more than two of whom can be from the same political party — adjudicates federal employees’ appeals of adverse personnel actions. Many government workers who have been impacted by the Trump administration’s downsizing of the civil service have pursued claims through the MSPB.

Former Federal Labor Relations Authority Chairwoman Susan Tsui Grundmann similarly challenged her 2025 firing, but her term at the agency expired in January, rendering her lawsuit moot.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision “reshapes our government.”

“Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the president’s hands,” she wrote.

Since the start of his second term, Trump has fired or attempted to fire 20 board or commission members who have “for-cause” protections from removal, according to an April report by the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit.

In February 2025, the president also signed an executive order to exert more White House control over regulations from independent agencies.

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GSA’s centralization push is a return to its roots, not just a Trump priority

Nick Wakeman — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:59:57 -0400

The General Services Administration’s push to centralize government buying is as much a return to its roots as it is a Trump administration initiative, according to one of the leading architects of the consolidation.

Laura Stanton, acting commissioner for GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, gave a bit of a history lesson during remarks at the GovExec-produced SAP NOW event on Wednesday in Washington, D.C. GSA started in 1949 as part of a series of recommendations from the Hoover Commission.

“The reasons we were founded as agency are the same reasons and the priorities that I’m going to talk about today,” Stanton said. “Going back to those founding principles is really important to understanding where GSA is and what we’re doing.”

GSA wants to consolidate more government buying through its vehicles. There is plenty of room for that growth with GSA contracts accounting for about 25% total government buying. In 2025, $110 billion in order volume flowed through GSA vehicles.

“That’s a great baseline, but I also think that it’s an indication that we still have a lot of decentralization across the government,” Stanton said.

GSA has long had its Assisted Acquisition Services, but that organization concentrates on contracts and task orders exceeding $50 million.

“There are lot of common goods and services that everybody needs to deliver everyday that are far below that level,” Stanton said.

To fill that niche, GSA created the Office of Centralized Acquisition Services. A lot of routine buying was happening agency-by-agency.

Stanton said that agency-by-agency buying led to inconsistent pricing, duplicative contracts for the same items and negotiations that left money on the table.

OCAS will step into the void and manage actual transactions, not just create master contracts. The theory is that by aggregating demand across agencies, GSA can negotiate better and drive consistency in pricing.

“This means we have to understand the demand for common goods and services across the agencies, so data becomes key,” she said.

OCAS is already working with the Small Business Administration, Office of Personnel Management, other smaller agencies and a few larger ones on the acquisitions of common goods and services.

The office is in a growth mode and Stanton recommended that industry get to know them through their quarterly pipeline reviews.

“You can hear directly about what’s going on in that group and you can figure out how to align to the needs they are articulating,” she said.

OCAS will act as a shared services center actually executing transactions, not just as a contract vehicle shop.

“The more that we’re able to bring into the centralized acquisition group, the more we can begin to work at scale and get those benefits for the federal government at the task order level, not just at the master contract level,” Stanton said.

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Despite taxing year, IRS watchdog reports mostly smooth filing season

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:46:50 -0400

Despite having to make more than 100 changes to the tax code as a result of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, employing about a quarter fewer employees and experiencing leadership turnover, an independent IRS watchdog reported that the tax agency conducted a largely successful filing season in 2026. But the Taxpayer Advocate Service also warned that staff cuts made it harder for taxpayers who needed assistance to receive it.

“In the end, the IRS performed better than expected in most respects. The vast majority of taxpayers filed their returns successfully and received their refunds without significant delay,” National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins wrote in a Wednesday report to Congress. “IRS leadership and its workforce deserve substantial credit for that accomplishment, particularly given the extraordinary operational pressures they overcame.”

TAS reported that the IRS processed almost 99% of individual tax returns by the end of filing season. The office attributed this to stable leadership in the division responsible for tax filing as well as a “significant majority” of returns being automatedly processed through electronic submission and direct deposit.

Still, the watchdog criticized phone wait lines, the level of provided in-person assistance and the filing experience for many taxpayers who rely on paper checks.

“With fewer employees and even fewer experienced employees, personal service was harder to come by,” Collins wrote. “That translated to longer waits for assistance, fewer experienced employees available to work on complex account issues, delayed responses to correspondence and, as a result, longer case resolution times.”

In total, IRS answered 21% of calls in 2026 with an average wait time of 14 minutes compared with 25% the prior year when taxpayers waited an average of eight minutes.

The TAS noted this was somewhat by design, as the IRS prioritized assigning employees to work on responding to paper correspondence instead of answering phones because staffers often end up not performing work while waiting for a taxpayer to call.

But the watchdog flagged that the phone line for taxpayers when they are unable to pay their liability, for example, only answered 31% of the time and after an average wait of 45 minutes. Likewise, the line taxpayers need to call to prove their identities when their returns are suspected of identity theft had an answer rate of 19% with a 20-minute average wait.

The TAS also reported that the number of fully staffed Taxpayer Assistance Centers decreased to 42 from 102 in 2025 and that the Trump administration’s pivot away from paper checks contributed to delays of six weeks or more for taxpayers who requested non-electronic refunds.

“A modernized IRS can and should improve efficiency and service, but transformation should not come at the expense of accessibility, fairness or human assistance,” Collins wrote.

The National Treasury Employees Union said the TAS report shows the IRS workforce deserves praise for managing “to do more with less” but also bemoaned the reduced service availability.

“No taxpayer should be left out in the cold for needing help paying their fair share,” said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald in a statement. “A smaller, less effective IRS undercuts the whole tax system and deprives our government of much-needed revenue.”

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Secret Service phone security lapses put US officials at risk, watchdog says

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:18:00 -0400

The Secret Service failed to effectively secure and manage mobile devices used for official business, including during protective operations, creating risks that adversaries could intercept sensitive communications and use them to target U.S. leaders and other protectees, according to a watchdog report issued Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general determined Secret Service employees routinely relied on personal phones for official work, including during domestic and overseas protective assignments, because government-issued devices lacked key tools needed to communicate with law enforcement, foreign partners and other officials.

Those personal devices were not managed or secured by the government, creating vulnerabilities that could expose operational details, employee information, contacts, location data, photos and other sensitive material, the report said.

Adversaries “could have intercepted and exploited Secret Service information, placing at risk our Nation’s leaders, other protectees, and employees — especially when unsecured devices were used overseas,” the inspector general wrote.

The audit grew out of broader reviews of the Secret Service following the July 13, 2024 attempted assassination of then-former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa. During those reviews, the watchdog said it learned that Secret Service personnel frequently used personal cellphones for official business, raising security and federal records concerns.

One episode described in the report connects the issue directly to the Butler security breakdown. Shortly before the attempted assassination, a Secret Service employee used a personal device to receive a picture message from local law enforcement of the would-be assassin because of reliability concerns with the employee’s government-issued phone. The employee told investigators that prior issues had prevented them from sending text messages with images using government equipment.

The watchdog also found that, after the attack, another employee had to take extra steps to email a photo of the would-be assassin to colleagues because a known issue prevented them from simply forwarding the image by text on a government-issued device.

The report points much of the blame at the Secret Service’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, which is responsible for setting mobile device security standards, managing government-issued devices and ensuring compliance with agency policies.

Secret Service employees told investigators that government-issued devices often lacked commercial messaging apps commonly used by foreign police, military officials, embassy drivers, State Department personnel and other partners overseas. Some also said they needed personal devices to access websites blocked on government phones, including sites used to research restaurants where a protectee was scheduled to dine.

Employees also cited reliability problems. According to the report, government-issued devices frequently disconnected from the Secret Service virtual private network, and about 12% of wireless help desk tickets involving mobile devices were related to VPN issues.

The watchdog found that the use of personal devices had become routine and expected during foreign assignments. Of 24 employees and supervisors interviewed about international travel reimbursement records, 23 said they relied on personal devices, with most saying they needed them during nearly every foreign assignment.

The inspector general also reviewed call and text records and found more than 15,000 instances in which employees sent or received calls from colleagues’ personal phones while working protective events. It found about 24,000 text messages between personal devices and government-issued phones, though its analysis did not include communications made solely between personal devices or through messaging apps.

The report also found that Secret Service mobile devices used overseas lacked required mobile threat defense software designed to provide real-time protection from malware, cyberattacks and other threats. The Secret Service did not begin installing that software on any government-issued mobile devices until August 2025, despite DHS policy requiring it for devices used outside the United States.

The watchdog also found that the Secret Service did not consistently wipe data from government phones after employees returned from international missions, even though agency policy required employees to wipe devices within 24 hours of returning to the United States. One employee told investigators their phone had never been wiped over the course of eight years and 20 international trips, including travel to high-risk countries. Another employee reported 15 trips over eight years and estimated their phone had been wiped only four times.

The Secret Service concurred with all five watchdog recommendations, including recommendations to improve its process for identifying mobile device needs, strengthen cybersecurity training, communicate that personal devices are not allowed for official business and update app vulnerability testing policies.

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Artificial intelligence is cutting months off nuclear licensing review times, official says

Edward Graham — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Artificial intelligence has already helped the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shave years off its typical licensing review process, an agency official said on Thursday. Now, the NRC is looking at how it can safely adopt other emerging capabilities to further speed up its review processes.

Speaking at the ATARC AI for impact summit in Virginia, NRC Chief Data Officer and Deputy Chief AI Officer Basia Sall said uses of AI have built upon recent regulatory changes and federal guidance to turbocharge the once drawn-out procedure for granting licenses for nuclear facilities.

“I’m happy to report we've already reduced the amount of time it takes for licensing,” Sall said. “For example, one type of licensing would take four years. We said we're going to get it down to 18 months. We just finished that first round of that licensing in nine months.”

Not all of this is strictly due to AI. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in May 2025 to reform the NRC, which included setting an 18-month deadline on licensing reviews. But AI has helped the agency further shorten those licensing timelines, and Sall said internal personnel believe they can use the technologies to make the process even more efficient.

“I think some of our AI gurus at our agency were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we can do it better,’” she said.

NRC is also using AI to help with drafting documents “to make sure we look at the precedent” of previous decisions, Sall added.

Engaging with industry partners who are developing their own AI tools has also helped NRC conduct faster regulatory reviews. Sall said the agency has allowed some of these actors “to take our NRC public data and curate those data sets” for their own relevant applications.

“What that means is we receive a much better application than we have in the past,” she said. “We don't have as many questions. It's clear once we get it into our hands, we start our process, we accept it and then we start to do our review process.”

Using GSA’s AI offerings

NRC has also been leveraging some of the software and products made available through the General Services Administration’s OneGov initiative, which launched in April 2025 and provides agencies with significant discounts on select private sector technologies by treating the entire government as one customer. More than 20 companies have reached deals so far with GSA to offer their services at discounted rates.

Through OneGov’s offerings, Sall said NRC has already been testing AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude, Azure OpenAI and Google Gemini “for limited use cases with public data” and added that “we're finding some good success with that.”

GSA said in May that agencies have placed more than 120 orders for AI offerings through the strategy, which has made these technologies available for use to around 3.4 million federal employees.

NRC is also just beginning to take advantage of GSA’s USAi platform, which launched last August and serves as a testing ground for agencies to experiment with AI tools. A GSA official said earlier this month that “over 25 different agencies” were already using USAi, with an additional 16 others expected to begin using the platform before the end of 2026.

“We're looking at various tools about what makes sense,” Sall said, adding that “it’s going to be a menu” when it comes to testing out the various models on the platform.

Beyond experimenting with additional AI use cases, Sall said NRC has also been developing its own services. She cited the agency’s internally-built tool, known as SimplifAI, as something "which we're really proud of,” adding that it was built off Azure OpenAI and “we are finding that we're using that for our regulatory documents.” NRC recently moved to a 2.0 version after the initial model became deprecated.

NRC’s most recent AI use case inventory says the text retrieval and generation tool enhances the agency’s “efficiency and consistency in licensing, oversight, and other regulatory activities.”

Sall said some employees have also been training SimplifAI to help them write speeches.

“We're really proud that tool continues to develop,” she said, adding that “having those tools — a menu of tools — is going to be key, we think, moving forward.”

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Oregon lawsuit could upend federal management of public lands

Alex Brown, Stateline — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

A new lawsuit challenging a logging project in Oregon threatens to unravel the management plans governing hundreds of millions of acres of federal public land.

At stake are thousands of leases and permits covering billions of dollars of economic activity — including mining, drilling, grazing, logging, ski resorts, wind and solar projects, outdoor recreation, hunting and fishing. If successful, the lawsuit could throw the management of huge swaths of the West into chaos.

Some experts fear the new legal uncertainty around federal agencies’ management authority could unleash a tsunami of lawsuits targeting everything from mining to the conservation of wildlife habitat.

“They’ve opened Pandora’s Box here,” said Susan Jane Brown, the attorney who filed the lawsuit and serves as principal at Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm.

“When you throw that whole system into chaos, it’s a problem whether you’re the oil and gas industry or the timber industry or someone who wants to take a fall hunting trip. There’s a lot at stake here.”

The legal battle stems from Republican lawmakers’ recent use of the Congressional Review Act, a previously obscure tool, to push for more mining and drilling on public lands overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.

Under President Donald Trump, Congress has aggressively used the review power granted by the 1996 law to revoke decisions made during the Biden administration, including financial regulations, energy efficiency standards and auto emissions rules.

Some legal experts contend that by using the law to target public land policy, Congress unwittingly invalidated hundreds of land use plans, along with decades worth of permits and management decisions. The Oregon lawsuit is the first to test that theory in court — but public lands advocates don’t expect it to the be the last.

“This is incredibly destabilizing for anyone that cares about public lands, whether you care about those as an industrial developer or a wilderness advocate,” said John Ruple, research professor of law at the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment.

Over the past year, legal experts, agency veterans, conservation groups and industry leaders have warned that Congress was using the Congressional Review Act in a way that could undermine land use plans across the country. Oil and gas drillers could have their permits challenged in court. Ranchers could lose their leases. And understaffed federal agencies would have to redraft hundreds of plans that typically take years to complete.

“This has been flying under the radar,” said Michael Carroll, a land management campaign director with the Wilderness Society, an environmental group. “[Congress] basically opened themselves up to multiple lawsuits from any number of stakeholders calling into question whether or not an agency has the authority to issue permits.”

The Congressional Review Act

The three-decade-old Congressional Review Act requires new regulations issued by federal agencies to be submitted to Congress before taking effect. Congress then has a review period of 60 working days during which it can vote to revoke them.

This review power was rarely invoked until Trump’s first term, when Republicans used it to overturn 16 regulations. The GOP has been even more aggressive in Trump’s second term, overturning 23 rules so far, including conservation standards for water heaters, overdraft lending regulations and restrictions on pollutants in tire manufacturing

Until recently, management plans for federal public lands were not considered “rules” subject to congressional review under the law. Agencies have issued well over 100 such plans since 1996 without ever submitting one to Congress. Those documents guide the work of agency officials who oversee specific areas of land, often covering millions of acres.

Created after years of public meetings and local feedback, they determine which landscapes will be leased for oil and gas drilling, protected for endangered species or open for off-road vehicles, along with a multitude of other uses.

But last year, Republicans asked the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan advisory agency for Congress, to affirm a sweeping new view of the Congressional Review Act. The office found that certain management plans were subject to review because their land use decisions “prescribed policy,” and determined that lawmakers’ queries about those plans had opened the 60-day review “clock” in each instance.

Using this new interpretation, Republicans in the past two years have revoked plans that restricted mining and oil production on federal lands in Alaska, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

But the repercussions could go well beyond those specific plans.

None of the plans issued by federal land managers over the past 30 years was ever submitted for review, because no one at the time considered them to be rules. In other words, hundreds of plans covering millions of acres of land could be deemed invalid under the new congressional interpretation.

Oregon lawsuit

Now, a lawsuit in Oregon will put that argument to the test. Cascadia Wildlands, a conservation group in the Pacific Northwest, has filed a complaint challenging a timber harvest on Bureau of Land Management land in western Oregon. That logging project was approved under a management plan that was issued in 2016.

Since Congress now considers such plans to be rules, the plaintiffs argue, the 2016 plan never took effect because it was never submitted to Congress.

Cascadia Wildlands has fought numerous legal battles over logging projects approved by the Bureau of Land Management. If the lawsuit over the management plan is successful, said Nick Cady, the group’s legal director, the same theory would give them leverage to block any logging project issued under the 2016 plan.

“They let the genie out of the bottle,” Cady said. “Instead of just letting [the Congressional Review Act] move forward with whatever Republicans choose to select, it’s worth curbing that by pointing out that it can point both ways.”

If the plan is struck down, activists of all types could use that precedent to challenge any activity on public land governed by a management plan that hasn’t been reviewed by Congress.

“It is a target-rich environment if our lawsuit is successful, and even if it’s not successful we’ve already demonstrated that there’s a lot of interest here,” Brown said. “This is what happens when you overturn longstanding precedent and throw spaghetti at the wall.”

Cady and Brown said they hope their case compels Congress to revise the Congressional Review Act to exempt public land management plans.

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

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As opposition mounts, House cancels vote on VA overhaul bill

Erich Wagner — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:33:08 -0400

House Republicans on Thursday gaveled floor activity for the week, effectively cancelling a planned vote on a controversial Veterans Affairs Department overhaul bill that packages bipartisan benefits increases with cuts to others and increased privatization of health services.

The House planned this week to debate and ultimately vote on the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act (H.R. 9237), a collection of more than 60 bills related to the VA and veteran care, including benefits increases for severely disabled veterans and the families of service members who died in the line of duty. Its centerpiece is the Major Richard Star Act (H.R. 2102), a bill that would allow veterans who were forced to retire early due to a combat injury to collect their full military retirement pay in addition to their VA disability benefits.

But Democrats warned at a press conference Thursday that the larger bill is an effort to “hijack” the Major Richard Star Act, which has more than 300 House sponsors and a discharge petition just five signatures short of forcing a floor vote, and anchor it with $60 billion in cuts to other veterans’ benefits, like those associated with tinnitus and sleep apnea, alongside plans to further prioritize veterans’ health care and abridge VA psychologists’ collective bargaining rights.

“This bill pits veterans against veterans,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Pa. “I think it stabs those serving right now in the back, many of whom are currently fighting a war. When it comes time for them to apply for their benefits for conditions linked to their service, they will see those benefits cut . . . The same politicians who added nearly $5 trillion to our national debt to pay for tax giveaways to the rich and powerful, who cut health care to help pay for those tax giveaways, now want to force other veterans to pay for these very important VA benefits increases.”

Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., also noted that the version of the Major Richard Star Act within the Republicans’ megabill is watered down compared to the standalone version of the measure. This new iteration implements a cap that would prevent impacted veterans from receiving both their retirement and disability benefits in full.

“They claim this fixes the wounded veterans tax, but it doesn’t,” he said. “It creates a cap in the amount of benefits they can get so they cannot get their full medical benefits and retirement benefits together. They’re nickeling and diming our veterans, our wounded warriors, while they’re at the same time proposing $500 billion to pay for the Iran war. And it takes away PACT Act benefits from 1.5 million veterans to pay for it.”

Veterans groups zeroed in on the dangers of how the bill “rewrites” benefits associated with service-connected tinnitus and sleep apnea. The VA first floated changing how it compensates veterans suffering from those conditions during the Biden administration, but advocates argued that process is governed by medical and scientific analysis, not “politics.”

“Once Congress starts rewriting the disability ratings whenever it needs money, there’s no limit,” said Jess Finucan, director of policy and advocacy for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “Today it’s ‘just’ tinnitus and sleep apnea. Tomorrow, will it be PTSD? Will Congress decide that taking care of veterans suffering from the long-term effects of toxic exposures suddenly isn’t worth the price tag?”

And Craig Romanovich, executive director of the Union Veterans Council, who himself suffers from “severe” tinnitus, said these conditions contribute to other medical conditions—by defanging coverage of hearing loss and sleep apnea, Congress would make it harder to qualify for benefits under those knock-on disabilities as well.

“There is a constant ringing in my ears—it’s ringing right now,” he said. “It deprives me of my sleep, it causes anxiety and depression, and it causes issues in my family. These are the hard truths of something I live with every single day of my life . . . These are all secondary issues to tinnitus. If this goes through and you can no longer claim tinnitus, now you will have to fight for all of those secondary conditions on their own merits, making it much harder to get compensation and care.”

Labor leaders warned that the Republican bill’s changes to the Veterans Community Care Program, the initiative by which veterans can receive VA-sponsored medical care from private sector providers, could serve as the “tipping point” toward privatization, funneling money away from VA facilities and thereby causing service deterioration which in turn would fuel more privatization.

“This pushes us farther down a dangerous road, one that speeds up privatization of the VA,” said American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley. “It locks in biased standards that VA facilities must meet, while holding private providers to no such standards . . . This is not strengthening the VA, it is hollowing the VA out.”

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