Government Executive - Workforce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Agencies have a new question to answer about employee misconduct

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 1.0 How employee misconduct is addressed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key considerations include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Unions accuse mediation agency of ‘doublespeak’ in updated lawsuit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: IndyCar

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy AFGE

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

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

Photo courtesy AFGE

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

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

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

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OPM finalizes expanded hazard pay for federal firefighters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘We’re still in hell’: A year later, CDC employees remain shaken by headquarters shooting — and angry at agency leaders’ response

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:00:11 -0400

About a year ago, a gunman opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s headquarters in Atlanta, killing a responding police officer before committing suicide. There’s still damage from the attack that hasn’t been repaired, according to Yolanda Jacobs, the president of the union local for CDC HQ employees.

Between the shooting, staff cuts and leadership turnover, staffers say they are being pushed to the brink. While some are cautiously optimistic about the agency’s new director, they also feel the administration is hostile toward the CDC workforce, pointing to rhetoric from senior leaders during events associated with the one-year anniversary of the attack.

“The last 18 months have been hell for a lot of CDC employees,” Jacobs said during a virtual press conference on Aug. 7. “You know how they say ‘taking you to hell and back,’ we haven’t gotten back — we’re still in hell.”

As part of commemorations on Aug. 7, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited CDC’s headquarters where he met with the family of slain police officer David Rose and participated in a fireside chat with agency employees.

According to Jacobs, who did not attend the chat, employees described the town hall as more “badgering and beating down the employees versus we’re here and we’re going to lend support.”

“I do think that it stepped away from being something beautiful — commemorating the death of someone who sacrificed his life for us — and it turned into more of a political fest,” she said.

Another CDC staffer, who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation, said that employees feel senior officials — such as Kennedy and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, who has been leading the CDC until the new head is sworn in — are trying to blame the workforce for last year’s shooting.

“A theme that Bhattacharya always comes back to when he's talking to us is that basically ‘We need to listen, and we don't respect people and the whole reason nobody believes in public health — or trusts public health — is because of us not listening to people,’” she said. “It's pretty obvious that they're victim blaming and really telling us it's our fault that we got shot up.”

In addition, a CDC employee who attended the fireside chat shared a photo with Government Executive of a poster featuring Bhattacharya as a wrestler to thank him for his leadership at the agency.

A poster featuring Jay Bhattacharya as a wrestler.

Photo provided by a CDC employee who attended the Aug. 7 fireside chat.

“Just looking at the photo, I see leadership that is totally out of touch with the needs of its employees that does not really understand the magnitude of all that is happening and continues to happen,” Jacobs said.

A group for CDC alumni hosted a commemorative event on Aug. 8 that was unaffiliated with the agency.

“They obviously understood how the first anniversary was going to be really hard for us, and so they put together that service for us and having it off campus was really nice,” the unnamed employee said.

In response to a request for comment, an HHS spokesperson said that: “Secretary Kennedy unequivocally condemns last year's horrific attack and remains fully committed to the safety and well-being of every CDC employee. Any claim that the administration does not take this tragedy or its lasting impact on the CDC workforce seriously is simply false.”

As the Trump administration laid off and otherwise downsized the civil service, CDC’s workforce shrunk by nearly 30% since 2024. And the agency’s former director, Susan Monarez, was fired after only about a month in the position for, she said, refusing to pre-accept vaccine decisions and fire career employees who work on vaccine policy.

Last week, the Senate confirmed a new CDC director, Erica Schwartz, the former deputy surgeon general. At the time of her approval, Jacobs said in a statement that the new leader “has an opportunity to turn the tide.”

“All of us are more than anxious and willing to work with our leadership to get the agency back on solid footing…We just need to know that leadership feels the same way,” she added during the virtual press conference. “Until that happens, we’re going to continue to see employees having mental breakdowns — and we’re seeing a whole lot of that — and we’re going to see a lot of people taking their skills elsewhere where they feel that they’re more valued. And in the end, can we blame them for that?”

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Judge rejects VA’s third attempt to cancel union contracts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mediation agency changes how labor disputes move forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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OPM finalizes rules expanding its power over RIFs, employee appeals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘An existential threat to due process’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The costs of urgency

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

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

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

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

Leadership is choosing the right pace

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

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

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

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

Urgency is a leadership decision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Staffing cuts are leaving federal statistical agencies stretched thin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last summer, President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency produced a monthly jobs report that showed hiring had slowed. The incident raised concerns about the long-term independence of federal statistical agencies, but after pushback from Congress and those who rely on BLS data, Pierson said the Trump administration is unlikely to target the heads of other statistical agencies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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IRS and Social Security bar employees from taking advanced leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An IRS spokesperson said the policy change “aligns with the agency’s efforts to build a high-performing, highly engaged workforce operating as One IRS to deliver a world-class customer experience and aligns to our commitment to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As USDA relocation deadlines near, employees say questions remain unanswered

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

Updated at 4:39 p.m. ET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USDA keeps relocation plans moving despite lawsuit

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

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

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

Employees say they're making decisions without answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A USDA spokesperson declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Unions warn relocations could deepen staffing losses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some agencies expect especially steep losses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officials and former leaders question the impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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