Government Executive - Workforce

Unions ask for injunction restoring collective bargaining at Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Arbitrator restores telework for IRS workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More than 50 Dem lawmakers demand more Schedule F transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Arbitrator restores telework and remote work at the Forest Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fired EPA dissenters sue for reinstatement, alleging First Amendment violations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Judges block Trump effort to narrow public service loan forgiveness

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

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

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

Forgiving student debt owed by public service workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump administration’s attempt to revise the program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the judges struck Trump’s revised rules

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

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

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

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

What this means for borrowers and nonprofits

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implications for everyone else

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin Leff, Professor of Law, American University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s extremely draining”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is a moral issue”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump wants to scrap a key framework for federal employee discipline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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OPM proposes ‘decentralized’ FEVS with fewer questions and less transparency

Erich Wagner — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:07:55 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management last week proposed new regulations that would end the HR agency’s annual administration of the Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey, instead passing the task along to individual agencies with fewer guardrails and less transparency.

OPM Director Scott Kupor announced the plan in a blog post, arguing without evidence that the annual survey of federal employee engagement and job satisfaction had become a “box-checking exercise” for some agencies and a “vanity” project for others. The proposed changes come after OPM failed to administer the FEVS in 2025, a violation of federal statute.

“Employee engagement surveys should therefore be designed, administered and acted upon by the agencies that understand their own missions, structures, workforces and management challenges—not administered by OPM as a government-wide ritual. Done right, surveys become a management tool for agency leaders to measure what matters, identify where alignment is breaking down, and take responsibility for improving the employee experience.”

In addition, the proposal would cut the overall number of questions that must be asked each year from 16 down to 10. While a few questions have been retained, most have either been significantly revised or replaced entirely, particularly those questions pertaining to employee morale and workload. In their place are questions pertaining to managers’ “expectations” for workers and how efficiently agencies remove perceived poor performers.

Jenny Mattingly, vice president of policy and stakeholder engagement for the Partnership for Public Service, which each year collates FEVS results into the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, said those changes effectively eviscerate the questions upon which the survey’s Global Satisfaction Index are based. While the law requiring agencies to survey their workforces was aimed at measuring employee engagement and morale, last week’s proposal—tucked into broader regulations around strategic human capital—suggests the Trump administration wants to use it more as a workforce planning tool.

“There seems to be some conflation here between strategic planning and using workforce surveys as a planning tool,” she said. “Which could be a right idea—agencies can and should be doing these things—but FEVS is supposed to be an engagement tool. Those are two separate things.”

And while the plan ostensibly preserves the requirement that the annual surveys’ results be published, the manner in which agencies post their results—and in how much detail—will largely be up to the organizations’ discretion.

“Although the operative statute requires that survey results be posted publicly on the agency’s website (unless doing so would jeopardize or negatively impact national security), these specific requirements are not spelled out in the statute requiring annual employee surveys,” the regulations state. “Instead, OPM proposes to note simply that each agency may determine the specific content of its public disclosure of its annual survey results."

OPM’s proposal is unusual in that most regulatory and policy changes it has initiated since Trump’s return to the White House have sought to pull functions into the HR agency’s orbit, not decentralize them. Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, said the move seems to be of a piece with OPM’s previous actions to reduce the utility and longevity of Fedscope data and to release only limited information on positions affected by Schedule Policy/Career.

“It is important to understand what’s happening right now within the historical context, but without that historical data, that makes it that much harder,” Kettl said. “FEVS in particular, we didn’t have it at all last year, and this year they’re talking about a fundamental change. Did it need an update? Absolutely. But if you break the chain of evidence, it becomes that much harder to understand what is and isn’t happening with employee engagement, which is at the core of our relationship with government.”

Mattingly took issue with Kupor’s characterization that the FEVS had limited utility for individual agencies with different needs. Agencies previously were able to ask OPM for supplemental questions to be asked alongside FEVS, and some HR offices have successfully used the survey to drive performance. Without a government-wide survey—and centrally conducted annual analysis in the form of an annual governmentwide report—senior officials and the public will lose out on valuable trend data on the state of public service.

“Chief human capital officers, HR offices and senior leaders are definitely aware of the survey and look at it as one tool in their toolbox,” she said. “[With] all this significant workforce reshaping that is happening, you have a lot of changes to employees’ workloads and morale, and you have reorgs and other things going on as well. Removing some of these satisfaction questions and devolving the overall survey back to agencies, it removes our ability to publicly benchmark these changes against previous administrations, previous actions and previous iterations of agencies. So it really is a tool that helps both agency leadership, but also the public to see how these things are impacting employees, and ultimately service delivery.”

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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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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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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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Bill would limit federal relocations to states with abortion restrictions

Erich Wagner — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:04:48 -0400

Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., and 26 other House Democrats introduced legislation Wednesday aimed at protecting federal workers’ reproductive rights in the wake of the balkanization of abortion rights across the United States.

Since the Supreme Court issued Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the abortion rights spelled out in Roe v. Wade, in 2022, 13 states have enacted—or revived long-dormant—bans on abortion, while another six have restricted the procedure to between the first six to 12 weeks of gestation.

The Federal Workforce Reproductive Rights Protection Act would bar agencies from relocating their headquarters or at least 5% of their employees to states that have erected or re-implemented abortion restrictions in the last four years. It also would ban the purchase or new leasing of property in the state—only lease renewals for existing or entirely in-person public-serving facilities would be exempt.

The bill also would grant federal employees the chance to opt out of details, relocations or reassignments to states that have restricted or banned abortion; similarly, agencies would not be able to condition a job or promotion on the applicants’ living in or moving to those jurisdictions. The proposal also would bar the government from asking federal workers and job applicants abortion-related questions as part of the security clearance process and bans retaliation against employees and jobseekers who avail themselves of the bill’s protections.

And feds living in states that have restricted abortion would be eligible for both paid administrative leave and transportation allowances to help defray the costs of traveling to a jurisdiction to receive reproductive health care. Shortly after Dobbs was issued in 2022, the Biden administration similarly authorized paid leave for abortion-related travel, albeit under the category of paid sick leave.

In a statement Wednesday, Walkinshaw said that federal workers should not be forced to choose between their career and obtaining reproductive health care.

“Federal workers serve this country in every state and territory, and they deserve to know their employer will protect their health, privacy, and family,” Walkinshaw said. “Since Dobbs, millions of Americans have been forced to navigate a dangerous patchwork of state abortion bans and restrictions. For federal employees, who can be ordered to relocate or accept assignments across the country, that threat is especially real. This bill protects public servants from being punished, pushed out or put at risk because they need lawful reproductive health care.”

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Lawmakers warn acting intelligence chief against major workforce changes

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:10:05 -0400

Top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees warned acting spy chief Bill Pulte on Monday not to use his temporary post to make major changes at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, citing concerns that he could pursue sweeping personnel cuts or politically motivated declassification decisions before a Senate-confirmed director is in place.

In a June 22 letter to Pulte, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Pulte should not take actions “more appropriately left to a Senate-confirmed Director” and reminded him of his legal obligation to preserve records related to any actions he takes in the role.

The warning comes days after Pulte began serving as acting director of national intelligence following the cancellation of a Senate hearing for Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to permanently lead the intelligence community. The delay ensured Pulte would assume the acting role, prolonging a fight that has already complicated bipartisan efforts to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a powerful foreign spying authority that lapsed earlier this month.

Democrats have warned Pulte’s role in the administration’s mortgage fraud reviews last year could foreshadow the use of intelligence tools to pursue the president’s political opponents.

In Monday’s letter, Himes and Warner sharpened that concern, saying Pulte’s record as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency showed “a willingness to misuse your position, including your access to sensitive information,” to pursue Trump’s perceived political enemies.

The lawmakers said they expect Pulte to not declassify information in a way that would compromise intelligence sources and methods or “weaponize the declassification process for partisan political purposes.” They also said any declassification effort should follow established policies and include input from career intelligence officials on the national security risks of releasing classified material.

The letter also directly addresses multiple reports that Pulte could soon fire or place on leave hundreds of ODNI employees. Himes and Warner said they were concerned by those reports and argued that any large workforce reduction would come after substantial downsizing at ODNI already occurred this year.

Pulte could serve in the acting role through August, The New York Times reported Monday, citing an administration official.

“Given your lack of experience within the Intelligence Community, it is difficult to imagine that in such a short amount of time you have already developed fully-informed views as to how to shrink ODNI without incurring risks to national security,” they wrote.

A spokesperson for ODNI didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

The office was created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to improve coordination across the intelligence community. Trump has said he wants Pulte to further downsize the office and continue election-related investigations launched under former DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

Himes and Warner said Pulte should refrain from making significant structural changes to ODNI, including any reduction in force, while serving in an acting capacity and without consulting Congress.

The lawmakers also said Pulte and ODNI employees must preserve records related to declassification, publication or release of classified materials, as well as personnel actions. They said that obligation extends to electronic messages sent through official or personal accounts, text messages, phone-based messaging apps and encrypted software.

They requested that Pulte soon acknowledge the letter and confirm his “full and immediate compliance” with legal records-preservation requirements.

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Unions urge court to force ruling in ‘loyalty question’ lawsuit

Erich Wagner — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:59:19 -0400

A coalition of federal employee unions this week urged a federal appeals court to compel a lower court judge to act upon a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s introduction of essay questions that many say amount to a presidential loyalty test for federal jobseekers.

The American Federation of Government Employees, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the National Association of Government Employees sued the Office of Personnel Management last November after the government’s dedicated HR agency introduced four essay questions to be issued with all federal job postings, including one question asking applicants their favorite Trump policy or executive order.

While OPM has insisted that the essay questions are optional and will not be used to adjudicate hiring decisions, the unions have argued mere presence alone serves to both coerce or chill the speech of federal jobseekers and highlighted evidence that at least in some instances, responses were, in fact, mandatory.

The unions had asked U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, a Clinton appointee in Massachusetts, for a preliminary injunction blocking federal agencies from including the essay questions as part of their job application process. Both parties had filed their legal briefs on the matter by December 10, and a hearing on the unions’ motion was held on March 11.

But since then, the case has ground to a halt. The unions on Monday filed a writ of mandamus with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, requesting the appeals court compel O’Toole to publish a decision on the proposed injunction “promptly.”

In their filing, the unions said that in the time since they first requested the court take action, the deployment of the essay questions has expanded rapidly.

“When the unions filed their complaint, the loyalty question had appeared on over 5,800 job postings on USAjobs.gov, the website operated by OPM that serves as ‘the federal government’s official employment site,’” they wrote. “By the time briefing was completed on the motion, approximately 8,500 jobs had been posted with the loyalty question. On April 27, 2026, the unions informed the court that they had learned, contrary to the government’s representations, that applicants could not skip answering the loyalty question on USAJobs postings. In the same notice, the unions apprised the court that the loyalty question had appeared on over 33,000 job postings.”

As of press time, nearly 48,000 job postings on USAJobs featured the essay questions as part of the application process, according to an online tool that scrapes the various listings on the job site.

“Every day that the [Merit Hiring Plan] is not stayed or enjoined, the unions’ members who are interested in federal jobs face the dilemma of how to respond to this plainly unconstitutional loyalty question—by speaking favorably about the current administration’s policies regardless of the individuals’ own personal convictions; by speaking on political matters (when they would prefer not to speak); by remaining silent when they would prefer to offer their sincerely held views but feel they cannot; or by declining to apply to jobs that include the offending question,” the unions wrote. “In other words, every day, the unions’ members endure irreparable First Amendment injury.”

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NSF is using its HQ move to revoke telework for workers with disabilities, employees say

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:41:48 -0400

The National Science Foundation is reviewing employees’ reasonable accommodations, as the agency relocates its headquarters to a nearby building. But several employees allege that officials are using the move to revoke telework flexibility for workers with disabilities.

While President Donald Trump ended work from home for most of the federal workforce at the start of his second term, his administration exempted employees with disabilities who telework under a reasonable accommodation. Officials are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations (e.g. accessible technology) to better enable a worker to perform their job, unless doing so would result in an “undue hardship” for the agency.

Nevertheless, employees at several agencies — including now NSF — have contended that the Trump administration is blocking civil servants with disabilities from receiving telework reasonable accommodations.

“There are people with cancer, people who cannot walk and people with major disabilities, and [officials] are telling them that telework will not be an option,” said an NSF employee who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation.

In employee testimonials provided by American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, which represents federal research staffers, NSF workers said the officials reviewing reasonable accommodations are offering unclear guidance and pushing alternative accommodations that don’t meet their needs.

One worker said that the experience “created an environment where I no longer felt psychologically safe advocating for my medical needs” due to fears of retaliation or having to leave their job if a reasonable accommodation isn’t granted, while another said their stress level has gone “through the roof” and that they’ve “developed additional symptoms related to [their] disabilities as well as a new physical condition as a result.”

Likewise, a different NSF employee, who said they’ve previously renewed their reasonable accommodation without issue, wrote in a testimonial that the agency HR’s response to emails has been “incredibly delayed,” but workers are required to fulfill requests for additional information with “fast turn arounds.”

Agency employees are particularly perplexed by the apparent crackdown on telework, as most of them are currently working from home due to the headquarters move. The Housing and Urban Development Department began transferring its workforce to NSF’s former headquarters in Alexandria, Va., this spring.

NSF is in the process of moving to a building that is close to its old headquarters, and the agency employee said the expectation is that workers will start working from that office in a staggered schedule over the summer.

An NSF spokesperson said in a statement to Government Executive that the agency “prioritizes the health and safety of its staff and remains committed to fulfilling all legal obligations under the Rehabilitation Act. Exercising due diligence, NSF continues to implement the reasonable accommodation process and assess the new workplace environment while most of its staff are teleworking during the transition to its new headquarters.”

The agency did not address a question about the schedule of the relocation.

The NSF employee said that the scrutiny of reasonable accommodations is worsening morale at the agency, which has also been impacted by the Trump’s administration’s staff reductions and changes to the grantmaking process.

NSF’s workforce went from around 1,700 employees in 2024 to just under 1,150 in 2026, according to federal workforce data. And the Office of Management and Budget recently proposed overhauling the federal grantmaking process, including by requiring political appointees to approve awards to ensure they advance the president’s priorities.

“[These are] the foremost scientists and administrators in the country, who for decades have ensured that not a penny of taxpayer money is wasted, and [they’re] now being collapsed and attacked by a bunch of folks who have no scientific training,” the NSF employee said.

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