Government Executive - Workforce

Judge again orders reinstatement of Bureau of Prisons union contracts, but stops short of contempt

Erich Wagner — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:10:31 -0400

A federal judge in Connecticut on Friday ordered the U.S. Bureau of Prisons again to reinstate its collective bargaining agreement, ruling that last week’s re-termination of union contracts violated the preliminary injunction he issued last month.

In September, U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver found that the Bureau of Prisons’ move last year to terminate its union contracts with the American Federation of Government Employees likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the agency’s official reasoning was “entirely pretextual.”

But last week, the union reported that several wardens across the federal prison system were instructed not to take action to reinstate the agreements, and at least one employee was denied union representation in a disciplinary meeting in which they were ultimately fired. AFGE’s Council of Prison Locals called for Oliver to enforce his court order and to hold agency leadership in contempt.

The following day, the union reported that some pieces of the CBA were restored on a limited basis—some officials began seeing requests for official time, office space and union representation at a committee meeting approved. But the agency then issued a new termination notice and rescinded prior statements about the first contract cancellation, particularly a blog post from Director William Marshall that stated AFGE wasn’t the “kind of union” he supports.

In a 14-page opinion Friday, Oliver found that last week’s re-termination violated his order, describing the gambit as impermissible “self help.” Such a move would only be fruitful if, as the Biden administration did when it rescinded the “remain in Mexico” policy, the agency presented its new termination to the court prior to implementing it and then requested modification or rescission of the injunction.

“At no point did the defendants in Biden v. Texas seek to disregard a court order,” Oliver wrote. “Instead, they complied with the injunction, despite issuing a new action, and only sought to implement it after moving to vacate the original injunction . . . Here, in contrast, the defendants failed to move the court for amendment, clarification or dissolution. . . Rather than abiding by this order, defendants issued the re-termination memorandum, which purported to terminate the CBA under new rationale.”

But the judge stopped short of granting the unions’ request as it pertained to whether the agency initially “defied” the injunction, and he denied the motion to hold leadership in contempt. Oliver wrote that BOP plausibly raised the notion that “administrative burden” was to blame for the agency’s slow reinstitution of the CBA, and that individual violations of the contract should be handled through its own procedures.

“Individual instances of noncompliance with the CBA, such as failing to allow union representation at disciplinary proceedings or delaying responses to official time requests, are properly addressed under the agreement itself,” the order states. “The CBA has an extensive grievance process for managing individual complaints of noncompliance. Those concerns are properly addressed under the CBA—not by this court.”

In a statement Friday, Council of Prison Locals President Brandy Moore White applauded the judge’s ruling and urged management to comply.

“The employees we represent work in some of the most challenging and dangerous conditions in federal service, and their union contract gives them a collaborative way to speak out when their safety or the safety of the public is in jeopardy,” White said. “Our members deserve nothing less than full compliance with the court’s decision, and we will keep fighting for our members to ensure the safety and security of the workers we represent.”

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VA allows union contract to expire for most employees

Erich Wagner — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 09:06:45 -0400

The Veterans Affairs Department this week told employees that it has let its collective bargaining agreements with the American Federation of Government Employees expire, weeks after a federal appeals court ruling stayed an order requiring management to honor the deal amid negotiations for a successor deal.

As part of its efforts to implement President Trump’s executive order banning collective bargaining for most federal workers on national security grounds, the VA had sought for months to terminate its union contracts, including two instances where the cancellation was blocked in court.

In July, the VA announced that it would let the contract lapse upon its scheduled Aug. 8 expiration date. AFGE officials argued that when the VA last spring requested to begin negotiations on a successor agreement, it triggered a clause in the CBA that extends its provisions indefinitely until those negotiations are complete.

But VA management said the union failed to come to the bargaining table within 30 days, negating that provision. Union officials, conversely, argue the ground rules negotiations they engaged in throughout that 30-day window meet the clause’s requirements. U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose agreed and again halted the contract’s termination, but a three-judge panel found that decision improperly modified the scope of her original injunction, allowing the department to proceed.

In a message to employees Tuesday, obtained by Government Executive, VA management pitched the removal of AFGE as an opportunity to improve communication within the department.

“Employees and managers can more freely engage in open communications to improve the organization,” the message stated. “You may also see changes to some of the processes and procedures that were previously contained in the now-expired AFGE collective bargaining agreement. Managers have been directed to exclusively follow VA policy for all matters, including, but not limited to, promotions, alternative work schedules, details, hours of work, telework and leave usage . . . You are encouraged to discuss all workplace matters directly with your supervisor.”

And in guidance from the department’s Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer, the department said it would maintain portions of the expired CBA, albeit only for its police officers, firefighters and security guards—jobs exempted from Trump’s executive order. Specifically, management said it would preserve only contract articles pertaining to conditions of employment, and disregard provisions governing non-mandatory subjects of bargaining.

Most VA workers will also lose their Weingarten right to have a union representative present during disciplinary proceedings or other formal discussions, something department first responders will retain.

Similarly, the department will continue to provide union office space in facilities with exempt employees, primarily VA medical facilities. But employees banned from collective bargaining may only enter union office space while off duty.

Management also said that while it is ending its participation in any grievance proceeding or case before the Federal Labor Relations Authority involving “non-exempt employees,” it will continue to participate in cases involving exempt workers, and it will seek to carve non-first responders out of any cases involving a mix of employees.

“If the underlying grievance covers or appears to cover both exempted employees and non-exempted employees, VA should continue to participate in the grievance and arbitration procedure only to the extent it covers exempted employees, but continue to raise EO 14251, the CBA expiration, and all related arguments/positions) . . . at every stage of the grievance and arbitration procedure,” VA wrote. “Further, if the matter involves both exempted employees and non-exempted employees, VA should request the matter be held in abeyance until the litigation related to EO 14251 and VA’s implementation thereof is resolved.”

In a blog post this week, AFGE said it will continue to fight for the restoration of its contract for all VA bargaining-unit employees, and that it is examining potential next steps.

“Notably, the First Circuit [Court of Appeals] did not sanction the VA’s interpretation of the Duration of Agreement article, nor did it give the VA permission to re-terminate the CBA,” the union wrote. “[Our] fight is far from over. We will take every action to defend our contract and the rule of law. The court has not ruled on the underlying issue in this case, which is whether VA Secretary Doug Collins has the right to strip more than 300,000 VA employees of their voices at work.”

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HHS scraps disability accommodations over missing paperwork. Employees say they have receipts

Jory Heckman — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:41:50 -0400

The Health and Human Services Department, with a single email, is closing out accommodation requests from employees with disabilities or medical conditions.

Several HHS employees told Government Executive that the department administratively closed out their reasonable accommodation requests over failing to provide supporting medical documentation within 20 calendar days.

Impacted employees, however, shared evidence that they submitted their medical documentation before the deadline. One employee said she was granted an extended deadline to provide their medical records, but still had her RA request closed out.

“To date, the Reasonable Accommodation Program (RAP) has not received the information requested to support your request for a reasonable accommodation,” HHS wrote in Sept. 21 email obtained by Government Executive. "Because this information is necessary to evaluate your request and continue the interactive process, we are unable to proceed with processing your request. Accordingly, your reasonable accommodation case will be administratively closed.”

The email states that any interim accommodations employees had in place while their RA requests were pending “will also cease.”

“This administrative closure is based solely on the absence of the information necessary to evaluate your request and does not constitute a denial or determination on the merits of your request for reasonable accommodation,” HHS wrote.

An HHS spokesperson said in a statement that if a “request is verified to have been closed in error due to documentation having been received prior to the 20 day timeline, then those cases will be corrected accordingly.”

Many employees have waited months – or about a year, in some cases – for HHS to process their reasonable accommodation requests. HHS faces a backlog of thousands of accommodation requests.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave employees 20 calendar days to submit medical information supporting their accommodation requests – even if they had already done so. Employees at the National Institutes of Health said they received a similar notice.

A CDC employee with degenerative arthritis said she first submitted her reasonable accommodation request in early 2025. She said CDC first requested medical documentation from her in August 2026. After dealing with delays from her doctor, she said the agency granted her an extended deadline, allowing her to submit documentation by mid-September.

Despite providing the necessary documentation, she said CDC administratively closed out her reasonable accommodation in late September. She said her condition has worsened now that she is required to report to the office full-time.

“When we were forced to return to the office full time in February [2025], I suffered steadily worsening knee pain, until the point where the pain was so severe that I could literally not bear to walk on it,” she said. She said she condition worsened to the point that she required surgery.

“I might have eventually had it due to my underlying condition, but I believe that it was significantly accelerated by the requirement to return to office full time,” she said.

A second CDC employee received the same message about the agency closing out their reasonable accommodation request – even though they submitted the required medical documentation.

“People are absolutely livid,” the second CDC employee said.

An NIH employee also said their reasonable accommodation request was administratively closed out.

A second NIH employee said she was already working with an HHS reasonable accommodation coordinator to submit her medical documentation, when she got a separate unsigned email from the department’s Human Capital Accountability (HCA) directorate with conflicting deadlines.

“Because I had already been given instructions and a deadline by my assigned coordinator, I was suspicious of this duplicate request,” she said.

She said she emailed the Human Capital Accountability (HCA) directorate to clarify the situation, but did not receive a response. She said her RA coordinator told her to disregard the email she received from HCA.

“Whether this is intentional or the result of a deeply dysfunctional process, the effect on employees is the same: people seeking disability accommodations are receiving overlapping or confusing directives, being placed under strict deadlines, and then waiting while their attempts to comply or obtain clarification go unread,” the NIH employee said.

Yolanda Jacobs, president of AFGE Local 2883, which represents CDC headquarters employees, said the decision to close out many RA requests was “a deliberate choice to clear the backlog without taking meaningful action to support workers.”

“What’s clear is that HHS leadership has no real solution to properly work through the backlog of thousands of unresolved accommodation requests, nor are they making any attempts to provide a solution,” Jacobs said.

Linnet Griffiths, a former senior advisor to CDC’s chief operating officer and equal employment opportunity director at CDC and HHS, who left the agency in April 2025, said that employees who can prove they submitted medical documentation should be able to file an appeal.

"This use to not be a problem because all documentation was submitted through the RA secure system. I’m not sure what they are using now," Griffiths said.

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Bureau of Prisons re-terminates union contracts despite court order

Erich Wagner — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:22:57 -0400

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons terminated its union contracts for the second time Thursday, just two days after the American Federation of Government Employees called upon its leadership to be held in contempt over failure to comply with a court order restoring the agreements.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver ordered that BOP reinstate its collective bargaining agreements, finding that the September 2025 contract terminations, conducted under the auspices of President Trump’s executive orders banning unions at most federal agencies on national security grounds, violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the agency’s stated reasoning was likely “entirely pretextual.”

But on Tuesday, union officials reported to the court that they had experienced widespread “defiance” of Oliver’s preliminary injunction. Wardens reportedly told union officials their instructions were to wait, rather than comply with the ruling; one employee was denied union representation at a disciplinary hearing and was ultimately fired after 19 years at the agency.

In a court filing Thursday responding to AFGE’s contempt motion, the bureau alleged that leadership had instructed the agency to reinstitute its CBAs and that it simply took time to wind up those systems—union officials began getting approval for official time requests Tuesday, after the labor group filed its motion.

“Plaintiffs allege that wardens have been told not to comply with the PI and not to work with the union,” wrote BOP’s attorneys. “As indicated above, the BOP avers no such guidance was given by BOP leadership. On the contrary, beginning the morning of September 30, 2026, [Human Resource Management Division Senior Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan] Hemingway describes the focus of BOP senior leadership being on implementation and compliance with the preliminary injunction and remained the focus of bureau leadership until the agreement was terminated on October 7.”

In BOP Director William Marshall’s new termination notice, he rescinds the 2025 termination notice, as well as a blog post in which he said he was cancelling the union contracts because AFGE is not the “kind of union” he supports, though the latter message remains on BOP’s website. He argued that the contracts were “not intended to operate” independent of the federal sector labor rules the agency is now exempt from, and that engaging with the union distracts from its national security mission.

“Maintaining the CBA despite the president’s exclusion order has already caused, and will continue to cause, significant and irreparable harm to the bureau,” Marshall wrote. “These harms include substantial monetary, operational and resource impacts relating to staffing and scheduling, implementation of the First Step Act, staff and inmate safety, necessary infrastructure repairs, adoption of technological advancements and updating mission-critical policies and procedures . . . These monetary, operational and resource impacts directly interfere with the agency’s ability to meet its national security duties and responsibilities, as well as its other duties and responsibilities.”

Other agencies have tried a similar tactic, to limited success. The Veterans Affairs Department terminated its CBA for a second time last March, earning a swift rebuke, and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was similarly chastised in a case involving efforts to overturn prior administrations’ administrative extension of collective bargaining rights to Transportation Security Administration workers.

In a statement Thursday, Brandy Moore White, president of AFGE’s Council of Prison Locals, denounced management’s effort to cancel her union’s contracts a second time, and vowed to continue to fight the initiative in court.

“Our collective bargaining agreement and local agreements provide essential protections for employees who work every day in some of the most challenging and dangerous conditions in federal service,” she said. “The public should be outraged. These agreements are not simply pieces of paper; they provide stability, due process and a meaningful voice for the men and women who keep our institutions safe. Our members deserve nothing less than full compliance with the court’s decision.”

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Some former federal employees are still struggling to find the right fit

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:12:21 -0400

Speaking outside of a job fair at a Northern Virginia Community College campus on Thursday, Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., said that “a lot of people have landed” since the Trump administration last year pushed hundreds of thousands of employees out of the civil service through layoffs, firings and separation incentives.

“But there's sadly been a persistent subset that has been very difficult to find a job that matches their skill set,” the congressman told Government Executive. “For example, foreign service officers and people that worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development [which the Trump administration shuttered], they have a unique skill — helping children not get malaria, or feeding kids or doing family planning in sub-Saharan Africa. There's not a lot of use for that in metropolitan Washington, D.C.”

The job fair, which was co-hosted by Beyer’s office, the city of Alexandria, Arlington County and several other nonprofits and state and local government agencies, is an example of ongoing initiatives to re-employ workers who lost their jobs as the Trump administration slashed agency workforces.

David Remick, the executive director of the Alexandria/Arlington Regional Workforce Council, said it has been a challenge to provide assistance to former feds, as there is a lot of variation in the type of work they used to perform.

“The positions were a bit all over the place,” he said. “There are some people that could, with some rebranding, move into something different. And there's others that can't.”

Remick emphasized the number of resources available to ex-feds looking for new work, including artificial intelligence-based tools (his office recommends Google’s Career Dreamer) and community support organizations.

“Some people feel a sense of isolation because they're not going into an office every day, and so there have been a number of ad hoc groups just popping up over the year where people can find belonging,” he said.

Government Executive has previously featured FedsForward, an AI-powered website that helps former civil servants navigate the private sector job search, and the organizations Former Gov and wellfed, which offer regular opportunities for ex-feds to connect.

As time goes on, Remick said the workforce council is offering fewer resources specifically for unemployed feds. For example, Thursday’s job fair, while marketed to laid off agency staffers and government contractors, was open to the general public.

Dozens of jobseekers attend a job fair at Northern Virginia Community College Alexandria Campus on Thursday. Two of the recruiting organizations included the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Credit: Sean Michael Newhouse/GovExec

“We still see people in our workshops or webinars, but we're not necessarily breaking them out between former federal workforce and anybody else. It's just — these are the people that we're supporting,” he said. “There was sort of a scarlet letter on some of these [former feds], they felt, because they were in this situation. And it shouldn't be that way. They're still valuable people that bring a lot to the economy, and I've just learned to treat them like anybody else. They appreciate that.”

Beyer has introduced bills to bring some of the pushed out feds back into government service. One would give federal hiring preference to individuals who were involuntarily removed from the civil service between Jan. 1, 2025, and the end of the current calendar year (H.R. 3093), while another would exempt former foreign service officers who were pushed out during Trump’s second term from having to retake the Foreign Service Officer Test if they want to rejoin (H.R. 9730).

While neither measure has advanced in the current Congress, Beyer thinks they could pass if Democrats retake the House and/or Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

“They're not partisan bills. They're not ‘D’ bills or ‘R’ bills,” he said. “So I think we can get them to the Senate. Getting the president to sign them might be harder.”

There were at least two federal agencies at the job fair recruiting new workers: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA has walked back plans to halve its workforce, but the disaster response agency did lose 17% of its staffers in fiscal 2025. And agency officials have argued that they can operate with a smaller headcount because of technological advances.

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Union demands federal prison leaders be held in contempt after agency ‘openly defies’ court order

Erich Wagner — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:23:08 -0400

The union representing employees at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons accused agency management Tuesday of “openly defying” a court order to reinstate its collective bargaining agreements and called for a federal judge to hold Director William Marshall in contempt.

U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver, a Biden appointee, issued a preliminary injunction last week, finding that BOP likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act when it terminate its contracts with the American Federation of Government Employees’ National Council of Prison Locals, in accordance with President Trump’s 2025 executive orders banning collective bargaining at most federal agencies on national security grounds. Key to that decision was Marshall’s public statement that he made the decision because AFGE is not the “kind of union” he supports, rather than any national security concern.

But a week later, though attorneys for the Trump administration have said the agency has “complied” with the court order, union officials tell another story. In a motion to hold Marshall in contempt and enforce the injunction, they relay reports of wardens across multiple prisons who said they had been instructed to wait, rather than restore unions’ access to their office space or otherwise allow them to resume their representational work.

“On October 1, Jonathan Eperson, president of AFGE Local 612 at USP Big Sandy, reported that the acting warden had told him that the regional director instructed management not to work with the union on anything and to maintain the status quo,” the union wrote. “’At] FCI Manchester, management similarly advised the local union on October 5 that word had been ‘put out’ that management were ‘not to do anything yet.’ Another local president reported to [Council President Brandy Moore] White that his warden said wardens were being verbally instructed not to comply with the court’s order and to ignore it.”

And on Sept. 29, just before the injunction was issued, Marshall met with staff at Federal Correctional Institution Elkton in Ohio and was asked about the potential for the judge to order the collective bargaining agreements be restored.

“I don’t take directives from the court,” Marshall reportedly responded. “I take my orders from the president of the United States.”

One employee told the court that they were called into a disciplinary meeting on Oct. 5, when they were denied access to union representation.

“There ain’t no union,” said the prison’s HR manager. The meeting ended with the employee’s termination.

“These accounts support the conclusion that BOP has continued operating with the CBA terminated, which is contrary to the court’s order that BOP immediately reinstate the CBA,” the union wrote. “The withholding of these arrangements is significant because defendants themselves identified official time, bargaining and union office space as consequences of an injunction requiring reinstatement of the CBA. The continued absence of these benefits, coupled with management’s categorical denials of recognition, proves that the September 2025 termination remains operative in practice.”

Oliver on Wednesday instructed BOP to provide “detailed information” on the effort to reinstate AFGE’s contract by Thursday and scheduled a hearing on the union’s motion for Oct. 13. The Bureau of Prisons told Government Executive that it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

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Social Security ends flexible work schedules, teeing up clash with union

Jory Heckman — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:04:51 -0400

The Social Security Administration is ending flexible work schedules for its employees, soon after imposing new restrictions on annual leave and sick time.

Under these flexible work schedules, SSA employees generally worked longer hours, in exchange for an extra day off each week or two-week pay period. Employees on these flexible schedules still work the same total hours as their peers working a standard five-day workweek.

The American Federation of Federal Employees, which represents tens of thousands of SSA employees, said many employees relied on these flexible work schedules for medical treatment or to provide family care, and that removing this option would push more staff to leave the agency.

SSA told its workforce that a consistent five-day workweek “strengthens our ability to deliver the service the public expects,” even for employees who don’t work directly with the public.

Employees received an email on Monday informing them that alternative work schedules would no longer be permitted, starting Nov. 16. SSA employees will be allowed to remain on flexible work schedules through Nov. 13.

Prohibited work schedules include employees working 10-hours days four times each workweek, or working eight nine-hour days and one eight-hour day for a two-week pay period.

“Management was given zero notice, so we are scrambling,” an SSA manager told Government Executive. “Many of us just approved people for new AWS schedules in the last few weeks.” An SSA spokesperson declined to comment further, referring back to the email employees received on Monday.

In the email, SSA Chief Human Capital Officer Florence Felix-Lawson told staff that “all employees will transition to a standard five-day workweek.”

“The American people depend on SSA to deliver on its mission every day, and that mission depends on a workforce that is present and available throughout the week. AWS, which allow employees to complete their work hours in fewer than five days, reduce staffing on the days employees are off,” Felix-Lawson wrote. “The cumulative effect across the agency is significant and impacts our service to the public.”

AFGE’s SSA General Committee filed a national grievance, arguing that the agency unilaterally ending flexible work arrangements amounts to an illegal repudiation of its contact with the union.

The Trump administration eliminated collective bargaining at more than 20 agencies last year through a pair of executive orders, on the grounds that these changes were necessary for national security reasons. SSA, however, wasn’t impacted by the executive orders and still recognizes AFGE. Its contract with the union is effective until Oct. 25, 2029.

AFGE’s SSA General Committee said in a statement that SSA “paints a false picture of an agency overwhelmed by employees with alternative schedules.” The union says public-facing field offices and hearing offices must have a minimum staffing level to be eligible for flexible work schedules, and cap the number of public-facing employees who can be off any given day.

The union said that an “overwhelming majority of employees” already work a regular five-day workweek, and that “a small portion of SSA’s total workforce utilized an alternative work schedule.” Employees at smaller offices, for example, are not eligible for flexible work schedules.

The union argued that these changes “will harm public service by further depressing morale in an already overwhelmed workforce, and that many employees will leave the agency, "exacerbating attrition and further depleting service capacity." About 7,000 SSA employees took voluntary separation incentives last year, bringing the agency to its lowest staffing level in about 50 years.

SSA, along with the IRS, announced in July that employees would no longer be granted advanced annual or sick leave until further notice.

Federal employees are generally allowed to use “advanced” annual or sick leave for 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 essentially borrow from a reserve of leave hours they will eventually accrue.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., led colleagues in denouncing this new policy as a “cruel and unjustified plan that is likely to drive additional employees out the door.”

“Like with advanced leave, many SSA employees utilized alternative work schedules to make time to seek medical treatment and take care of loved ones without loss of pay. SSA’s action will fall harshest on those workers who will have to choose between getting paid or getting care. The cruelty of this move cannot be overstated,” the union wrote.

The union is calling on Congress to pass legislation that expands unions’ ability to seek injunctive relief in unfair labor practice cases. It’s also urging the Senate to pass the Protecting America’s Workforce Act. The bill, which passed the House last December, would restore collective bargaining rights to over 3,000 SSA IT workers and approximately 1 million federal workers.

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Using holiday lights to inform hurricane recovery? Award honors ‘seemingly odd’ federally funded research that brings about groundbreaking discoveries

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:53:21 -0400

Miguel Román, the deputy director for atmospheres and data systems in NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Earth Sciences Division, started his career at the space agency with a much simpler title: intern.

“Summer 2003 was a sublime moment for me because I truly saw people walking the halls of this building, and they were literally changing the books of science by making major discoveries at the time by building large flagship missions and pointing them down at Earth and measuring things we had never looked at before,” he said. “Twenty-some years later, I'm sitting in the corner office of that building.”

Román himself has changed science books through his work on Black Marble, a NASA project that provides a near real-time measurement of nighttime light around the world. Its data has been used to support disaster response, humanitarian organizations in conflict zones and as a proxy for economic activity.

Black Marble is part of a trio of winners for this year’s Golden Goose awards, an annual program put on by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that honors “unexpected, seemingly odd federally funded research that ultimately leads to transformative breakthroughs for science and society.” Winners were recognized last week during a ceremony at the Library of Congress.

Past honorees include researchers that contributed to mRNA vaccines, artificial intelligence and GLP-1 drugs.

Black Marble’s quirky origin story is that initially NASA was picking up nighttime lights that researchers couldn’t explain.

“We thought the instrument was broken because the lights over desert areas where we drew all our calibration — very stable sites — were going up and down every year,” Román said. “Up until that moment, we didn't realize that we were seeing the effects of Muslim cities celebrating the end of Ramadan.”

The NASA official said that Black Marble’s life-saving applications started to become apparent during hurricane recoveries, such as Hurricane Maria in 2017 that hit Puerto Rico, where Román is from.

“I was looking at changes in places where I knew the names of streets, and I had walked. If you're a citizen of that locale, and you know what's going on, it carries a different weight,” he said. “We went from curiosity and something a little fun and happy to answering our call to service and having a sense of urgency and taking that seriously as a group, even though we're a science agency. The capability was there. We had data systems. At that point, it wasn't about the science as much as it was also making the data available to the people making decisions on the ground.”

New Orleans before Hurricane Ida in 2021 Credit: NASA

Román added that Black Marble data is increasingly being used by Fortune 100 companies for matters like assessing AI supply chains and insurance decisions.

“NASA built an ecosystem around public value that drives the national economy and national interests,” he said. “We are still doing the curiosity-driven work, but we're also helping eat up the risk that industry may not stomach to allow folks to take on this capability.”

“Scientific research is more than just about the funding; it relies on people”

The Golden Goose awards were founded in 2012 as a response to former Sen. William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece Awards.” When he was in Congress from 1975 through 1988, Proxmire targeted federal spending that he considered to be wasteful, which often included scientific research funding.

“The idea for the Golden Goose award was to demonstrate that sometimes research that might sound silly or odd or a waste of taxpayer dollars can have amazing contributions to society,” said Joanne Padrón Carney, the chief government relations officer for AAAS.

For example, the other two Golden Goose honorees this year are:

Histotripsy, which can break apart tumors without surgery or heat, that originated with a graduate student, Zhen Xu, trying to quiet noisy lab equipment. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and Defense Department, and Xu has since co-founded a multi-billion health company to commercialize the technology.
Sidney Nagel, whose research backed by the National Science Foundation and Energy Department on phenomena like “the ring left behind by a spilled drop of coffee” has led to “applications ranging from inkjet printing and industrial manufacturing to grain silo design and diagnostic techniques that analyze dried blood and saliva droplets.”

Carney is concerned, however, that various actions taken by the Trump administration will stymie future scientific discoveries. Specifically, she pointed to attempts by the Office of Management and Budget to give political appointees more power in approving grants and the president’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget cuts to science agencies: NIH (-12.8%), NSF (-54.7%) and NASA Science (-46.3%). Congress largely rejected Trump’s proposed reductions to science agency funding last fiscal year.

Regardless of whether the administration’s efforts are ultimately successful, she worries that they will still deter young people from becoming scientists.

“Scientific research is more than just about the funding; it relies on people. Our concern is that these young, hopefully aspiring, scientists that may be in elementary school, high school or even college — they may not be considering going into scientific research as a career path because they're seeing the challenges facing the current cohort of scientists that we have across the United States,” Carney said. “Research really relies on people, ultimately, and their curiosity and their drive and persistence.”

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Bureau of Prisons is the latest agency ordered to reinstate union rights

Erich Wagner — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:15:16 -0400

A federal judge in Connecticut last week ordered the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to restore its collective bargaining agreements with the nation’s largest federal employee union, after he found the decision to terminate those contracts last year were likely “entirely pretextual.”

The 32-page preliminary injunction marks the latest in a string of rulings that examined not whether President Trump’s 2025 executive orders banning collective bargaining for most federal workers are legal, but whether the agencies complied with the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirement that decisions be well-reasoned when they implemented the edicts.

At the heart of U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver’s ruling was the fact that when BOP terminated its contracts with the American Federation of Government Employees’ National Council of Prison Locals in September 2025, it told the union in its decision that it was to conform with Trump’s executive order excluding the agency from federal labor law. But in a message to employees and the public that same day, BOP Director William Marshall stated it was because AFGE was not the “kind of union” he supports.

“Director Marshall posted his message that heavily criticized [the union’s] operations and stated that the ‘whole purpose of ending this contract’ was because the ‘union was an obstacle to progress’ and ‘the current contract has too often slowed or prevented changes,’” Oliver wrote. “The letter did not state that EO 14251 required the termination of the CBA. Nor did it mention the national security rationale underlying the executive order . . . Although an agency may have multiple reasons for its action, it cannot offer an entirely pretextual explanation that is undermined by its own contradictory assertions made the same day.”

Oliver noted a laundry list of actions the agency has taken since the CBA was terminated, mostly to the detriment of employees.

“BOP pressured employees not to take sick leave, and in one instance sent a sick-leave abuse letter to an employee who was in the hospital for kidney surgery,” he wrote. “In another instance, an employee who was recovering from surgery was placed on AWOL (absent without leave) status and threatened with termination if they did not return to work. Terminating the CBA stripped BOP employees of the benefit of union representation in these instances, leaving them to navigate disciplinary proceedings without union support.”

Justice Department attorneys had argued both that the agency was acting on behalf of the president, making the termination exempt from the APA, as well as that the act was “committed to agency discretion,” which also would make it exempt from the APA. But the judge noted that the executive orders, and subsequent guidance from the Office of Personnel Management both allow agencies to “choose” whether to terminate a union contract, making such actions reviewable.

“Defendants took affirmative steps to decide whether and when to terminate the CBA: in accordance with OPM guidance, Director Marshall ‘made the decision’ to terminate the CBA, and defendants had the authority to determine when, precisely, the termination was to occur,” Oliver wrote. “Those decisions by BOP and Director Marshall are reviewable under the APA. Accordingly, defendants’ argument that decision to terminate the CBA is unreviewable because they lacked discretion is contradicted by the record, contradicted by other statements made by the United States, and unavailing to this court.”

In the days following Oliver’s ruling last week, the Bureau of Prison has indicated it is “complying” with his order. But it asked for clarification about whether it would be permitted to submit a new termination notice—something that has drawn the ire of judges in cases involving the Veterans Affairs Department and Transportation Security Administration.

But union officials at at least one correctional facility report that management has yet to comply. AFGE Local 1237 President Aaron McGlothin, whose union represents workers at Federal Correctional Institution Mendota in California, said he is still unable to access the union’s office on agency property, and that the agency continues to refuse employees access to union representation or even acknowledge the union’s status as workers’ exclusive representative.

“How can FCI Mendota management claim to respect the rule of law while refusing to honor a federal judge’s order?” McGlothin said in a statement. “This is a direct attack on the law enforcement officers who keep this institution running and protect the public every day.”

The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to a request for comment.

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TSA took away its officers’ chairs. The union isn’t sitting quietly

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:43:34 -0400

The American Federation of Government Employees on Monday launched a public campaign to push back on a new Transportation Security Administration policy prohibiting officers from sitting while working at airport checkpoints.

“Our officers screen millions of people a day and they do it right, sitting or standing,” said Hydrick Thomas, president of AFGE TSA Council 100, in a statement. “Nobody who works a checkpoint asked for this. Nobody who flies asked for this. If TSA leadership truly believes standing makes people better at their jobs, I look forward to watching every manager in the building prove it for eight hours straight.”

According to an AFGE press release, TSA officials on Sept. 25 ordered that chairs be removed from travel document check stations because “[m]aintaining a standing posture helps reinforce professionalism, attentiveness and active engagement with passengers” and that the policy change “reinforces both our security posture and our commitment to hospitality.”

But union officials argued that there’s no data to support the assertion that a standing officer, versus a sitting one, improves security. They also reported that the agency has recently asked officers to sign a “Security Operations Pledge of Service and Security” in which employees agree to support “the well-being and morale of our colleagues.”

“That is a punch line,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley in a statement. “Hospitality is not something you get by making working people stand at a podium until their feet go numb. Respect is how you keep good officers, and respect is how you keep travelers safe.”

TSA did not respond to a request for comment.

The TSA workforce has recently worked for periods without pay across two government shutdowns: the 43-day funding lapse in 2025 and the Homeland Security Department shutdown earlier this year. As a result, many officers quit or called out sick, which led to long lines at airport security checkpoints.

The Trump administration has sought to remove TSA workers’ collective bargaining rights, but a district judge in January blocked its most recent effort. DHS on Sept. 25, however, filed a notice of appeal. AFGE and the trade association for domestic airlines also have pushed back on the administration’s plans to expand the privatization of screening at small airports.

Administration officials contend that axing TSA union representation and increasing airport security privatization would generate cost savings.

Erich Wagner contributed to this report

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Appeals court seemingly OKs VA’s contested union contract expiration

Erich Wagner — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:45:28 -0400

A federal appeals court has seemingly cleared the way for the Veterans Affairs Department to allow its contract with the American Federation of Government Employees to expire.

Last month, a federal judge for the third time blocked VA management from cancelling its collective bargaining agreements with AFGE, the latest in the long-running dispute over the department’s implementation of President Trump’s executive order barring unions across much of the federal government.

U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose had previously ruled that the VA likely violated union members’ First Amendment rights when it first sought to terminate the contract in August 2025. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld most of her injunction and subsequent order enforcing it, though it noted that the court could not force the VA to “comply” with particular contract terms.

In July, the VA announced its intention to end its contracts with AFGE for a third time. This time, the department said it would simply allow the agreements to lapse when they expire in August; the union countered that management had already broached negotiations on a new deal, triggering a clause within the contract automatically extending its expiration date until such time as a successor agreement can be reached.

Dubose again blocked the effort through a new enforcement order last August, but the department appealed that decision again to the First Circuit. In an order Friday, the same three-judge panel that upheld her prior rulings issued a stay halting the most recent order, finding that it modified Dubose’s prior injunction, which is improper when those orders remain under appeal.

“On this score, the defendants contend that the second enforcement order ‘reaches well beyond the original injunction’s scope by imposing on the parties, on pain of contempt, the district court’s resolution of a disputed contract-interpretation question,’ namely, whether the parties’ communications ‘automatically extended the CBA,’” the judges wrote. “That dispute, the defendants assert, is ‘distinct from’ the dispute the district court addressed in the preliminary injunction: whether the defendants’ ‘initial CBA termination was unlawful.’ We agree.”

The three-judge panel found that Dubose’s determination that VA management had triggered the CBA’s automatic extension clause was the type of compliance question they previously warned about when upholding the bulk of her first enforcement order.

“We recognize that there remains an unresolved dispute between the parties as to whether their communications satisfied the CBA’s automatic extension provision,” they wrote. “But that is a function of the fact that the preliminary injunction’s directive to ‘reinstate’ the CBA leaves open potential questions of interpretation of and compliance with the CBA. As we observed in our prior decision, the duty to reinstate the CBA as a binding agreement and a duty not to violate the reinstated CBA in any particular instance are distinct obligations, because an individual breach would not in and of itself suffice to show that the CBA had not been reinstated as a binding agreement.”

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EPA union sues management over contract termination

Erich Wagner — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:22:23 -0400

Updated at 10:40 a.m. ET on Oct. 1, 2026.

A union representing workers at the Environmental Protection Agency became the latest labor group to sue agency leadership over the 2025 cancellation of its collective bargaining agreement, alleging that EPA violated both its members’ First Amendment Rights and a law requiring the federal government conduct reasoned decision-making.

The American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 represents around 8,000 workers at the EPA, one of the more than two dozen agencies targeted by President Trump’s 2025 executive orders banning collective bargaining on national security grounds. EPA management terminated its contract with the labor group in August 2025, after a federal appellate court lifted an injunction blocking its implementation upon AFGE locals but before the Office of Personnel Management amended guidance to greenlight such an action.

While efforts challenging the legality of Trump’s executive orders have largely stalled in federal appellate courts, the union’s lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, mirrors other cases that scrutinized agencies’ implementation of those edicts. Success in those cases have come from a combination of discrete alleged First Amendment violations at those agencies, as well whether management has fulfilled its duty under the Administrative Procedure Act to provide a reasonable explanation for its decision.

“Supreme Court precedent makes clear that even if the [executive] order was lawful, a question not raised in this case, and even if EPA was not legally required to maintain a CBA with the union, the agency had to comply with the APA’s reasoned decision-making requirements in terminating the existing agreement,” AFGE’s lawsuit states. “Moreover, under no circumstances is the agency permitted to terminate the CBA in order to suppress protected speech or retaliate against those who voiced concerns over the administration’s policies.”

In its filing, the union accused the agency of waiting to mete out discipline against employees who signed a June 2025 open letter criticizing EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s leadership of the agency for nearly two months until after management terminated the CBA so that provisions protecting employees’ scientific integrity and governing disciplinary procedures would no longer apply.

“They just didn’t want to face any accountability in front of the Federal Labor Relations Authority or a third-party arbitrator, quite frankly,” said Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 238. “Had this happened with the recognition of our union contract, we would have filed grievances on behalf of all of these people, taken them to an arbitrator and then the FLRA. So there was no accountability in terms of labor standards or employees’ statutory labor rights.”

Union officials said agency leaders continue to chill protected speech by employees, both on and off duty. The agency has begun requiring union officials, who previously would have performed representational work using official time, to request authorization to do union-related work on their own time. Chen said that although he is aware of only one instance when the agency has rejected a request, it has caused friction in otherwise day-to-day workplace interactions.

“The agency has at times taken a nearly limitless view of [union activities] in an attempt to silence speech by plaintiffs,” the lawsuit states. “[AFGE] Local 704 President Nicole Cantello was summoned by agency management and directed to answer questions about a conversation she had during her lunch hour with a longtime friend and coworker on the ground that it constituted a ‘union meeting.’”

Chen described management’s insistence that there is “no union at EPA,” while closely policing union officials in the workplace, is borne of a “Kafkian contradiction.”

“There’s this heightened suspicion; someone’s a local president but we’re also just colleagues and friends with the people in our union,” he said. “Not every conversation is a consultation that would require official time, but they bring it up and try to make an issue out of it. Like, fine, you don’t recognize the union, but why are you attacking us, claiming we’re trying to use official time? I thought we don’t exist in your eyes.”

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the EPA had never denied a union official's request to perform representational work while off duty. Since publication, Chen said he has learned of one such instance.

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‘Nobody knows anything.’ Displaced IRS staff move from one project to another with few details why

Jory Heckman — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Updated Sept. 29 at 3:15 p.m.

Mid-career IRS employees involuntarily moved to entry-level jobs they had no prior experience doing are getting new assignments, as part of the agency’s latest shakeup.

The IRS in February put IT and human resources employees on 120-day details to work in taxpayer services. They were assigned entry-level roles answering inquiries from taxpayers and processing tax returns. The National Treasury Employees Union estimates that about 1,500 IRS employees were placed on these details.

Many of these temporary details to taxpayer services were extended for another 120 days in May, but impacted employees weren’t sure what job – if any – they’d have with the agency in the long-term. Displaced IT employees have been told they aren’t allowed to return to the agency’s tech shop.

That next role at the IRS is coming into focus. IRS employees moved off taxpayer services details are being reassigned to one of three “ONE IRS Readiness” teams.

IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano has repeatedly outlined his “One IRS” vision for running the agency more efficiently. Bisignano, who also serves as the Senate-confirmed commissioner of the Social Security Administration, also reassigned many SSA employees from field offices to answer calls to its 1-800 number.

Bisignano told employees in a Jan. 12 meeting that “we should be able to move any talent wherever is the best place,” as part of a “One SSA” strategy.

Joseph Ziegler, the IRS’ chief of internal consulting, described this latest agency reorganization in an email to employees as a “Reporting and Organizational Correction.”

“These corrections will serve as the basis for improved roster management, workload alignment, reporting integrity, and cross-business unit coordination,” Ziegler wrote in an email obtained by Government Executive.

The rollout of these changes, he told employees, “represents a major step forward in strengthening the accuracy and consistency of our foundational data” across the agency’s IT, human resources, and time and attendance systems.

Government Executive reported last week that the IRS asked some on-detail employees to stay in taxpayer services for a third tour of duty. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is investigating these temporary reassignments to taxpayer services as part of an audit of the agency’s attempts to reshape its workforce.

“I don’t think many volunteered to extend their details a third time,” said one IRS employee who’s been reassigned to one of these new readiness teams. “Everyone’s old details have expired, so we are all starting fresh. I’m happy to finally have something to do.”

Impacted employees have been assigned to one of three readiness teams. It’s not clear what work these teams will be performing or how team assignments have been decided.

“Nobody knows anything else,” the IRS employee said.

“Team A” will be led by Fred Wade, an IRS IT executive who oversaw the agency’s rollout of a modernized electronic tax filing platform.

“Team B” will be led by Gregg Zurmühlen. His LinkedIn page states that he currently serves as the IRS’ director of enterprise cybersecurity operations and standards.

“Team C” will be led by Adela Gresham, an IRS IT executive who recently returned to work after being placed on administrative leave for more than a year.

“After being placed on administrative leave 15 months ago, I was not quite sure if I would or wanted to return to federal service. I was recently given an option and after much prayer, I decided to jump back in to continue the journey,” Gresham wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.

Gresham is one of 50 IRS IT leaders the agency put on paid administrative leave in March 2025. Government Executive confirmed that another IRS IT executive previously placed on administrative leave has been brought back to work at the IRS.

Treasury Chief Information Officer Sam Corcos defended putting these officials on administrative leave. In a podcast interview last October, he said the IRS “had poor technical leadership for roughly 40 years.”

The Trump administration spent nearly $10 billion placing more than 100,000 federal workers on paid administrative leave for extended periods last year, a sixfold increase from two years prior, according to the Government Accountability Office. That spike was driven largely by the administration’s deferred resignation program aimed at encouraging feds to quit public service.

A second IRS employee said he has also been assigned to a ONE IRS Readiness team after he was recently released from his detail to taxpayer services.

“They let a few of us out, and then eventually they released even more people. Everybody was happy to get out. Most of the people who are still there, I don't know if they wanted to stay. You really had to raise some hell to even get out,” the employee said.

The second IRS employee said he’s relieved to be done with his detail to taxpayer services, but he’s not sure what this new assignment will entail.

“As soon as we got back from taxpayer services, they’re trying to send us off for another detail,” he said.

The second IRS employee, who previously worked in IRS IT, said the agency’s tech shop is backfilling the jobs and his colleagues previously performed.

IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya said in March that his office planned to hire up to 175 IT employees, after permanently moving 1,200 employees out of the tech shop. Pandya said in February that the IRS lost 40% of its IT workforce and nearly 80% of its leadership last year.

“They hired people to replace us,” the second IRS employee said. “They really just disappeared us and threw us away.”

The second IRS employee described his detail in taxpayer services as “chaos.” He said there was “no clear direction of who was actually your manager,” and that detailees were rushed into frontline roles with minimal training.

“We were thrown directly into these IRS systems and processing tax returns. We had no idea of that – how to do it. The people who had been doing it had been doing it for years.”

The second IRS employee said many full-time taxpayer services employees were “resentful” of detailees brought on to the same jobs, but retaining their old salaries. Detailees were making about two or three times what these frontline jobs normally pay.

“Many of us were [GS]-13s, [GS]-14s, [GS]-15s,” the IRS employee said. “You had people who were [GS]-3s, [GS]-4s and [GS]-5s who were managing you, telling you what to do, and they had no idea of management.”

The second IRS employee said workers placed on details were disproportionately racial minorities, women and people with disabilities.

“The overwhelming majority of these people are black, brown, and minorities who have been just rushed off in this detail,” he said. An IRS official strongly disputed the notion that reassignments were based on demographics.

The second IRS employee said he’s not clear why the agency keeps reassigning him, and why he was removed from his IT job in the first place. He said he chose a career in the federal government over the corporate world because of job stability – but said upheaval at the IRS has challenged that idea.

“What is the point of this? What is the business purpose of this? It's just like DOGE,” he said. “All the savings they talked about, it wasn't real savings.”

This story was updated to include a comment from an IRS official

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FLRA ruling puts ball back in courts’ court on Trump’s union EOs

Erich Wagner — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:37:29 -0400

The National Treasury Employees Union said Wednesday that a new ruling from a semi-adjudicative agency bolsters its argument in the fight over whether President Trump can strip wide swathes of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights.

Unions have been in protracted litigation over the question since Trump signed a pair of executive orders last year exempting most agencies from federal sector labor law under the auspices of national security. In total, the so-called ‘exclusion’ orders impacted roughly two-thirds of the federal workforce.

While the labor groups have succeeded in some instances of blocking the orders’ implementation at individual agencies, they have struggled to halt the initiative government-wide. In NTEU’s lawsuit, which has languished before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since oral arguments were held last December, the three-judge panel has publicly grappled with the question of whether unions may directly challenge the executive orders’ legality in court, without first going through administrative channels like the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

The FLRA, which at the time of Trump’s orders was deadlocked due to his firing of former Chairwoman Susan Tsui Grundmann last year, initially responded to the edicts by placing cases involving the unions and agencies at issue in abeyance.

But in a 2-1 decision involving employee discipline at a U.S. Marine Corps facility in Twentynine Palms, Calif., Tuesday, the agency dismissed management’s appeal on grounds that it lacked jurisdiction, due to the Defense Department’s inclusion in the executive orders. It extensively cites the American Federation of Government Employees’ lawsuit challenging the edicts’ legality, in which a Ninth Circuit appellate panel overturned an injunction blocking their implementation, and stressed the decision does not weigh in on the orders’ legality.

“Importantly, the authority did not review the merits of [previous] presidential national-security determinations at issue in any of those cases before dismissing them,” the majority wrote. “Considering the factors mentioned above—including the pertinent precedent—the authority finds it appropriate to take this case out of abeyance at this time, and to dismiss the agency’s exceptions due to a lack of jurisdiction.”

Following the ruling, NTEU submitted a letter to the court Wednesday arguing that the decision reinforces its argument that requiring unions to first seek redress from the FLRA would be time-consuming and fruitless. And it noted that the union in that case could not appeal it if it wanted to, due to restrictions on which types of arbitration cases can be reviewed by circuit courts.

“The union in U.S. Marine Corps cannot challenge EO 14251’s validity in an appeal of the decision because the decision is not subject to judicial review,” wrote Paras Shah, NTEU’s general counsel. “An FLRA order ‘involving an award by an arbitrator,’ like U.S. Marine Corps, is not reviewable by a U.S. court of appeals ‘unless the order involves an unfair labor practice.’ . . . As this decision shows, no FLRA order dismissing a case for lack of jurisdiction will ‘include a substantive evaluation’ of an unfair labor practice.”

The FLRA case is unusual in that U.S. Marine Corps officials agreed with the FLRA that it lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate management’s appeal. And although the AFGE local technically won the case, it is unclear how it can ensure compliance with the arbitrator’s underlying award now that the union is no longer recognized.

FLRA Member Anne Wagner, the agency’s lone Democratic appointee, dissented from Tuesday’s decision, calling it premature, given the litigation surrounding the executive orders.

“I continue to believe that the most prudent course of action is to keep cases covered by the exclusion orders in abeyance until the litigation over those orders reaches a definitive conclusion—including any actions by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Wagner wrote. “Although the majority cites previous examples of the authority dismissing cases based on executive orders that excluded the relevant entities from the statute, the executive orders in those cases were not the subject of pending litigation.”

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Trust in government is sinking, but a new survey suggests civil servants’ stock is rising

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:11:23 -0400

As the Trump administration downsizes the civil service and weakens federal employee job protections, new survey data shows that, by some metrics, more Americans have a favorable opinion of civil servants, even as trust in the federal government diminishes.

“Views of civil servants are more positive now than any of the previous few years,” researchers for the Partnership for Public Service wrote. “Whether that trend continues will probably depend on how the Trump administration continues its efforts to change the federal workforce and how much competence and experience are valued.”

The good government nonprofit has been conducting national surveys on the public’s view of the federal government since 2021. Its most recent data comes from a nationally representative survey of 1,000 U.S. adults performed between March 31 and April 5.

While the percentage of respondents who said they trust civil servants did decrease to 44% from 49% last year, the Partnership noted that that statistic is higher than the 27% who reported trusting the federal government in 2026.

Researchers, however, emphasized that the shares of people who agreed that most civil servants are committed to helping people “like me” and are competent have surged to record highs, largely due to increases in the sentiments among Republicans and independents.

This year, 65% of respondents said that “most civil servants are competent,” with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agreeing.

“Since 2021, far more people agreed that civil servants are competent than disagreed — often by a ratio of more than two-to-one,” the researchers wrote. “Now, that number is the highest it has been since the Partnership started the yearly surveys.”

Likewise, the percentage who agreed that “most civil servants are committed to helping people like me” went from 56% in 2025 to 61% this year.

“The increase was particularly notable among Republicans — who increased from 52% last year to 63% now — and independents, who increased from 31% to 48%,” the researchers wrote. “In fact, the view that civil servants are committed workers has risen in each of the last four years the Partnership has conducted surveys.”

The good government group argued that there are likely several different reasons for these results.

“There's obviously been a lot of attention on the federal workforce over the past two years, particularly because of the cuts made by the current administration,” said Paul Hitlin, a senior research manager at the Partnership, during a webinar on the survey data Wednesday. “It's very possible that people have learned more about civil servants and what they do and think a little more highly of them. It is [also] possible that some people think that less effective civil servants have been removed from the government.”

During the webinar, Hitlin also highlighted survey data from April showing that 64% of respondents said “the management of the federal government is headed in the wrong direction.”

Overall, trust in the federal government decreased six points from last year to 27%. This statistic has never surpassed 35% in any of the Partnership’s surveys.

“It goes up and down a little bit, but generally a third or less of the country say they trust the federal government,” Hitlin said. “That's obviously a major challenge.”

Additionally, 49% of respondents agreed that their experiences with the federal government (e.g. applying for a passport, receiving veterans benefits) have been mostly positive compared with 38% who disagreed. But a breakdown of that data by political affiliation shows a partisan gap that changes depending on who the occupant of the White House is.

In 2024, 69% of Democratic respondents said their experiences with the federal government were mostly positive compared with 41% currently. In contrast, the percentage of Republican participants who agreed with that sentiment increased from 31% to 62% over the same period.

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FAA administrator defends withholding part of ATC pay raise

Erich Wagner — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:49:00 -0400

Democrats on a House spending panel had pointed questions last week for Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford over his decision to withhold a portion of a pay raise for air traffic controllers that Congress enacted earlier this year.

Earlier this year, Congress set aside $140 million in appropriations to fund a 3.8% pay raise for federal air traffic controllers, enacted as part of the deal to end the 76-day shutdown of the Homeland Security Department. But to date, Bedford has only OKed the dispersion for a 1% pay raise, arguing that the workforce must adopt new efficiencies in order to “unlock” the rest.

Bedford has justified his position by noting that the funding law authorizing the 3.8% pay increase grants him “sole discretion” to implement the raise, subject to the implementation of improvements in “workforce scheduling, staffing utilization and other operational efficiencies.”

Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies pressed Bedford on that decision during an FAA oversight hearing last week.

“Part of the way we tried to address the staffing issues was with a 3.8% raise, but they’re getting 1%,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill. “This can’t supercharge the plan to dramatically increase [staffing], I would see it’s discouraged. For someone who wants to do this or currently does this, it shows a lack of concern about the stress they’re under, financial and otherwise. Why hasn’t it happened yet? Why haven’t we given them this pay raise that we voted for?”

Bedford noted that in addition to the 1% raise, air traffic controllers received a “contractual” 1.6% raise, an apparent reference to their union contract, and said he was following Congress’ instructions.

“Let’s be clear, I have the utmost respect for ATCs; I value the work they do, and as a pilot myself, I rely on them,” he said. “I’m grateful we have them up there and we are supercharging the hiring . . . I could quote the statute, but Congress asked me to look for ways to improve staffing efficiency. That’s what you asked me to do, and if we could get it, then we would do the 2.8% [raise] as part of that. But we have not been able to.”

At issue are statistics indicating that the average time an ATC is actively managing air traffic per shift has fallen from more than five hours per shift 15 years ago to roughly four hours per shift today, Bedford argued.

“That’s not to say that they aren’t doing work, we just don’t know exactly what that work is because we don’t punch time cards, per se,” Bedford said. “But we can tell with the data we have that 15 years ago we were operating many more hours ‘on desk’ than today . . . We’re asking questions and what we’re seeing are schedules that are very inefficient.”

But Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., said air traffic controllers are already stretched too thin. An irony of the FAA’s push to hire thousands more ATCs is that training those new hires adds even more to employees’ workloads, at least in the short term.

“Is it your contention that you don’t have operational efficiency while you have understaffed, overworked individuals who are responsible for the safety of air traffic,” she asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“I listen to the data,” Bedford said. “I know you’re listening to a lot of anecdotal information, but the data will tell something totally different.”

“You may look at data, but I listen to people,” Watson-Coleman said. “If I hear consistently that the people that we as Congress are supposed to protect are being negatively impacted, that the people responsible for the safety of our airways are depressed and overworked and have mental health issues that aren’t being addressed properly, I listen to that and I recognize it as more than just anecdotal.”

Later, Bedford touted the more than 4,000 new hires the agency has made in the last 18 months but expressed frustrations at improving staffing levels in the New York region.

“There’s a lot of work between hiring and then training someone before they can actually dispatch traffic,” he said. “There’s another fact of whether we can get them to New York. That’s the most difficult place in the national aviation system to staff. I’m not sure why, but we’ve got to figure that out.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., the panel’s ranking member, said he had a different recollection of Congress’ intent behind the pay raise language.

“I’ve been here three decades, but before that I spent three decades as a manager of governmental entities,” he said. “As I read the legislation on the pay raise, the intent was to put air traffic controllers on par with law enforcement. That was the intent of the 3.8%. The discretion that was given to you, I think, was with then improving the environment [they work in]. And I suspect that the reason you may be having trouble getting people to work up in New York is because of their pay.”

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OPM uses conservative influencers on college tour to recruit young workers

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:48:35 -0400

Updated at 11:10 a.m. ET Sept. 22

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor is in the midst of a college tour to recruit early-career workers into the federal government, which is one of his top priorities. The underrepresentation of younger people in the civil service is a longstanding issue that worsened over President Donald Trump’s first year in office, as many new agency staffers lost their jobs during the mass firing of employees who were still in their probationary periods.

Several of Kupor’s stops so far, however, have featured conservative figures who don’t have experience working for the government.

For example, on Thursday, Kupor is visiting the University of Austin in Texas. The college, which was founded by right-leaning individuals and started its first academic year in 2024, is not yet accredited; although, the state has authorized it to award bachelor’s degrees in liberal studies. According to its website, the school is completely donor-funded and does not charge tuition to its roughly 150 students.

Kupor will share the stage with Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire GOP donor who served as the first chairman of the University of Austin and co-founded several companies, including Palantir. The event is hosted by The David Network, which describes itself as “a community of over 5,000 conservative students, alumni and professionals who drive change in America’s leading institutions and industries.”

Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., co-chair and founder of the Federal Workforce Caucus, criticized Kupor’s college tour in a statement to Government Executive, particularly over Lonsdale’s planned appearance.

“The federal government and OPM desperately need to improve the recruitment and retention of early career talent,” he said. “Sadly, [Kupor is] more interested in hanging out with billionaire ideologues than he is in rebuilding the federal workforce that Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency have decimated.”

OPM spokeswoman Kiki Nyoh, on the other hand, said in response to a request for comment that: “This visit is about one thing: showing students that public service is an opportunity to serve their country, build a meaningful career, and help shape the future of government. We welcome the opportunity to have that conversation with students at UATX and campuses across the country.”

Kupor’s first stop on his college tour was at the University of Florida on Sept. 15, where he had a fireside chat with right-wing commentator Benny Johnson. In some of Johnson’s recent videos, he muses if Trump is using alien technology in Iran and bemoans the decreased percentage of white people in Texas.

The student newspaper for the school, which has more than 60,000 students, reported that about 60 people attended the event with Kupor and Johnson.

Director @skupor on the two key motivators for serving in the federal government @bennyjohnson pic.twitter.com/2QOVF13eJp
— U.S. Office of Personnel Management (@USOPM) September 18, 2026

Earlier this year, a video created as part of the launch of OPM’s Early Career Talent Network featured country singer Kid Rock, a Trump supporter whose peak popularity was in the 2000s.

Trump has removed civil service job protections for about 8,000 agency positions by placing them in a job category called Schedule Policy/Career. Critics contend that the new classification is an attempt to install more people in government based on alignment with the administration rather than merit.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Schedule P/C affects about 8,000 agency staffers. It affects about 8,000 federal positions.

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NASA employees: EEOC committed ‘flagrant distortions’ to decertify class complaint

Erich Wagner — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:35:36 -0400

A group of National Aeronautics and Space Administration employees on Thursday challenged the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s decision last month to strip them of class-action status in a long-running discrimination case, accusing the commission’s Republican majority of committing “flagrant distortions” of the facts and law.

In 2013, NASA workers filed a class action complaint with EEOC, alleging that the agency’s performance appraisal system systematically advantaged white employees and disadvantaged Black and Asian-American workers. Due to delays on EEOC’s part, an administrative judge did not certify the class until 2022, over NASA’s objection.

But in a decision last month, the Republican majority atop the EEOC voted 2-1 to decertify the class and, in an unusual step, ruled in NASA’s favor on the merits of class agents’ individual complaints, rather than remand the case back to the administrative judge. Weeks later, EEOC officials cited it and other long-delayed cases as part of their argument for ending class action cases in the federal sector entirely and removing federal workers’ right to request a hearing before a judge in cases alleging discrimination.

On Thursday, complainants in the case filed a motion asking EEOC to reconsider its decision, a necessary step before appealing the decision in federal circuit court. Though they missed the 30-day deadline to make such a motion, they said that is because EEOC failed to inform them of its ruling.

The motion alleges that EEOC’s decision relied on a jaundiced view of both the underlying facts in the case and federal civil rights law.

“This type of radical change in established legal procedures, achieved partly through distorted depictions of the arguments and evidence in the case, undermines the rule of law, which is rooted in principles of stability, fairness and civil justice,” attorneys for the complainants wrote. “While reconsideration is rarely granted, it is imperative in this case.”

EEOC’s August decision summarizes the NASA employees’ complaint as alleging that judging employees’ performance based upon teamwork and communication creates a disparate impact negatively impacting Black and Asian-American employees’ performance ratings. The Trump administration has separately staked out the position that disparate impact liability is unconstitutional.

“Specifically, class agents allege the ‘communication’ and ‘collaboration and teamwork’ critical elements—which are included in every employee’s performance plan—led to disparate outcomes for African-American and Asian-American employees compared to their white peers,” EEOC wrote. “Class agents attribute these disparate outcomes to the fact that the performance system relies extensively on a frontline supervisor’s subjective discretion to score these elements.”

But the complainants said that was just one of six interrelated flaws in the performance appraisal system, and EEOC declined to address the others.

“Class agents in no way elevated the fourth [Employee Performance Communication System] flaw as more important than the other five,” the NASA workers’ motion states. “Yet the ‘Facts’ section of the decision misleadingly singles it out . . . Then the discussion of EPCS in the analysis section again focuses on the standards for communication and teamwork. The decision briefly mentions only one of the other six identified flaws; it entirely ignores the other four.”

They also took issue with the commission’s decision to decide the underlying merits of the case, despite not providing the parties with an opportunity to submit legal briefs.

“Without input from the parties, the commission erroneously concludes that ‘the agency’s practices are undisputedly job-related and consistent with business necessity’ and that ‘class members have not, and cannot, demonstrate a viable alternative to the challenged employment practice,’” the complainants wrote. “[But] class agents do not challenge that supervisory discretion is necessary and appropriate in EPCS. Instead, they challenge the level of discretion that NASA gives supervisors and contend that viable alternatives would reduce that discretion while meeting NASA’s need to evaluate and improve performance.”

For example, while NASA advises supervisors to write “standards” for employees at the start of the year that are “SMART”—specific, measurable, aggressive yet achievable, results-oriented, and time-based—examples that NASA provides to supervisors are not in that format. The complainants argued the agency could correct this by changing the examples it provides to supervisors, improving training more broadly, or engaging in targeted training for supervisors whose standards write-ups are not in SMART format.

In a statement last month, the EEOC’s lone Democratically appointed commissioner, Kalpana Kotagal decried her colleagues’ decision to decertify classes in this case and two others and suggested they were pretextual in nature.

“These decisions break with these longstanding agency goals by making it harder for federal employees to pursue class claims and get relief in the class complaint process,” Kotagal said. “Shockingly, the commission goes out of its way to decertify classes in decades-old cases, or to resolve questions not before the agency. Unfortunately, the outcome of these decisions feels predetermined: to make it harder for workers to challenge systemic discrimination and vindicate their civil rights.”

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Judge halts ‘favorite EO’ question on federal job applications

Erich Wagner — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:39:45 -0400

A federal judge in Massachusetts issued a decision Friday halting federal agencies from asking job applicants about their favorite Trump administration initiative, concluding the essay question likely violated jobseekers’ First Amendment rights.

The case dates back to the Office of Personnel Management’s issuance of the Merit Hiring Plan, which asserted greater engagement in the hiring process by political appointees and introduced four essay questions to most federal job applications, in May 2025. The third question asked jobseekers how they would advance the president’s policies and asked for an example of an executive order or initiative “significant to” them.

In U.S. District Judge George O’Toole’s long-awaited ruling, he focused on a sworn declaration of a federal employee and member of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of three unions suing to block the question’s deployment, who said she felt compelled to provide an answer contrary to her personal views for fear that not answering—or answering honestly—would “hurt her application.”

“The plain language of Question Three calls for the applicant’s personal views on a political topic, and directly links that personal view to the duties of the desired civil service job,” O’Toole wrote. “Indeed, the defendants implicitly recognize the reasonableness of such an interpretation insofar as the [Merit Hiring Plan] guidance states that answers to Question Three and the other free-form essay questions should not be used as ‘an ideological litmus test.’ Notably, as far as the court can discern from the present record, the limitation stated in the MHP guidance does not appear in the text of Question Three as it is presented to civil service applicants.”

Attorneys for the Trump administration had sought to argue that O’Toole lacked jurisdiction to hear the case; instead, the unions or their members should have exhausted administrative processes before either the Federal Labor Relations Authority or the Merit Systems Protection Board, then appeal those decisions in federal circuit court.

But the judge said the unions’ constitutional claims were “wholly collateral” to those review schemes, and noted that the alleged First Amendment violations occurred regardless of the outcome of a hiring decision.

“[The unions] do not, however, seek to remedy an identified personnel decision against any one of their members,” O’Toole wrote. “Put another way, there is no ‘personnel practice’ at issue. In fact, under the plaintiffs’ theory, even a civil service employee who receives a promotion would suffer a constitutionally based injury alleged if faced with Question Three when completing the relevant application.”

O’Toole issued a stay in the case, requiring agencies to cease asking applicants for every federal job GS-5 and above the favorite EO question at least until the conclusion of litigation. But he found that he could not issue a preliminary injunction blocking agencies from considering answers to the question that they had already received from job applicants, for the same reason.

“The requested injunction would thus effectively restrain the defendants’ conduct when reaching hiring decisions in individual cases,” he wrote. “The plaintiffs, however, repeatedly emphasize that this dispute does not concern individual personnel decisions involving their members. Indeed, the plaintiffs contend that the challenged question causes their members’ constitutional injuries regardless of any ensuing personnel decision. Accordingly, the requested injunction would not redress the injuries alleged.”

Union leaders, alongside Democracy Forward, which helped represent them alongside Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP in the case, applauded Friday’s decision.

“Requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service, and we are pleased the judge has put an immediate stop to the administration’s loyalty question,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley. “Federal employees should be hired based solely on their ability to perform the job—not their allegiance to any particular administration.”

“For more than a century, civil servants have been hired based on their merits, not based on allegiance to a partisan political agenda,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward. “Today’s decision—stopping the Trump-Vance administration’s required loyalty question for public servants—reaffirms the importance of a nonpartisan civilian workforce that serves the American people.”

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How 'Star Trek' inspired generations of NASA scientists and astronauts

Deana L. Weibel, The Conversation — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“Star Trek” began as a television series but grew into a cultural phenomenon.

When it premiered in 1966, no one could have predicted that it would lead to more than a dozen spinoff shows, more than a dozen movies and one of the most enduring fandoms in popular culture.

“Star Trek” is also unusual for its close connections to NASA, both in its storylines and in the real world. Decades of “Star Trek” adventures have ignited a love of spaceflight across generations, inspiring many who now work as space professionals.

I’m a cultural anthropologist who studies why people work in space exploration. I’ve interviewed astronomers, engineers, flight surgeons and astronauts. Although I focus more on science fact than science fiction, I’ve noticed in my interviews how much the two threads intertwine.

Because of this, I found myself at a “Star Trek” convention in early August 2026, just ahead of the show’s 60th anniversary on Sept. 8. The convention participants included people of widely different ages, appearances and identities. I was struck by just how much those gathered reflected the series’ values.

When NASA met Star Trek

In the original series, the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, came up with a philosophy held by the Vulcan people. He called it IDIC: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It suggests that an ideal society is made up of many different types, all working together.

It represented Roddenberry’s rejection of conformity. It also explained why the Enterprise crew included a Russian alongside Americans, and Black, Japanese and female characters all in positions of responsibility and authority. While many ordinary viewers absorbed “Star Trek’s” lessons of camaraderie and acceptance, those involved in real space exploration also took notice.

Roddenberry established relationships with NASA personnel in the early days of his series. NASA provided photographs of planetary bodies and advice about the realities of spaceflight, as well as stock footage and access to certain NASA facilities.

Leonard Nimoy, who played the popular character Mr. Spock, was even brought to the National Space Club’s Goddard Memorial Dinner in 1967 as a special guest. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey gave the keynote speech. Afterward, though, it was Nimoy, not Humphrey, who found himself surrounded by the club’s members, including NASA employees, aerospace engineers, members of the military and government officials, all eager to meet the actor portraying the starship Enterprise’s first officer.

The relationship between NASA and “Star Trek” benefited the show by legitimizing the series. It also helped NASA by publicizing its work and depicting a positive future where its efforts to land on the Moon would eventually lead to visits to distant worlds – and amazing scientific advances like the show’s transporter and warp drive.

The connection between the space show and space agency was reflected in NASA’s decision to name its first space shuttle Enterprise, after some encouragement from the “Star Trek” fan community.

Inspiring astronauts

In 1977, actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Uhura, was hired to recruit for NASA. The space agency had expanded its pool of astronauts to include scientists and other “mission specialists.” For the first time, an astronaut no longer needed to be a pilot to participate in a space mission.

NASA selected its first Black astronaut candidates and its first female astronaut candidates in 1978. While this move toward inclusivity may not have been directly influenced by infinite diversity in infinite combinations, it was compatible with it. “Star Trek” inspired many of NASA’s future employees. In interviews for my book “The Ultraview Effect,” a quarter of the space professionals I spoke with mentioned “Star Trek” as an influence.

An Apollo astronaut I interviewed, for instance, said he believed humans would eventually “be able to go anywhere in the universe, just like ‘Star Trek.’”

A young engineer who had grown up in the 1990s told me his motivation came from the “opening line of ‘Star Trek’… to explore strange new worlds.”

A space shuttle mission specialist emphasized Roddenberry’s decision to make the starship crew multicultural, explaining: “Today I look at the diversity of it … he was setting the stage back when it wasn’t acceptable [in order] to be acceptable!”

A changing future

That influence has accompanied a changing astronaut corps.

Both the 2025 astronaut class, which for the first time included more women than men, and the crew of Artemis II, which sent the first woman, first Black astronaut and first Canadian on a lunar mission, resemble the future that “Star Trek” imagined.

The “Star Trek” fans at the convention I attended were even more diverse. It was clear to me that Roddenberry’s “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” isn’t just a concept from the series, but something that has become a defining value of contemporary Trek fandom.

One such fan, Bjo Trimble, holds special status. She is credited with “saving ‘Star Trek’” when the series was almost canceled in 1968 after two seasons. Wearing a rainbow “IDIC” pin, she signed autographs at the SyFy Sistas booth, where T-shirts featuring Black “Star Trek” icons such as Uhura and Benjamin Sisko were on display.

However, with the Trump administration’s recent orders to dismantle all of NASA’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs and policies, institutional support for “Star Trek’s” vision of acceptance and inclusivity, which flourishes in its fan base, is being undone. This rollback occurred just as NASA’s crews were reaching new milestones in representing the diverse future that “Star Trek” has encouraged for decades.

Sixty years later, some of the diverse future that “Star Trek” imagined has become part of everyday spaceflight. Other parts of that ideal remain unfinished.

Deana L. Weibel, Professor of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University

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

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What does 9/11 mean for young public servants who hardly remember it?

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:59:00 -0400

Many of the articles about the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, will likely begin with the writer sharing where they were that fateful Tuesday morning. I can’t start this piece that way, however, because I don’t remember anything from that day. Because I was 4.

While there was a time when the only segment of the population that would have had little to no memory of the attacks was young children, I was born the same year as former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., the youngest member of Congress.

More people who don’t remember 9/11, or were born after it, will continue to enter government service. Nevertheless, three individuals who were young during the attacks — including a federal employee, a veteran and one who worked in national security – said that 9/11 and its aftermath continue to impact the next generation of public servants.

“I feel guilty I don't remember”

While I don’t remember anything from Sept. 11, 2001, I do have memories from the following days — specifically a tribute to the victims on local news and my parents talking about the attacks with their friends at church. Given how unreliable childhood memories can be, however, I’m not confident in my recollections.

Likewise, Megan Anderson — who previously worked for the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a membership organization for individuals who work in those fields — who was 5 on 9/11 is “pretty confident” she remembers her grandmother picking her up at school.

“I love my grandmother, so I was very excited to see her,” she recalled.

Anderson said that she didn’t see her dad, who worked for the FBI and responded to the Pentagon, for about two weeks after the attack. She said that visits to the building with her dad over the years helped her to make sense of 9/11.

“The big thing that I remember about seeing the Pentagon is my dad walking me through what happened from his perspective,” she said.

Taylor Wensel, the president of a Veterans Affairs Department union local in Utah and a coordinator for the American Federation of Government Employees committee for young members, was also 5 on 9/11 but has no memory of the attacks.

“I even asked my mom a couple times because people bring up what they remember,” Wensel said. “My mom was like, ‘Maybe you were playing with your Barbies.’ I was a Barbie kid, so I was probably playing with Barbies in the basement.”

Every year on 9/11, Wensel watches documentaries about the attacks.

“I feel guilty I don't remember. I don't have my own memories, so I have what's called collective memory, so I'm learning off of other people,” she said. “It was a big thing that happened in my timeline. I looked at my kid, and I said, ‘Hey, you're learning this, but I lived during it, but I don't remember it.’”

“There are people who are innately called to serve…and there are events that make that happen a lot quicker”

When I first pitched this article to my editor, who covered 9/11 as a reporter for Government Executive, she said that the attack initially motivated many people to serve in the federal government. It also led to an uptick in military enlistments.

Frank Lopez — an Air Force veteran who is currently attending Harvard Kennedy School through a fellowship for public servants – remembers being one of the last kids in his second grade class to be picked up on 9/11.

“I think by mistake, looking back now, [my teachers] turned on the television, and I actually saw the planes hit the towers,” he said. “I couldn't really at the time understand what was happening, but I had that feeling that something terrible had gone on.”

As an immigrant from Cuba, Lopez said that he always had a desire to give back to the U.S. but that 9/11 likely “made that happen a lot sooner.”

“I believe that there are people who are innately called to serve. I think that there are events that make that happen a lot quicker,” he said. “9/11 was a culminating event, and it did spur that spirit inside of me.”

Similarly, Anderson said that 9/11 influenced her interest in counterintelligence and counterterrorism work. She also said that the attacks motivated her younger brother, who was 3 in 2001, to join the Marines.

Even Wensel, who has no memory of 9/11, said that it probably impacted her desire to enlist in the military, which was her plan before she became pregnant.

“I think it pushed me to want to protect and to not see that happen — I know it probably won't happen here in Utah — but I don't want to see [9/11] happen again anywhere,” she said.

Still, Wensel sees a connection between her interest in the military and her current role at the VA.

“I do help veterans now, so I get the flip side that they protected me and now I help them in return, which is a nice turnover to me wanting to be a Marine,” she said.

“9/11 was just like a constant”

Even though the people I interviewed have limited recollections of the day itself, they said events that occurred as a result of 9/11 stand out in their memories.

“We launched the war in Iraq, and I remember the local casualties up on the nightly news,” Lopez said. “That stayed with me as a kid. I'd always wonder ‘Why are these people in the situation and why are they here on this television screen and like what's happening?’”

Wensel recalled that her neighbor’s dad was deployed.

“They would send him books and tape recorders, so he could read the books, and then the kids could listen to him,” she said. “That's how I correlated it. We were attacked, and now my neighbor doesn't get to see her dad.”

Anderson said that she woke her dad up in the middle of the night to tell him that Osama bin Laden was killed.

“That was actually something we talked about at school. It was a manhunt like ‘We don't know where he is’ and ‘Oh maybe we found his compound,” she recalled. “That was a really big topic because a lot of people in the area worked for the government, so 9/11 was just like a constant.”

I also remember when bin Laden was killed in 2011, but it’s because President Barack Obama’s announcement interrupted a new episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” so I missed which contestant was fired by host Donald Trump.

Lopez, who was deployed to Kuwait and Syria from 2019 through 2020, also brought up his memories of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, specifically the suicide bombing at a Kabul airport that killed more than 180 people, including 13 U.S. service members.

“I remember vividly sitting around the screen with my guys and gals, and we were talking through how centralizing forces within one airport and over the mission planning that would go behind an operation like that in order to get these folks out of there. We war-gamed it basically, and we all determined that what would happen is X potentially, like there's a high probability it would happen,” he said. “Sure enough, a day or two after, that same thing happened. I thought that was a complete — complete — operational failure, at least the aspect of those folks getting killed, I think it could have been avoided.”

Generational differences

Given that the people I interviewed were all young when 9/11 happened, I asked them if there are other national tragedies that stood out more clearly in their memories. Some of the events that they mentioned included Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wensel also brought up a bomb threat at her school that was connected with a belief that the world was going to end on Dec. 21, 2012, based on the ancient Mayan calendar.

“I remember the lockdown and the cop standing by the door all puffed up. He was a pretty big guy, but short, so it was pretty funny seeing him stock up,” she said. “I remember my parents texting us asking, ‘How's the day going? If anything weird's going on, you guys can leave whenever you want,’ which my parents never said that any other day.”

While many of the individuals entering public service today were born pre-9/11, they may only remember a post-9/11 world. As such, a large-scale terrorist attack occurring on U.S. soil, or a school being put into lockdown over a conspiracy theory, is not a wholly unexpected event for them.

“Younger generations get digged at because we’ve generally had pretty decent lives, but we’ve had all these big life events that have caused little things to change,” Wensel said. “My parents will be like ‘Oh, you guys had it easy.’ I beg to differ. I’d rather go through another 2008 recession if it can prevent more school shootings.”

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Bill would let federal whistleblowers sue if disciplined over violating NDAs

Erich Wagner — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:50:18 -0400

A pair of House Democrats introduced legislation last month that seeks to strengthen federal whistleblower protections in the face of the Trump administration’s effort to instill a standard non-disclosure agreement for use across government.

The Federal Worker Protection Act (H.R. 10198), introduced by Reps. Eugene Vindman and Suhas Subramanyam, both D-Va., would require every NDA issued by federal agencies to include a statement of federal employees’ whistleblower protection rights adjacent to each signature line in the document. Agencies would need preclearance from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel before deploying an NDA, and OSC would create a public repository of every NDA in use.

In the biggest departure from existing policy, federal employes removed or disciplined for violating an NDA in connection with a protected disclosure could sue their employing agency directly in federal district court. Currently, a whistleblower must go to their agency’s inspector general or OSC and then the Merit Systems Protection Board before appealing to a federal circuit court.

The Democrats’ legislation comes as the Trump administration weighs a proposal to institute a standardized governmentwide NDA for federal workers to sign, and shortly after the Office of Personnel Management in July finalized regulations granting itself the ability to remove federal workers for violating or refusing to comply with an NDA or other instances of “post-employment conduct” via suitability decisions, which bypass most of federal workers’ appeal rights.

And the National Security Agency’s inspector general reported last month that most of that agency’s NDAs already do not sufficiently inform employees of their whistleblower rights.

Allen Shoikhetbrod, managing partner at federal employment law firm Tully Rinckey PLLC, noted that bill’s proposed private right of action could open agencies up to liability unseen in most administratively channeled federal employment cases.

“It potentially creates an explicit private right to bring action in federal court to seek an injunction, damages, attorney fees and civil penalties for violations,” he said. “A judge could void noncompliant NDAs, or even just void a provision that would make them unenforceable altogether.”

In a statement, Vindman, whose brother Alexander Vindman’s whistleblowing led to President Trump’s first impeachment, warned the proposed NDA would have a chilling effect on the federal workforce.

“Federal workers should never have to choose between doing their jobs and speaking up when they see something wrong,” he said. “Last fall, I hosted a town hall for federal employees, where I heard directly from them about the fear and pressure they were facing. These are people who have dedicated their careers to serving their country and our communities. This legislation makes clear that public servants who speak up will not face politically motivated retaliation.”

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Don’t let federal agencies judge their own discrimination cases

Kendrick Roberson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400

For more than two million federal workers nationwide, the Trump administration has proposed taking away their automatic right to request a hearing before an impartial judge when they face workplace discrimination. If adopted, the proposal would make it harder for federal workers to challenge discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was expressly designed to protect workers from discrimination.

Specifically, the proposed rules would eliminate federal and D.C. government employees' automatic right to have their discrimination cases reviewed by a neutral administrative judge. Instead, the worker's employer would initially decide whether discrimination occurred. The worker could then appeal that decision to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and request that the commission refer the case to an administrative judge, but such a referral would be discretionary.

That change would create a clear conflict of interest. The same agency accused of discrimination would investigate the complaint and initially decide whether discrimination occurred.

The impartial hearing is crucial.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed to protect people in the United States from discrimination, and Title VII of that law specifically protects workers from discrimination. To enforce these protections, the law also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose stated mission is to "eliminate unlawful employment discrimination."

For many decades, federal workers who faced discrimination in the workplace have been able to appeal to the EEOC for relief and justice. For the past 40 years, they have had the right to request a hearing before an impartial administrative judge if they believed they were discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, disability, age, religion, genetic information or retaliation. The Trump administration seeks to end that automatic right and instead make an administrative judge hearing available only when the EEOC determines that such proceedings are necessary or efficient to resolve an appeal.

Under the current process, when a federal worker claims they faced discrimination in the workplace, the worker's employer is responsible for receiving the discrimination complaint, investigating it within 180 days and creating a report of the investigation.

If the employer is then in charge of deciding whether discrimination occurred and whether the employer will owe the worker restitution, federal workers are subject to a situation where the foxes are guarding the henhouse. The employer has a strong interest in deciding that the worker was not subject to discrimination. In FY 2021, agencies issued 5,604 merit final agency decisions that did not involve an administrative judge, and 109 of those decisions found discrimination. By comparison, 3,821 final orders implementing administrative judge decisions included 112 findings of discrimination.

This is why, in most circumstances, rather than have the employer make the decision, employees have a better opportunity to achieve justice by exercising their right to request a fair hearing before an administrative judge, which would be their first time engaging with a neutral party.

For example, we often represent employees who file discrimination complaints because their immediate supervisor sexually harassed them repeatedly and upper-level management knew and did nothing about it. Under the proposed rule, an agency would investigate the complaint and issue a final decision before the employee could appeal to the EEOC. The employee could request that the EEOC refer the case to an administrative judge, but the commission would decide whether such proceedings were necessary or efficient to resolve the appeal.

That means the agency that already controls the complaint and investigation process would initially decide whether the supervisor's actions constituted sexual harassment, whether management took appropriate action to stop the harassment, whether the employee is entitled to damages and, if so, the amount of those damages.

The historical data from the FY 2021 Annual Report also shows that administrative judge decisions accounted for a substantial share of findings of discrimination. Of the 221 findings of discrimination reported that year, 112 came through final orders implementing administrative judge decisions, while 109 came through final agency decisions without an administrative judge.

Furthermore, there are numerous instances when the federal agency that employs the worker does not complete its discrimination investigation within the 180-day deadline. Under the current process, when the investigation is complete, the employee can request a hearing before an EEOC administrative judge. The FY 2021 EEOC report found that agencies completed 86.4% of investigations on time, meaning thousands were not completed within 180 days.

We have represented many cases at the Department of Veterans Affairs where nurses with physical disabilities were fired or suspended for taking the same actions as employees without disabilities who were not disciplined. In many of these cases, the VA has blown through its deadlines to investigate the discrimination, and it was only through our ability to request intervention from a neutral judge that we were able to have the claims fully investigated and win relief for these nurses.

The proposed changes would remove that automatic avenue for these nurses and instead require them to wait for the agency to conduct its investigation and issue a final decision before appealing to the EEOC. Meanwhile, the nurses could be out of work and without a paycheck.

If this rule becomes final, there would also be significant practical and financial burdens placed on workers who allege discrimination. Court cases are complex and often involve significant court and attorney's fees. By taking away the automatic right to a hearing before an EEOC administrative judge and making such proceedings discretionary on appeal, the proposed rule's real effect would be to discourage employees from pursuing claims of illegal discrimination and make it harder for those who do move forward to challenge that discrimination successfully.

Every federal worker could be affected by this rule change, as the EEOC hearing process helps protect workers from discrimination as Congress intended. Although the proposed changes are currently targeted at federal and D.C. government employees, the rights of all workers are at stake and are under attack. This Trump administration has shown a malignant hunger to dismantle the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and this new proposed rule is a big, vicious bite.

Kendrick Roberson is a national vice president for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 820,000 federal employees. He leads AFGE's civil rights department, which represents members in discrimination cases through its Women and Fair Practices departments. Roberson is also a professor of labor at UCLA.

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For federal executives, retirement means losing more than a job

Joy Levin — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:08:14 -0400

Career Senior Executive Service ranks have dropped nearly 30% since the end of the Biden administration, falling from 8,127 members to 5,837 by January 2026, the lowest level on record since at least 1998. Notably, the Partnership for Public Service warned in a March report that the shrinking career SES will mean a real loss of institutional knowledge and operational continuity across agencies. Furthermore, roughly 105,000 federal employees are projected to retire across all grades by the end of 2026.

Agencies and OPM extensively cover the financial impacts of this for retirees in FERS annuity calculations, TSP withdrawal strategy, and FEHB and Medicare coordination. What gets far less structured attention is whether the executives behind those numbers are personally ready for what comes after the title, the clearance and the mission disappear. The same retirement wave carries costs for the agencies losing this expertise, and agencies have preparation of their own to do.

What makes this different for federal executives

For a career GS-15 or SES executive, that gap works differently than for a private-sector retiree. A corporate title can often be replaced with consulting work or a board seat. A federal clearance typically cannot be carried forward without a new sponsor, and a mission-driven identity built over two or three decades of public service has no clean private-sector substitute.

A departing federal executive gives up more than a general sense of loss: signature authority over budgets and programs, standing relationships with the GS-14s and 15s they were mentoring toward the SES track, and a clearance that, until it lapses, still defines what rooms a person can be in.

What this means for Gen X/Generation Jones

Gen X and Generation Jones federal employees also have no experiential template for this: They are the first cohort retiring almost entirely under FERS rather than the older CSRS pension structure, and that timing carries implications for the federal agencies they are leaving, too, since this cohort is retiring into an SES bench that has shrunk by nearly a third in two years. Previous generations handed off to a peer who had come up through the same institutional culture. However, with political appointees now filling a large share of senior roles, the current wave increasingly hands off to a smaller, thinner circle of career colleagues, or to no one at all.

What federal executives can do

Federal executives approaching retirement can treat identity readiness as its own planning track, run on the same timeline as the benefits paperwork rather than after it. Four moves matter most.

First, map what the title actually provides, roughly 12 to 18 months out: Consider decision authority, access, daily structure and recognition. Decide which to rebuild deliberately. Retirement advice usually covers what to retire toward, but rarely what to retire with. SES executives leave with real skills and talents intact. Deciding which to keep using, and how, matters as much as deciding what to build next.
Second, run that mapping alongside the OPM retirement application rather than after it. Digital applications are averaging well over three months this year, and the full wait to a first annuity check often runs six to nine months, long enough that postponed identity work can sit untouched for most of a year.
Third, decide early whether cleared work is part of the plan. Transferring a clearance to a private-sector or consulting role generally has to be worked out before separation, not after.
Fourth, build the identity conversation into the benefits counseling session a spouse or partner often already attends, rather than scheduling it separately. Retirement changes the household's structure and belongs in that conversation.

What agencies can change

Agencies have leverage here, too:

Pre-retirement seminars can add a structured identity-transition module alongside the FERS and TSP content. A deeper approach, rather than a single slide or an optional webinar, gives both the executive and the agency a clearer transition to plan around.
Succession planning can build in a formal knowledge-transfer period, pairing a departing senior executive with a successor for the final several months, giving the departing executive a defined role until the end instead of a hard stop.
Structured retirement coaching support, in-house or external, can serve both sides of that handoff: a framework for the executive's identity readiness and better-documented knowledge transfer for the agency.
And HR leadership can start tracking identity-related retirement risk the way it already tracks eligibility and succession pipeline data on OPM's dashboard: Which senior leaders are eligible to retire, and which of them have no plan beyond the paperwork? None of this shows up on that dashboard today, which may be exactly why it has gone unaddressed.

Agencies have gotten very good at measuring who can retire and when. The open question is whether agencies, and the executives themselves, are equally prepared for what retirement actually asks of a person who has spent a career being the one with the clearance and the mission.

Joy Levin is a Certified Professional Retirement Coach and founder of Gen X Exec Encore. She spent nearly 30 years in market research before shifting her focus to executive transition coaching and works with Gen X and Generation Jones leaders, including federal executives, preparing for retirement.

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Former pardon atty calls MSPB ‘a dead end,’ sues for reinstatement

Erich Wagner — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:31:21 -0400

Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer sued the Trump administration Thursday, asserting that her 2025 firing on “Article II” grounds violated her First and Fifth amendment rights, as well as the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

Oyer, who served as a federal public defender for a decade prior to her appointment to pardon attorney in 2022, was removed from her career post in March 2025, shortly after refusing to issue a nonbinding recommendation that actor Mel Gibson’s right to own a firearm be restored despite his 2011 domestic violence conviction.

Her removal was one of the first in a string of so-called Article II firings at the Justice Department that eventually encompassed attorneys, prosecutors and immigration judges. In these cases, the department has elided the firing procedures and rules set forth by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, instead arguing that the president has constitutional authority to remove these employees at will.

Though Oyer filed an appeal with the Merit Systems Protection Board shortly after her firing last year, she has yet to receive meaningful movement toward a decision before the quasi-adjudicative agency. Last March, the MSPB relinquished jurisdiction of such cases, and in June, an MSPB administrative judge dismissed Oyer’s case without prejudice, a decision that means she must wait at least another six months before she may refile and longer to receive a decision.

“The MSPB has proved, however, to be a dead end,” the lawsuit states. “Despite filing her MSPB appeal more than 16 months ago, she has yet to receive any substantive review of her termination. Most recently, on June 2, 2026, the MSPB dismissed Ms. Oyer’s appeal without prejudice for a minimum of an additional six months (and likely far longer), sending her case to a further prolonged limbo.”

Although federal workers typically must exhaust their administrative avenue to appeal a personnel action before heading to federal circuit courts for judicial review, Oyer argued that the morass of seeking MSPB review, combined with her firing purportedly on constitutional grounds, rather than via the Civil Service Reform Act’s procedures, allow her to pursue her case before the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C.

Oyer and her attorneys also argued that even if administration officials can bypass statutory removal protections when they fire inferior officers under Article II of the Constitution, the Justice Department failed to follow its own policy governing such removals, as her firing was signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“With respect to its purported removal of Ms. Oyer, moreover, DOJ did not even use the procedures that DOJ itself maintains are necessary to effectuate a removal under Article II,” the lawsuit states. “That is because Ms. Oyer’s removal was signed only by the deputy attorney general. This distinction is significant because—on DOJ’s own telling—only the attorney general can wield the president’s Article II removal authority.”

Another case challenging the Justice Department’s Article II filings, Jackler v. MSPB, is set to go before the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for oral arguments in December.

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