Government Executive - Workforce

After reductions, VA chief says facilities can 'hire where they need and what they need'

Eric Katz — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:07:35 -0400

The Veterans Affairs Department can hire any employee it wants at any time, the head of the agency told lawmakers on Thursday as he sought to address concerns about staffing declines and new restrictions that have set ceilings on workforce levels.

No VA facility is facing constraints on bringing in new personnel, Secretary Doug Collins said, who once again stressed that previous hiring efforts outpaced demand for health care through the department. He made the comments despite VA placing staffing caps on each facility that led to the elimination of tens of thousands of vacant positions and were designed to add layers of review to be surpassed.

“We will hire every need that we have in the department,” Collins said before a panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Our hospitals have the complete autonomy to hire where they need and what they need going forward.”

Collins’ comments came following his push to reduce VA’s workforce by 30,000 employees last year and the subsequent vacancy eliminations. The reductions have raised some bipartisan concerns, though Collins has maintained that his department was overbloated and VA care has not suffered. Between 2019 and 2025, he said, VA’s workforce grew by 14% while its interactions with veterans increased by just 6%.

VA has put “baselines” into place that set staffing levels for each facility, as Government Executive first reported last year. VA components cannot surpass their high-level personnel caps without approval from the department’s human resources and finance offices. Still, Collins said after the hearing the baselines would not impact any hiring effort.

“They're [full-time equivalent] accounts that are assigned to each facility,” the secretary said. “Those FTE accounts are not in a position to keep anybody from being hired.”

One VA official said it is accurate that VA facilities have "autonomy to hire what they need," but must operate within certain boundaries. They cannot simply hire as many employees as they want, the official said, though they maintain flexibility. Facility leaders have been instructed to escalate anything that has an impact on care delivery and hiring of doctors and nurses is always supported.

After years of growth, VA saw a net decrease in both doctors and nurses in 2025. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., the top Democrat on the subcommittee that held Thursday’s hearing, noted that VA’s fiscal 2027 budget would see further reductions in both categories. He added that proposed increases in the department’s budget would disproportionately go toward private sector care rather than to offerings within VA’s system.

“We see growing demand for VA care, but we're not seeing here the request for the investments in clinical staff to reflect that,” Ossoff said.

Collins noted that VA has eight pilot programs underway to get new hires onboarded more quickly, including by allowing employees to begin working before they fully go through the vetting process. The department is looking to expand those pilots by the end of the year and is hopeful it can bring average time-to-hire to between 30 and 40 days. VA has already demonstrated progress on that front, Collins said.

He also requested lawmakers provide more flexibility on the top pay levels for VA doctors. Congress previously authorized the department to exceed the existing $400,000 pay ceiling for 300 employees, which VA is currently working on implementing. That represents just 1.5% of VA’s doctors, however, and Collins said lawmakers should instead choose five specialties and wave pay caps for all doctors within them.

“My spouse, I have three kids, and at Christmas, she made sure that every kid had the same number of presents to open,” Collins said, alluding to the “inequities” created by the limited number of pay cap waivers Congress created.

Collins acknowledged that VA plans to close a handful of its contract facilities this year, though he said those medical offices were not performing up to the department’s standards and veterans would be able to receive care in other areas.

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How an obscure federal agency threatens to upend union disputes

Erich Wagner — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:44:46 -0400

A small federal agency has taken unusual steps to interfere in federal employee unions’ ability to secure independent adjudicators to hash out disputes with agency management, though in recent days it appears to be backing down from that approach following pressure from advocates and arbitrators alike.

As the Trump administration has defended in court the legality of two 2025 executive orders that strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of its collective bargaining rights on national security grounds, its attorneys have frequently relied on the idea that unions could challenge the edicts’ validity as part of preexisting administrative disputes to support the idea that federal judges lack jurisdiction to hear the labor groups’ lawsuits.

“The government identified numerous avenues for unions to challenge the executive order’s validity before the [Federal Labor Relations Authority] and then on direct review in a court of appeals, and plaintiff fails to explain why those avenues are unavailable,” the government wrote in a legal brief last October. “Specifically, the government explained that plaintiff can file an unfair-labor-practice charge with the FLRA’s general counsel or raise such a claim through the grievance and arbitration procedures in the union’s collective bargaining agreements.”

But one of those touted avenues—arbitrated grievances—was temporarily closed for some unions earlier this month. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service issued new guidance last week stating that it would not appoint arbitrators to hear grievances at agencies impacted by the national security EOs without management’s assent. President Trump previously sought to eliminate FMCS entirely via executive order last year, but that effort petered out following multiple federal court orders blocking the agency's closure.

“When an agency invokes an executive order as a reason for non-participation during the arbitration panel selection process, the agency has revoked any actual or implied consent to participate in the proceedings,” wrote FMCS General Counsel Anna Davis, who simultaneously serves as acting head of the agency. “Without an agency’s consent, FMCS cannot continue the process of issuing an arbitration panel. Again, ‘FMCS has no power to . . . compel parties to arbitrate any issue.’”

But federal sector labor attorneys said that document amounts to a post hoc justification, issued only after the agency began mysteriously balking at assigning arbitrators in multiple cases earlier this month. Suzanne Summerlin, an independent attorney that represents unions, said in two separate cases, FMCS interrupted and delayed the arbitrator selection process over “threshold issues,” and in one case required her to submit a legal brief in support of appointing an arbitrator.

One case involved one of the agencies targeted by Trump in his union executive orders, despite the fact that a 1993 Federal Labor Relations Authority precedent requires agencies that have been recently exempted from federal sector labor law to continue to participate in preexisting grievance proceedings. The underlying collective bargaining agreement also allows either party to advance those proceedings unilaterally. In another case, FMCS demanded information about whether a bargaining unit was made up of “information management” employees, something that would make those worker ineligible for union representation, before allowing arbitration to proceed.

“It seems like they’re just trying to gum up the works and not let anyone get a grievance arbitration going,” Summerlin said. “It feels like a power grab by the political factions in these agencies, for sure.”

Ibidun Roberts, another independent labor attorney who works frequently with federal employee unions, described a similar scenario, in which the Veterans Affairs Department seemingly engaged in communication in which the Veterans Affairs Department privately requested that FMCS block the appointment of an arbitrator. She said the questions posed by FMCS in her and other attorneys’ recent experience for decades have been for arbitrators—or the FLRA, on appeal—to decide, not the mediation service.

“We don’t bargain in order for FMCS to make the decision, we do it so that an arbitrator will make them,” she said. “It was wrong for VA to even put them in that predicament, but it was also wrong for FMCS to take them up on it. The response should have been, ‘We don’t get involved.’”

Arbitrators, too, have taken notice. If FMCS moves forward with its efforts to take a more active role in the grievance process, it could impact their livelihood, as they are typically paid by the case.

“Several of our members, as well as some advocates, have brought this to the Academy's attention, and we are seeking clarity about the actual nature of the agency's actions, and the reasons for them,” Joshua Javits, a federal arbitrator and president of the National Academy of Arbitrators, told Government Executive.

Robert Tobias, distinguished practitioner in residence at American University’s Key Leadership Program and a former president of the National Treasury Employees Union, was aghast when he learned that FMCS was delaying the issuance of arbitrator panels.

“Oh my god,” he said. “This is supposed to be a ministerial process . . . Their job is only to ensure that the arbitrators who are on the list are competent to be arbitrators, that they have the requisite background, experience and qualifications to be arbitrators on the list. The job is to assign them when requested, and if either of the parties think that the arbitrator lacks qualifications, that’s for someone else to determine, not FMCS.”

But in at least one of these cases, FMCS appears to have backed away from its newly hands-on posture. Summerlin said she received an email from Davis on April 24 allowing arbitration to move forward. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

“Please be advised, in accordance with applicable statutes, regulations, authorities and published guidance, after FMCS has processed the panel request, FMCS will leave it to the parties as to how best to proceed,” Davis wrote.

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Feds that Trump fired without cause can take their appeals directly to federal court, judges say

Eric Katz — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:01:45 -0400

Federal employees fired without a stated cause can challenge that decision directly in federal court without first going to a separate panel designed for civil servants, two judges have ruled in decisions with potentially broad reaching impacts on the Trump administration’s efforts to more quickly dismiss certain workers.

Maurene Comey, a former career attorney in the Justice Department and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, won the initial decision on Tuesday in a case in which she is appealing her termination last year. Comey has suggested her firing was the direct result of her connection to her father, a longstanding target of President Trump who is also facing prosecution from the administration, or her perceived political beliefs. In a separate case earlier this month, a judge ruled his court was the proper forum for Mary Comans, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency official, to challenge her dismissal.

Comey and Comans are among a slew of employees who the Trump administration has dismissed with no stated reason, instead justifying them by arguing the moves were within the president’s scope of authority. Their termination notices suggested the actions were taken “pursuant to Article II of the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Justice has taken a particularly aggressive approach in dismissing career staff, beginning just hours after Trump took the oath of office when it fired personnel in the Executive Office of Immigration Review and elsewhere. It has continued to remove employees, including both Senior Executive Service staff and standard civil servants, without cause.

In Comey’s case, New York-based U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman dismissed the administration’s argument that she must take her case to the Merit Systems Protection Board as most federal workers must under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

“The Court concludes that Comey’s case does not fall within the purview of the CSRA’s scheme because she was fired pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, not pursuant to the CSRA itself,” Furman said. “Defendants’ sole reliance on the Constitution — rather than the removal provisions of the CSRA — places Comey’s case outside the universe of cases that Congress intended the MSPB to resolve.”

Trump has fired MSPB’s Democratic head, Cathy Harris, who is now challenging that dismissal before the Supreme Court. The board’s two remaining Republican members recently ruled that some federal employees fired using the Article II justification will no longer have appeal rights before MSPB.

The administration is asserting the employees it has fired are inferior officers under the Constitution and the president therefore has full control over their appointment and removal. Some legal observers have suggested Justice and other agencies are looking to broaden the population of employees it can fire on an at-will basis. The Trump administration has separately created a new classification of federal employees called Schedule Policy/Career, estimating it would allow agencies to fire around 50,000 workers in policy-setting roles at will.

In Comans case, the former FEMA chief financial officer fired after the administration alleged she misused federal dollars when authorizing funds to house migrants in hotels, Virginia-based District Judge Michael Nachmanoff said the terms of the dismissal made federal court the “mandatory” forum for a challenge. Nachmanoff similarly found that because FEMA circumvented civil service law in firing Comans, MSPB was not an appropriate place for her to challenge the decision. The judge dismissed her request for back pay and monetary damages, however.

The judge in neither Comans nor Comey’s cases has yet ruled on the merits of their appeals, which center on the administration improperly side-stepping due process requirements and unlawfully targeting them for political reasons.

Federal workers are typically not considered at-will and current statute requires that agencies provide notice, cause and an opportunity to rebut allegations before a firing can take place. Civil service protections date back more than a century and were most recently solidified in the CSRA. They have taken shape to prevent presidents from interfering with a career workforce of experts for political reasons. Good government advocates have long argued that undermining those protections could return the U.S. government to a spoils system in which political patronage threatens agencies’ capacity to deliver on their missions.

Comey’s initial victory in court came on Tuesday, the same day Justice again brought charges against her father over a social media post it said was threatening the president.

Clarick Gueron Reisbaum, the firm representing Comey, celebrated the judge’s decision.

“No president can ignore the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and federal law to fire a career federal employee based solely on her last name,” the firm said. “We look forward to continuing to vindicate Ms. Comey's constitutional rights and protect our civil service.”

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EPA workers disciplined for dissent letter get legal aid from whistleblower groups

Erich Wagner — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:22:18 -0400

A pair of whistleblower protection organizations announced Tuesday that they will represent dozens of Environmental Protection Agency staffers who were suspended last year following their endorsement of a “declaration of dissent” to Administrator Lee Zeldin in proceedings before a quasi-judicial agency challenging their discipline.

Last summer, more than 600 EPA employees signed the letter excoriating Zeldin’s leadership of the agency, alleging among other things that his leadership undermined scientific consensus in favor of polluters. Though a majority of signatories did so anonymously, the agency quickly suspended more than 100 employees who publicly signed onto the letter. Ultimately, the agency handed out a range of disciplinary measures, from letters of reprimand to unpaid suspensions and even termination.

Last December, half a dozen of those employees who were targeted with firing challenged their terminations before the Merit Systems Protection Board, with the help of environmental advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. On Tuesday, whistleblower organizations Lawyers for Good Government and the Government Accountability Project announced they would aid in other EPA workers' cases.

According to L4GG and GAP, 15 complaints in connection with the firings and other discipline have already been filed with the Office of Special Counsel, alleging violations of the employees’ First Amendment and whistleblower protections, and “many more” will be lodged in the coming days.

“Lawyers for Good Government is proud to stand with these courageous employees for doing exactly what the law protects, and what the public demands, in telling the truth about dangerous government misconduct,” said Traci Feit Love, L4GG’s founder and executive director. “Retaliation against them is not just illegal, it’s a direct assault on the democratic principles that protect public servants who expose threats to public safety.”

Recent reporting from E&E News suggests that EPA leadership was warned that disciplining those who signed the dissent letter was likely unjustified under the rules governing federal employment. Officials within the agency told leadership that signing the letter did not run afoul of ethics rules, and a top EPA lawyer warned taking action against them constituted a “significant” risk of legal liability in an email apparently accidentally divulged by EPA’s Freedom of Information Act office.

“Taking any such action would present significant legal risk, as the letter is likely protected speech under the First Amendment,” said Nate Nichols, an assistant general counsel at EPA within its employment law practice group.

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From bowling repairs to zoology, Trump admin consolidates job titles affecting 5,000 feds

Eric Katz — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:55:28 -0400

Bartenders, meatcutters, woodworkers and bookbinders will all no longer be official job titles in the federal government after the Office of Personnel Management announced on Friday it was consolidating 115 occupational series that it said are obsolete or redundant.

The change will impact around 5,000 employees, the federal government’s human resources agency said, though the employees will be shifted into new job titles and may not see any impact to their pay. OPM said the consolidated roles, which will be absorbed into the many hundreds of remaining job series, will help streamline positions with low employment or obsolete duties, modernize job classifications, promote more transparent qualification standards and better support hiring based on skills rather than educational attainment.

In the first phase of the overhaul, OPM said it focused primarily on job series with fewer than 100 employees across government, outdated roles that require non-transferable skills, little or no hiring activity over the last few years or no projected need for replacements based on workforce planning. It also identified roles that are duplicative with other occupational categories or that no agency identified a need to maintain.

The impacts will be felt across a wide range of governmental activities. The elimination of the “office automation clerical and assistance” role will affect the most individuals at 862. More than 600 “guides” throughout government — those who give talks, tours, explanations and provide other services to guests at parks and other sites of public interest — will be absorbed into the “general arts and information” job series.

Just two staff involved in “bowling equipment repairing” — whose work includes “minor repairs to bowling approaches and pins” — will see their job series phased out. Many military bases throughout the country maintain bowling alleys on site. The vast activity at military sites account for additional job series the government no longer needs, in part due to the outsourcing of such work, including bakers, bartenders, meatcutters and waiters. Those roles will now be consolidated into the “general food preparation and serving” category.

Some of the eliminated jobs no longer have any people working in them: the government currently employs zero elevator operators or film assemblers and repairers, and the titles will be abolished.

Interior of passenger elevator, showing operator controls. Credit: Library of Congress

One federal HR official praised OPM for the changes, saying it made sense to generally clean up and simplify the list of federal roles and would significantly reduce back-end burdens when hiring for certain specialized or scientific roles.

“It’s the most reasonable and data driven change we’ve seen [from OPM] so far,” the official said.

OPM said the effort would bring “clarity and consistency” across the government and better support the needs of agencies.

“The evolution of work across government, including new technologies, scientific advances, and shifting mission demands, has led many series to become low-use, outdated, or overlapping,” OPM said.

It reminded agencies to follow all existing statutes on pay and grade retention, as well to adhere to their collective bargaining requirements. The agency said it would “provide comprehensive implementation guidance” to ensure a consistent approach across government, protect employee rights and minimize disruption.

OPM acknowledged that employees and stakeholders would have questions about the changes and vowed to ensure a smooth transition. Some of the consolidated jobs require highly specialized skills and extensive hands-on training and those expectations will not change, it said. It will work with agencies to help them write clear position descriptions for specialty, mission-critical jobs.

Some of the impacted jobs are technical or scientific in nature, such as for the government's nearly three-dozen zoologists or its more than 300 employees in fish and wildlife administration. Those employees will become general natural resources managers and biologists. The federal HR official said the more generalized categories will make it far easier for hiring personnel to determine whether an applicant meets minimum qualifications.

As OPM stated, many of the consolidated job functions already appear to be waning in prevalence. The government will no longer hold a specialized title for its nine theater specialists and its lone remaining “coin/currency checker” — whose job is to visually examine finished coins for defects, discoloration or missing letters, as well as U.S. currency, stamps and bonds for any imperfections — will no longer have such a distinct title.

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USDA kicks off more employee relocations, including some that spark déjà vu

Eric Katz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:15:07 -0400

Updated April 23 at 5:42 p.m.

The Agriculture Department on Thursday announced additional relocation plans for employees as part of its larger reorganization, including a new center for food inspectors in Iowa and a second attempt at sending research staff to Kansas City.

The Food Safety Inspection Service will send out two-thirds of its headquarters staff currently based in Washington, the agency said, to a newly stood up National Food Safety Center in Urbandale, Iowa, a new Science Center in Athens, Ga., or other locations. The Iowa facility will become FSIS’ largest office with 200 people and USDA said the changes will move staff “closer to the agricultural and food production systems that FSIS regulates.”

The department’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, meanwhile, will once again relocate employees to Kansas City. It also did so in President Trump’s first term, though President Biden subsequently moved the agencies’ headquarters back to Washington while keeping the Kansas City offices open. This time around, ERS and NIFA will move employees out of the capital region to Kansas City and bring other employees who have since been shifted to other locations back to that hub.

Following the 2019 moves, both agencies lost more than half of their staff, leading to a significant decline in productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover. The latest USDA reorganization plan received overwhelmingly negative feedback during the public comment period from lawmakers, employees and local governments on the larger USDA reorganization, as well in meetings the department held with tribal governments.

The reshaping of those components is part of a larger USDA reorganization that will see 2,600 employees shifted from the capital region into new regional hubs around the country. In addition to Kansas City, those hubs will be in Salt Lake City, Raleigh, N.C.; Fort Collins, Colo., and Indianapolis. The department previously announced it would move its U.S. Forest Service headquarters, and 260 employees, to Salt Lake City.

USDA’s fiscal 2026 appropriations bill blocked the department from reorganizing or relocating any offices or employees unless Congress authorizes it. The head of USFS recently told Congress his general counsel’s office approved the moves anyway, though Democrats suggested that would play out in court.

FSIS said none of its front-line employees—the inspectors themselves who make up 85% of the agency’s workforce—will be impacted by the changes. It will instead by relocating administrative, technical and support staff, which officials said would reduce duplication and increase accountability.

Justin Ransom, the FSIS administrator, said the moves will improve training and bring more policy expertise to the front-line workforce.

“The National Food Safety Center will help us better prepare and support our workforce while also creating new opportunities to attract and develop the next generation of food safety professionals,” Ransom said.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has pushed the Trump administration to consolidate office space and move employees out of Washington and openly encouraged USDA specifically to place those workers in her state. The new center will be placed in an existing FSIS building.

The Georgia-based science center will expand upon an existing laboratory in the area and expand capabilities in microbiology, chemistry and epidemiology. The facility will boost access to academic institutions and industry partners, the agency said, and improve recruiting.

FSIS will not issue any layoffs, though employees who reject management-directed reassignments must either accept those roles or lose their jobs. USDA has vowed to provide employees with relocation assistance and other benefits required in statute. Secretary Brooke Rollins told lawmakers this week she was not sure how much those payments would cost. USDA requested $55 million for relocation costs and to prepare buildings for sale as part of its fiscal 2027 budget, though department officials said it hopes to complete the moves this summer so employees with children can enroll their kids in new schools before the school year starts.

The agency plans to leave 100 employees in the national capital region, while also establishing a presence in Fort Collins.

In an email to staff obtained by Government Executive, Ransom said there were still details FSIS was working out and the agency would do its best to provide information as it becomes available.

"I recognize that changes of this scale have real personal and professional impacts," he said. This transition will take place over time and we are committed to working through it together."

In addition to NIFA and ERS, the Agricultural Research Service and National Agricultural Statistics Service—the four components collectively make up the Research, Education and Economics Mission Area—will also be moving staff. As previously announced, ARS will shift employees out of its Beltsville complex comprised of 400 buildings and into field locations around the country. It did not specify where the employees will go, but said they will be better suited to support producers after reporting to locations the agency has identified to absorb additional personnel.

NASS will move some employees out of Washington to Saint Louis and other locations.

“Science is most effective when it’s connected to the people and places it’s meant to serve,” said Undersecretary for Research, Education, and Economics and Chief Scientist Scott Hutchins. “This effort strengthens our ability to deliver actionable research, trusted data, and innovative solutions by aligning our teams more closely with agricultural producers across the country.”

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FAA sets records in effort to hire gamers as air traffic controllers

Edward Graham — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:00:00 -0400

The Federal Aviation Administration has broken recruitment numbers in its push to hire gamers to be among its next crop of air traffic controllers, according to the Transportation Department.

Transportation — which oversees the FAA — launched an ad campaign on April 10 targeting video gamers, saying in a press release that the effort “aims to reach young adults who possess useful skills that are transferable to a career in air traffic control.”

A YouTube video associated with the campaign begins with the Xbox One logo before breaking into snippets from Twitch streams and then a montage of air traffic controllers and planes, telling viewers to “level up” and apply for positions beginning at midnight on April 17.

The FAA launched a similar “level up” campaign in 2021 that was also focused on hiring 18- to 30-year-old gamers to be air traffic controllers.

“With only about 25 percent of controllers holding a traditional college degree, this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming,” Transportation said in a press release. “Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.”

During an appearance at the Semafor World Economy event on Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the department had already received 6,000 applicants since the application portal opened. As of Saturday, applications were no longer being accepted.

Duffy called the hiring push “wildly successful,” and said that “we’ve had a flood of young people coming in that want to be air traffic controllers.”

In a subsequent Facebook video shared on Duffy’s account on Saturday, the department said that it had received 12,350 applications, “more than double the previous record.” Of these applicants, 10,779 were identified as being qualified for air traffic controller roles.

The job call, which led to a posting for an “Air Traffic Control Specialist - Trainee” role, said “no prior air traffic experience is required,” and that potential hires would begin with training at the FAA Academy.

Transportation said there are almost 11,000 current air traffic controllers, “with more than 4,000 trainees in the pipeline.” But new hires are needed to meet rising demands and to replace personnel leaving the workforce.

A January Government Accountability Office report found that the total number of air traffic controllers has decreased by roughly 6% over the past decade, even as the number of flights relying on these personnel has increased by 10%.

The effort to attract young applicants with non-traditional backgrounds comes amid a broader governmentwide push to fill critical job vacancies — particularly those in cybersecurity or technology areas — by expanding hiring criteria.

The Office of Personnel Management issued new standards for technology employees last week that no longer include degree requirements, part of an effort to prioritize job aptitude over educational background.

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Labor groups sue to block FLRA’s political seizure of union elections

Erich Wagner — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:27:02 -0400

A coalition of labor groups on Thursday sued the Federal Labor Relations Authority in an effort to block new regulations granting the agency’s political appointees control over union elections at federal agencies, arguing both that the agency robbed stakeholders of the opportunity to weigh in on the changes and that the measure would have the opposite effect from its stated aim.

Since 1983, the handling of petitions for union elections and other petitions relating to the composition of bargaining units at federal agencies have primarily been handled by the FLRA’s regional directors and their staff—career employees—with a process by which parties can appeal their decisions to the authority’s three-member board, presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate.

But last month, the FLRA issued an interim final rule wresting control of those petitions from regional directors, who the agency said will now work “collaboratively” with the three-member authority to process, and removed the appeals process. The rule, set to take effect April 23, bypassed the notice-and-comment period agencies traditionally employ when they consider major changes to their operating rules.

“After reexamination of its practices, the FLRA finds that the memorandum of delegated authorities and responsibilities to the [regional directors], and the related regulations governing representation matters, merit revision,” the rule states. “The FLRA envisions a streamlined process in which representation matters are resolved through the collaborative efforts of the regional offices and the authority—rather than a strict separation of an initial decision by an RD, followed by a possible appeal to, and potentially duplicative decision by, the authority.”

Thursday’s legal challenge, filed by the American Federation of Government Employees, National Association of Government Employees, National Federation of Federal Employees and other unions, argues that the interim rule’s “threadbare” justification for upending four decades of precedent, the peremptory implementation window and failure to seek public comment before finalizing the regulations all amount to the type of “arbitrary and capricious” decision making forbidden by the Administrative Procedure Act.

While the FLRA stated that a reason for issuing this change was to eliminate “duplicative” proceedings in cases in which a party appeals the regional director’s decision, the unions said such cases are exceedingly rare: in 2025, 277 representation petitions were filed with the agency’s regional directors, while only six cases were appealed to the authority’s three-member board. And contrary to the agency’s claim that the new process would “streamline” the processing of union elections, the three-member authority was the only part of the agency to miss its processing goal last year.

“Indeed, in fiscal 2025, the authority’s own performance report stated that it did not meet its targets for the ‘average age of representation cases decided or otherwise resolved by the authority’ nor the ‘average age of representation cases pending before the authority,’” the unions wrote. “In contrast, targets for the percentage of cases ‘resolved by the [Office of General Counsel] through withdrawal, election or issuance of a decision or order within 120 days of the filing of a petition’ and the same ‘within 365 days of the filing of a petition’ were met by the OGC and its regional directors. It is both implausible and unexplained that these unacceptable delays at the authority level would be remedied by requiring the authority to take on an enormous amount of additional representation decisions.”

The unions filed their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, where the case has been assigned to Chief Judge Denise Casper, an Obama appointee.

In a statement Thursday, AFGE National President Everett Kelley suggested that the FLRA had an ulterior motive for its regulatory change: meddling in ongoing and future union organization drives.

“Make no mistake, these changes are significant and substantive,” he said. “They eliminate the nonpartisan, nonpolitical decision-making process that currently governs who can and can’t be represented by a union. We should recognize this for what it is—just another step in this administration’s efforts to politicize federal employment and make it easier to retaliate against those, including unions, that speak out against them.”

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Hegseth orders termination of union contracts

Erich Wagner — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:32:20 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week instructed leaders to terminate most of the department’s collective bargaining agreements, more than a year after President Trump signed an executive order banning federal employee unions from many agencies on national security grounds.

In an April 9 memo obtained by Government Executive, Hegseth gave his deputies 24 hours to take action to cancel their union contracts, with some exceptions. In April 2025, Hegseth exempted bargaining units made up of Federal Wage System workers at four installations—the Letterkenny Munition Center in Pennsylvania, the Air Force Test Center in California, the Air Force Sustainment Center in Oklahoma, and the Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Florida.

“I hereby direct the termination of all collective bargaining agreements to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation of Executive Order 14251, ‘Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,’ within 24 hours of the date of this memorandum, except as applied to the population covered by the [April 2025] secretary of defense certification . . . and the local employing offices of any agency police officers, security guards or firefighters, pursuant to EO 14251,” Hegseth wrote. “This action is required to align agency operations with national security requirements as outlined in EO 14251.”

Spared from this memo are unions like the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association, who both secured preliminary injunctions blocking implementation of the executive order, which cites a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights on national security grounds, last fall.

Not so for the nation’s largest federal employee union. In a statement Wednesday, American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley decried Hegseth’s decision as “cowardly.”

“For 50 years, these employees have exercised their union rights; under several administrations, during a global pandemic and throughout peacetime and wartime, including our most recent conflict with Iran,” he said. “To rip up the union contracts of civilian employees after touting a successful ceasefire in the Middle East is not only a slap in the face to the employees who supported those efforts, but again proves that this action has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with silencing workers’ voices.”

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OPM cuts degree requirements for government tech jobs in new standards

Natalie Alms — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:38:46 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management released new classification and qualification standards for technology employees on Monday that make it easier for those without higher education degrees to get government jobs.

The update is meant to move the government from relying on strict requirements for higher education and years of experience when hiring and promoting workers to using assessments meant to actually test for the skills needed for a given job.

The new standards for technology employees no longer include degree requirements, an OPM official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Nextgov/FCW. The goal is to make higher education and experience at prior jobs one — but not the only — way to show competency as the government shifts more to relying on testing for actual skills.

“For the first time, your fitness for the job will be determined via a formal assessment rather than based upon whether you have a bachelor’s degree or some minimum amount of work experience,” Scott Kupor, the director of OPM, wrote in a blog about the change.

OPM is now rewriting the standards for all 604 occupational series roles and looking to reduce the number of series, too. The agency aims to move from self-attestation of skills in government hiring to formal assessments to test for aptitude for a given job.

The new change, years in the making, has bipartisan support, unlike some of the administration’s other revisions to government hiring that have garnered pushback from critics that say that they are politicizing the workforce.

Administrations led by both parties have sought to move the government toward skills-based hiring. The Biden administration announced that the government would be rewiring resume requirements for the government’s IT workforce in 2024, although it was working on this even before then.

A Trump-era executive order from 2020 directed OPM to review job classifications and qualifications, which set the minimum requirements like educational attainment or years of experience for different types of government jobs. Congress has also passed legislation codifying changes that stress skills over educational attainment.

Technology was a good starting point, the Trump administration said, because of the fast-paced rate of change in the field where the government is wanting to hire up.

“The move to skills based hiring over time, we think, really does open up many additional possibilities for US citizens who would like to join the federal government to do so,” the OPM official said. “We don't want lack of a specific degree to be an impediment.”

Kupor's blog post cited Edward Coristine — a member of the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency effort who goes by the moniker ‘Big Balls’ — as an example of the opportunities made available by removing degree requirements in his blog about the change.

Before working for the government, Coristine was previously fired from a company, Path Networks, after leaking internal firm secrets to a competitor, Krebs and Bloomberg News have previously reported.

In the media, an existing federal employee objected to Coristine’s place in the government, wrote Kupor, with the “chief complaint” being that “Ed was 19 years old and was a Northwestern University dropout.”

Coristine, who now works at the White House, is a “world-class software developer,” wrote Kupor. “And, if they are in fact world-class engineers, then we should pay them at the level at which they are performing versus force-fitting them into a lower pay level because they have no prior work experience.”

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Dem senators boost effort to reinstate 2 immigration judges

Erich Wagner — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:44:54 -0400

A half dozen Democratic senators this week urged a federal appeals court in Washington to expedite its consideration of two immigration judges’ appeal of their ouster last year, after a quasi-judicial agency said they could be removed at will.

Last month, the Merit Systems Protection Board upended decades of precedent when it ruled that the president had Article II constitutional authority to remove inferior officers like immigration judges on an at-will basis.

But in their appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Megan Jackler and Brandon Jaroch, who were both fired by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in February 2025, said that MSPB’s decision mistakenly relied on “dictum,” a legal term for portions of a judge’s writing that is made in passing and not relevant to the actual decision, in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a case invalidating removal protections of principal officers. Unlike the judges in this case, principal officers may be removed at will due to their lack of a direct supervisor between them and the president.

“The crux of [MSPB’s] decision rests on a half-sentence of dictum from Seila Law, in which the Supreme Court characterized its prior precedent as having permitted for-cause removal protections for those inferior officers 'with limited duties and no policymaking or administrative authority,’” they wrote. “According to the MSPB, that half-sentence radically cabined [U.S. v. Perkins] and its progeny to a small subset of civil servants. It bears emphasis: the MSPB’s test for Article II firings—that the [1978 Civil Service Reform Act] may apply only to those with ‘limited duties’—will have enormous ramifications.”

The two former immigration judges have asked the circuit court as a whole to hear their case, rather than the traditional three-judge panel. Like the legal challenge to President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs, which the Federal Circuit heard en banc last year and the Supreme Court invalidated in February, the judges’ case is the first of many such lawsuits, as administration officials’ citation of “Article II” as sole justification for employee removals last year was widespread.

“This appeal is the tip of the iceberg,” attorneys for the fired judges wrote. “The executive branch has fired numerous other civil servants like petitioners, including as many as 100 immigration judges, employees previously assigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith, and prosecutors who handled January 6 cases. The abuses have been egregious: In July 2025, the government fired a career prosecutor apparently because she is the daughter of [former FBI Director Robert Mueller], whom the president views as a vocal critic.”

In a filing Monday, six Senate Democrats—Sens. Chris Van Hollen, Md., Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, both Va., Gary Peters, Mich., and Andy Kim, N.J.—lent their support to the judges’ request. They argued that the MSPB ruling effectively usurps Congress’ authority to insulate inferior officers from political interference.

“The Merit Systems Protection Board’s decision poses serious consequences for the constitutional systems of separation of powers and checks and balances, and it will affect thousands of federal workers, many of whom are constituents of amici,” they wrote. “The board’s decision, if left standing, would subvert the constitutional authority of the Congress to enact any legislation governing inferior officers in the executive branch. This defies over 140 years of Supreme Court precedent and gives the president unchecked authority to take any action regarding inferior officers, constrained only by the few express limitations stated in the Constitution.”

If the court agrees, that means the case would be heard by all 11 active judges on the Federal Circuit bench. A three-judge panel has not yet been assigned.

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CyberCorps summer internships canceled by cybersecurity agency amid DHS funding lapse

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:42:49 -0400

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reversed a decision to onboard summer interns participating in a government scholarship program for cyber talent amid an ongoing funding lapse inside the Department of Homeland Security, according to emails obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

The CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service program provides college tuition and a stipend to awardees, who, in return, commit to working in a government cybersecurity role upon graduation. It’s backed by the Office of Personnel Management and the National Science Foundation, the latter of which awards scholarships that provide up to three years of support to undergraduate and graduate participants, including Ph.D candidates.

Over the last year, the longstanding pipeline was hampered by broader Trump-era moves to reduce the size and scope of the federal workforce. Many hiring and internship onboarding programs did not take place as expected, leaving scholars without work and under a looming deadline to fulfill program requirements or have to pay back their scholarships.

After multiple outlets, including Nextgov/FCW, covered challenges that scholars were facing under the program’s uncertainty, OPM announced plans to pursue a “mass deferment” of job placement deadlines for the cornerstone program, and CISA soon followed with its own plans to make around 100 internship opportunities available.

But DHS has now been unfunded for about two months, amid a partisan stalemate over immigration enforcement reforms. The cyberdefense agency, which is housed in DHS, is “unable to bring any [Scholarship for Service] interns onboard this summer given the impacts of the federal funding lapse,” according to one of the emails sent to a recipient. “Thank you again for your interest in CISA and we hope to be an option for you next year.”

Another email undersigned by a CISA official told planned program participants that, due to the DHS funding situation, “we will be shifting our focus away from SFS summer internships.”

“As of right now, there will be no SFS summer interns,” it adds. “I profusely apologize for the run-around this process has now given you two years in a row.”

The move is a major setback for students who had secured internships after months of confusion and uncertainty about their job outcomes.

Scholarship terms stipulate that graduates must secure a qualifying job approved by OPM within 18 months of completing their studies. If they don’t meet that deadline, their scholarship funding converts into a loan, obligating them to repay the full amount they received.

Nextgov/FCW has asked CISA for comment.

DHS employees were called back to the office this week, after President Donald Trump ordered the department to use funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to pay civilian employees and their furloughed colleagues who hadn’t received pay throughout the shutdown.

Due to its current cash issues, CISA is unable to cover costs beyond employee salaries, according to an email Acting Director Nick Andersen sent to staff on Monday that was obtained by Nextgov/FCW. The email specified that any non-salary expenditures now require an exception under the Antideficiency Act, which governs how agencies use their congressionally appropriated funds.

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OPM seeks cybersecurity talent to join Tech Force

Natalie Alms — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:33:01 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management is now expressly recruiting cybersecurity employees through the U.S. Tech Force, which the Trump administration launched last year after pushing out over 19,500 tech, data and cyber government workers from across various agencies.

Recruits will work across the federal government for two-year terms. OPM set an initial goal of hiring a 1,000-person cohort when it began the program last winter. Many agencies participating in Tech Force are currently in the final stages of hiring, according to an OPM spokesperson, who said that cyber hires will also be part of the initial cohort.

The government has long struggled to recruit and retain the cyber talent it needs to protect critical systems, although that workforce hasn’t been spared from cuts under the Trump administration’s aggressive downsizing.

The government is looking to hire software engineers, data scientists and product managers to join the Tech Force in addition to cybersecurity talent. Last month, OPM also launched a dedicated NASA Force within the larger program to place fellows at the space agency.

Twenty-plus private companies are collaborating with the administration on the program by providing training and mentorship opportunities. Those companies will also nominate their own employees to do government stints as managers for the Tech Force, a setup that’s raised a host of ethics and conflict of interest concerns, as these managers will remain employed by and on leave from their private sector companies while working for the government.

Scott Kupor, the head of OPM, has emphasized the importance of making it easier for professionals to move in and out of the public sector during their careers and pitched the Tech Force as a way to create those opportunities, as well as bring more young people into the government’s workforce.

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Trump’s federal workforce changes cost the economy more than $165.6B, analysis finds

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:17:35 -0400

The Trump administration’s reforms to the federal government cost the U.S. economy more than $165.6 billion, according to a new estimate from the Partnership for Public Service.

“This is an administration that has claimed that it is trying to reduce waste, and yet the choices that it has made have created phenomenally larger waste,” said Max Stier — the president and CEO of the good government group, which has been critical of the president’s overhauls to the government workforce — during a press call on April 9.

One of the largest individual sources of the costs is nearly $53.2 billion tied to disengaged civil servants. Researchers relied on a Gallup finding that disengaged employees cost their organizations about 34% of their salaries, along with the percentage of disengaged federal employees in a 2025 Partnership survey.

The Partnership conducted its poll after the Office of Personnel Management nixed the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which annually measures civil servants’ engagement and morale, in order to make changes in compliance with the president’s anti-diversity executive orders. Officials, however, acknowledged that their survey findings are not directly comparable to past FEVS data, as the sample size of the Partnership's poll was more than 10,000 while OPM’s survey covers the entire federal workforce.

Other cost estimates in the analysis include:

More than $4.5 billion to pay individuals who left government under the deferred resignation program, through which participants generally received pay and benefits for several months while on leave.
Nearly $764 million to provide severance pay for more than 10,000 agency employees who were laid off due to a reduction in force.
Nearly $444 million to cover administrative leave for more than 20,000 newly hired and promoted civil servants who were still in their one- or two-year probationary periods when they were fired. While the removals of many of these individuals were temporarily blocked after court challenges, which is why they received administrative pay, those orders were ultimately overruled.

The Partnership also reported that cuts to grants from science agencies, such as the EPA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, have cost the economy approximately $94.6 billion. Researchers determined that number based on a 2024 study that found every dollar invested in NIH yielded $2.56 in economic activity, which they then multiplied by the amount of unspent funding from terminated grants issued by various agencies.

Brandon Lardy, the Partnership’s data director, said during the April 9 press briefing that researchers relied on data from government agencies and congressional committees to develop their estimates but also stressed that there are challenges to measuring the consequences of government management changes.

“We do really try to emphasize that this is a conservative estimate,” he said. “There are lots of additional costs that just simply aren't quantifiable. We really tried to follow where there was actually data available to quantify the costs.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment; however, administration officials have argued that downsizing the civil service and cutting government spending are necessary to reduce federal spending.

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FEMA came up with a goal to cut half its staff without a plan to get there, records show

Eric Katz — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:16:12 -0400

The government’s emergency response agency developed a topline figure to which it would slash its workforce before it developed an analysis of how to reach that total, according to new documents and testimony from a lawsuit challenging an initial round of cuts, leaving staff to then reverse engineer a pathway to implement the potential reductions.

Officials at the Homeland Security Department tasked Federal Emergency Management Agency leadership with developing various staffing cut scenarios, including one that would have led to the dismissal of half of FEMA’s workforce, new court records show. That plan was ultimately developed and sent back to DHS, as well as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management, Karen Evans, the senior official currently serving as FEMA’s said in a recent deposition.

Excerpts of the deposition and internal communications on the staffing cuts were recently made public in court filings.

“We didn’t have a plan,” Evans said of the goal to get FEMA to 11,383 employees, roughly half of FEMA’s existing workforce. “That’s why I was tasking the plan.”

Evans, who replaced David Richardson as head of FEMA on Dec. 1, requested that other top officials at FEMA develop a process for meeting the already determined staff cut goal. Richardson had spearheaded the analysis that led to that figure based on “mission essential functions,” Evans said, though she acknowledged the final call on the plan—which she said included various options—came from her parent agency.

“I was told to include an option that would include a 50% cut,” she said, recalling a conversation she had with then-DHS Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Guy.

Evans sent that plan to DHS on Dec. 4 and it was subsequently passed on to OMB and OPM.

The FEMA chief was deposed on March 31 after a chaotic court hearing in which attorneys for the Trump administration contradicted previous, written testimony Evans had provided over the provenance of the staffing cut goals. A federal judge ordered top DHS and FEMA officials to provide depositions, and thousands of pages of related documents, to straighten out the discrepancy.

A union representing FEMA employees brought the lawsuit after the agency terminated hundreds of workers by declining to renew their expiring two or four-year contracts. The non-renewed employees were all part of FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery workforce, who serve in the short-term stints that are typically renewed. The employees, however, have been systematically dismissed at the end of their agreements since late last year, with an exception for the winter storms that hit much of the country in January.

CORE employees are often the first to deploy following a disaster and, according to the lawsuit, some of the terminated workers were in the middle of hurricane relief deployments. FEMA has so far slashed more than 1,000 of the employees since 2024, or about 10% of that workforce. FEMA also employs about 4,000 reservists, who serve on a part-time basis and only activate during disasters, and around 5,000 permanent, full-time staff.

Work on the plan to implement widespread staffing cuts is “put on hold” to implement the CORE non-renewal plan, Evans said. She suggested the shedding of COREs was related only to right-sizing the workforce and not necessarily connected to the larger workforce plans.

In February, however, Victoria Barton, a FEMA spokesperson, said while there was no plan to eliminate COREs en masse, the agency in recent years had been "inflating the workforce beyond sustainable levels” and the reductions would address that. She added the cuts Evans implemented to that workforce "brought a level of scrutiny and accountability" to the agency that it had been lacking.

Evans, DHS human resources chief Roland Edwards and FEMA HR head La’Toya Prieur all confirmed in their depositions that various DHS officials were involved in the decision making related to CORE non-renewals, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.

Plaintiffs in the case released the testimony and documents in asking the judge to compel further document disclosure and depositions from the government. Evans revealed that she chatted with DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem and her top advisor Corey Lewandowski, on Signal and using personal devices. The government stated those conversations were not related to the case. Evans also produced her own daily notes that she took on the job, but self-redacted them to screen for what she deemed to be inappropriate for disclosure. The plaintiffs are also seeking an unredacted copy of those notes.

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Fewer federal employees are ‘thriving’ and more are ‘struggling’, according to new survey

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The percentage of federal employees who are classified as “thriving” decreased by 10 points between 2024 and 2025, according to a recent report from Gallup, which sheds light on how civil servants are reacting to cuts and other reforms that President Donald Trump has made to agencies since the start of his second term.

By taking the average of responses from quarterly surveys conducted respectively in both years, the analytics firm found that the percentage of “thriving” feds dropped from 58% in 2024 to 48% in 2025.

“All major segments of the U.S. workforce experienced a worsening outlook on their lives since 2022; however, federal government employees stand out for the severity and speed of their decline,” researchers wrote.

While the “thriving” rate for federal employees held steady at around 60% from 2022 to 2024, the latest data puts them on par with the average for U.S. workers in general, which also stood at 48% in 2025. That broader group, however, saw a smaller decline, going from 51% in 2024.

Gallup also shared data with Government Executive that shows, between quarter four of 2024 and the same period in 2025, the percentage of feds who were classified as “struggling” increased from 37% to 47% and those determined to be “suffering” went from 3% to 5%.

Researchers classified respondents as “thriving,” “struggling” or “suffering” based on how they rated their current and future life on a 0-10 scale. The data comes from quarterly online surveys of adult U.S. workers. Gallup used probability-based, random sampling methods to recruit participants, and the sample size of the polls ranged from around 19,000 to roughly 23,000 individuals.

The Office of Personnel Management in 2025 did not conduct the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, with officials saying that changes were necessary to the annual poll of the government workforce in order to comply with Trump’s anti-diversity executive orders.

In response, the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan good government group, developed its own survey of more than 10,000 current feds. It found that all 30 agencies represented in the poll experienced decreases from their 2024 FEVS scores; although, Partnership officials acknowledged that the results are not directly comparable because OPM’s survey includes significantly more respondents.

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A hiring rule meant to help people with disabilities get federal jobs instead left them more vulnerable to DOGE mass firings

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:45:17 -0400

At the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, as part of the effort to slash the number of federal employees, his administration fired thousands of newly hired and promoted agency staffers who were still in their probationary periods. Such workers have weaker civil service job protections.

While the probationary period for a new federal employee is typically one year, it’s up to two years for those hired under Schedule A — a mechanism for agencies to bring on workers with a “severe physical disability, a psychiatric disability or an intellectual disability.”

Government Executive spoke with multiple individuals hired under Schedule A who were fired in 2025 between their first and second years of federal service. Some of the people interviewed feel they might still have a job if they did not have a disability or had been recruited by an agency through a non-Schedule A pathway.

“These are the employees that got affected. Why? How did it make a difference?” said one such worker at the Health and Human Services Department who was fired about a month before the end of their two-year Schedule A probationary period. They preferred to be unnamed because they are pursuing legal action. “To me, it's important for people to know. It may not make a difference to me, but if other people were to find out and see these were the impacts — that's a pretty large-scale thing.”

‘An extra punch’

Christa Reynolds had just completed her first year as a National Institutes of Health employee when she was caught up in the mass probationary firings as a Schedule A hire. Despite being a new federal staffer, she had worked at the agency for eight years prior as a contractor.

“I feel like we were doing really good work that was helping people and making a positive difference,” she said. “I know that's really corny, but I feel like it's important to have a mission and a reason to do your work instead of just wanting to get a paycheck, which is also very important.”

Before she was fired, Reynolds said that she worked on analyzing the distribution of agency grants and updating “hard-to-use [web pages] that were made in like 2000.” The Trump administration recently launched an initiative to improve the design of government websites.

While Reynolds was initially let go in February 2025, she was brought back on paid administrative leave due to court orders blocking the mass probationary firings. Ultimately, however, her position was terminated in May 2025 after those orders were overruled.

“I had been hoping that I’d be able to be brought back,” she said. “It also felt like an extra punch that I would have been back if I had not been hired on Schedule A.”

Since losing her job nearly a year ago, Reynolds has started a part-time contracting position but said that it’s been difficult to find full-time employment.

“The hard thing is finding something that feels comparable," she said. “A lot of jobs that I've applied for would be a huge pay cut or don't include benefits and then other jobs just feel really boring.”

Similarly, the employee who is pursuing legal action over being fired during their Schedule A probationary period said they have struggled to find a new job. And they emphasized that they don’t live in the Washington, D.C., area.

“There's a lot of people searching, especially in my hometown, there's a lot of people searching for work, so it's been difficult,” they said. “Still looking, but nothing has come of it.”

‘I was disgusted’

Based on a Government Executive analysis of federal workforce data from the Office of Personnel Management, HHS in May 2025 (the month that department officials formally fired many probationary employees) terminated nearly 1,400 employees with fewer than two years of federal service. Of those, 300 were individuals hired under Schedule A who had worked at the agency for at least one but fewer than two years.

Janice Lintz — a hearing loss disability advocate who worked at the Housing and Urban Development Department between 2023 and 2024, and who was hired under Schedule A herself because of a learning disability — said she was “disgusted” when she realized that more federal employees with disabilities could be impacted by the mass probationary firings because of the longer Schedule A probationary period.

She was frustrated, in particular, because she flagged the issue in 2024 to Jeff Zients, former chief of staff under President Joe Biden, who she unexpectedly met on a plane while traveling to her daughter’s wedding.

“If [the Biden administration] had changed the two-year [Schedule A probationary period] to one year, so many people with disabilities’ jobs would have been saved,” she said. “But they didn’t.”

Lintz argued that the additional year of probation for Schedule A hires is an unfair practice that disadvantages people with disabilities.

“Seriously, if someone can't tell whether someone's working in a year versus two years, then the issue is more with them than the person being hired,” she said. “If you're using someone effectively, you can tell in a year. I don’t really understand how an additional year sheds any further information.”

Neither HHS or OPM responded to requests for comment.

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OPM wants federal workers’ medical records

Amanda Seitz and Maia Rosenfeld, KFF Health News — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:28:18 -0400

The Trump administration is quietly seeking unprecedented access to medical records for millions of federal workers and retirees, and their families.

A brief notice from the Office of Personnel Management could dramatically change which personally identifiable medical information the agency obtains, giving it the power to see prescriptions employees had filled or what treatment they sought from doctors. The regulation would require 65 insurance companies that cover more than 8 million Americans — including federal workers, retired members of Congress, mail carriers, and their immediate family members — to provide monthly reports to OPM with identifiable health data on their members.

The proposal is prompting unease from insurers as well as health policy and legal experts, who are concerned about the legality of OPM acquiring such a sweeping database of sensitive health information, and the agency’s ability to safeguard it.

OPM could use the data to analyze costs and improve the system, said Sharona Hoffman, a health law ethicist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

“But,” she said, “they are going to get very, very detailed and granular data about everything that happens. The concern here is the more information they have, they could use it to discipline or target people who are not cooperating politically.”

OPM spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The agency’s notice asks insurers that offer Federal Employees Health Benefits or Postal Service Health Benefits plans to furnish “service use and cost data,” including “medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data.” It says the data will “ensure they provide competitive, quality, and affordable plans.”

The notice, posted and sent to insurers in December, does not instruct them to redact identifying information — a burdensome process that they would need federal guidance to complete.

Instead, it states that insurers are legally permitted to disclose “protected health information” to OPM. Several experts in health policy and law consulted by KFF Health News said they interpreted the request to mean the Trump administration was seeking identifiable data.

The ask comes a year into a Republican administration that has been defined by haphazard mass layoffs and firings of thousands of federal workers, including dozens who say they were targeted in acts of political retaliation or for not embracing the White House’s agenda. Under President Donald Trump, the government has also routinely tested the legal bounds of sharing sensitive and personally identifiable tax or health information across government agencies in its efforts to carry out mass immigration arrests or pursue identify fraud.

“You can anticipate a scenario where this information on 8 million Americans is now in the hands of OPM and there’s a real concern of how they use it,” said Michael Martinez, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, an advocacy organization that filed a public comment opposing OPM’s proposal in February. Martinez previously worked at OPM.

“They’ve given no information about how they would treat that information once they have it,” he said.

Among Martinez’s concerns is how the administration might use information about employees who have sought abortions — 41 states have some type of abortion ban — or transgender treatment, medical care that the Trump administration has tried to curb.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers, did not respond to requests for comment.

Martinez and others who reviewed the notice for KFF Health News said the proposal was so vague that they were uncertain, exactly, what medical records OPM wants to access.

At the very least, they said, the proposal would allow the agency to access the medical and pharmaceutical claims of patients with their identifying information, such as names and birth dates. Claims data also includes diagnoses, treatments, visit length, and provider information.

OPM’s request to view “encounter data” could allow the agency to look at “anything and everything,” Hoffman noted.

That could include detailed medical records, such as a doctor’s notes or after-visit summaries.

Jonathan Foley, who worked at OPM advising on the Federal Employees Health Benefits program during the Obama and Biden administrations, said he doubts the agency has the capability to ingest such minutiae.

The agency, however, could easily begin collection of personally identifiable medical and pharmaceutical claims information from insurers, he said.

Foley said he sees a benefit to OPM having broader access to de-identified claims data. In recent years, OPM has ramped up its analysis of claims data, which has allowed it to examine prescription drug costs and encourage plans to offer federal workers cheaper alternatives. He’s worried, though, that the Trump administration’s proposal goes too far, because it appears to seek identifiable data.

“It’s kind of shocking to think of them having protected health information without having strict guardrails,” he said.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, requires certain organizations that maintain identifiable health information — such as hospitals and insurers — to protect it from being disclosed without patient consent.

Those entities can disclose such information without consent only in specific scenarios, with a justification that it is deemed “reasonable” or “necessary.” Even then, HIPAA mandates that they provide only the minimum amount of information required.

OPM argues in its notice that it is entitled to the information from insurers “for oversight activities.”

But several people who reviewed the notice questioned whether OPM’s explanation for requesting the information is sufficient.

“The language in it seems quite broad and encompasses potentially a lot of information and data and is sort of light on justification,” said Jodi Daniel, a digital health strategist who helped develop the legal framework for HIPAA privacy rules over two decades ago.

Several major insurers that offer federal employee health plans — including the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Kaiser Permanente, and UnitedHealthcare — declined to comment on their plans to comply with the notice or offer insight on where plans to implement the data sharing stood.

Only one insurer individually weighed in with a public comment on OPM’s plan. In March, CVS Health executive Melissa Schulman urged the federal agency to reconsider its proposal.

“OPM’s request raises substantial HIPAA compliance issues,” Schulman wrote, arguing that federal law allows the agency to examine records but not to collect data. Insurers would be breaking the law by providing personal health information for OPM’s “vague and broad general purposes,” she added.

Schulman, who did not respond to additional questions from KFF Health News, also raised concerns about a lack of data privacy protections. She noted that insurers could be liable for security breaches or other situations “where consumer health information is inappropriately shared and outside of our control.”

In 2015, OPM announced the personal records of roughly 22 million Americans had been stolen from the agency in a data breach that has been blamed on the Chinese government.

The Association of Federal Health Organizations, which represents CVS Health and dozens of other federal health plan carriers, also weighed in with a 122-page comment opposing the notice. In it, AFHO Chair Kari Parsons emphasized that insurance carriers are bound by HIPAA to safeguard personal health information.

Federal law requires carriers “to furnish ‘reasonable reports’ OPM determines to be necessary,” Parsons wrote, “not to furnish the individual claims data of every individual.”

This isn’t the first time OPM has requested detailed data from insurers. In the AFHO comment, Parsons noted OPM had made a similar proposal in 2010, prompting HIPAA concerns. She described how, after several years of negotiations with AFHO, they discussed — but OPM never finalized — an agreement in 2019 for carriers to share de-identified data with OPM.

But since then, Parsons wrote, OPM has collected such detailed information on enrollees and their families that, with OPM’s new request, the agency may be able to trace even de-identified records to individuals.

OPM has not provided any update since closing comments in March. The agency would need to publish a final decision before anything officially changes.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Ex-VOA employees challenge last year’s buyout and retirement offers

Erich Wagner — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:15:03 -0400

A group of former U.S. Agency for Global Media employees on Monday asked the Merit Systems Protection Board to toss out their 2025 deals to leave the agency and reinstate their employment, following a federal judge’s decision last month invalidating Kari Lake’s tenure atop the agency.

The four ex-Voice of America workers agreed to leave the agency last year through the Deferred Resignation Program, Voluntary Early Retirement Authority or Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments following the Trump administration’s announcement that it would seek to shutter the agency and lay off all of its employees.

But last month, a federal judge ruled that Lake had been improperly appointed to lead USAGM, a position that requires Senate confirmation, and ordered the agency to reopen and reinstate the hundreds of employees who were laid off last year.

In a complaint filed Monday with the MSPB, the four former employees argued that those who accepted early retirement or buyouts should have the same opportunity to return to work. The workers, who are represented by Gilbert Employment Law, seek class certification to cover all USAGM workers who accepted participated in DRP, VERA or VSIP since Lake took over at the agency on March 5, 2025.

At the MSPB, employees generally cannot challenge voluntary exit agreements, unless there is evidence they acted under duress or that the parties acted based on a misunderstanding of either the law or an underlying fact. The plaintiffs argued in their filing that both factors are present in this case.

“Here, the DRP/VERA/VSIP offers were made approximately two weeks after appellants received [reduction in force] notices and were placed on administrative leave,” the document states. “The agency’s clear intent was to induce employees to accept these offers as an alternative to being separated by the RIF, and all appellants accepted the offers on that basis. Because both parties mistakenly believed the agency could conduct a RIF, the agreements were based upon a material mistake of fact and are voidable.”

In a statement Tuesday, the former employees said that they were effectively coerced into voluntarily leaving through the threat of mass layoffs.

“Many of us made life-altering decisions under intense pressure and severe time constraints,” said Sonya Laurence Green, a former VOA senior editor. “We were led to believe that widespread layoffs were imminent. People had to weigh how they would support their families, maintain health insurance and, in some cases, whether they would be forced to relocate.”

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See where Trump is looking to make staffing cuts next year and where he wants to grow

Eric Katz — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:29:01 -0400

After shedding more than 300,000 federal employees in his first year in office and pushing for additional cuts this year, the Trump administration is seeking to hold the overall workforce steady in fiscal 2027.

Under plans put forward in President Trump’s new budget, agencies would actually see a net increase of around 3,000 workers next fiscal year. Many agencies are still proposing that they cut additional workers, but the extent of those reductions would be far more mild than the White House previously sought and would be made up for by gains elsewhere.

While some agencies are looking to further slash their workforces this year, others have begun the process of building back with new hiring. By the start of the next fiscal year, more plan to join those looking to grow.

The Agriculture Department would lose the most employees under Trump’s budget, at 19,000 employees, but much of those would result from the transfer of firefighting duties out of the Forest Service and into the newly stood up U.S. Wildland Fire Service within the Interior Department. USWFS would absorb 13,000 new employees in total. Still, Agriculture is set to shed thousands of employees on top of those transfers. It pushed out more than 15,000 employees last year with various incentives.

The Forest Service would still shed thousands of additional employees from forest management and research offices. The department is looking to eliminate many smaller offices focused on research, energy and tribal outreach. USDA is also in the process of relocating thousands of employees out of its Washington headquarters, as well as from regional offices around the country, which is expected to lead to widespread departures from the agency.

Interior is set to grow by 4,500 employees, but that includes more than 13,000 who would transfer into the department’s new wildfire agency. It would lose 14% of its workforce outside of those transfers.

Interior said it will create “an optimized workforce structure that aligns staffing levels with mission requirements.” The U.S. Geological Survey would cut around 2,000 employees, or 29% of its workforce; the Bureau of Land Management is looking to shed more than 2,100 employees, or around 27% of its current workforce; the Bureau of Indian Affairs would slash 760 employees or 21% of its workforce and the National Park Service is aiming to cut nearly 3,000 employees, or 18% of its workforce.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media is looking to fully eliminate all of its 800 remaining employees. The State Department would set up an International Communications Activities account to fund USAGM’s statutory duties, but the agency itself would largely cease to exist.

At NASA, the Science Directorate alone is looking to shed nearly 1,000 employees, or more than 40% of that workforce. Additional cuts would come from testing for aerosciences

The Treasury Department would lose only around 1,400 employees in total, though components would face more severe cuts. The Internal Revenue Service, which has already shed more than 20,000 employees under Trump, is looking to offload an additional 4,700.

Even some agencies that will see overall staffing boosts are proposing significant cuts within some of their components. Workforce increases at the Commerce Department would stem mostly from Census Bureau hiring and the absorption of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would see a staffing cut of around 14%.

Most of the losses at the Labor Department would result from that proposal to shift BLS to Commerce, though additional cuts would result from the elimination of various offices including one charged with oversight of federal contractors. The Education Department, which has already pushed out or laid off about half of its workforce, would shed an additional 500 employees, which cuts coming from program administration, the Office of Civil Rights and the student aid office.

The Social Security Administration is looking to grow its workforce by 2% after shedding thousands of employees over the last 15 months. The agency said it will “hire strategically across our organization,” with a particular focus on front-line staff. After boasting of its efforts to shed 30,000 employees and installing new caps on staffing levels across the country, the Veterans Affairs Department is looking to add 9,000 employees, a growth of 2%. Most of those hires will go to medical services.

The Defense Department is planning to add more than 8,000 employees to its civilian workforce after slashing tens of thousands, a growth of around 1%.

The Justice Department is also looking to go on a hiring surge: it is aiming to bring on more than 3,200 FBI employees, nearly 1,000 new staff each at the U.S. Marshals Service and Drug Enforcement Administration, 500 employees for immigration courts and 145 hires at the Bureau of Prisons.

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Interior incentivizes more staff departures after already cutting 20% of its workforce

Eric Katz — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:47:02 -0400

After shedding around 20% of its workforce in the last 15 months, the Interior Department is once again offering employees incentives to leave the agency as part of what it is calling a new “strategic initiative" to save money and better deliver services.

Interior became the first major agency to offer a “deferred resignation program” on a widespread basis this year, which will allow nearly all of its full-time employees the chance to sit on paid leave through September before exiting government service. Interior, like all federal agencies, offered multiple rounds of DRP last year and successfully pushed out around 13,000 employees.

The department did not spell out a specific headcount reduction goal as part of the offer or say what would happen if it falls short of any such goal, and did not respond to requests for clarification. Interior has at multiple points in President Trump’s second term been on the verge of implementing sweeping layoffs across its workforce, only for various court rulings to delay those efforts at the 11th hour. The department no longer faces restrictions on such reductions in force, but the cuts—until Thursday—appeared to have been put on the back burner.

Interior will also allow eligible employees to retire early. Employees hired within the last 12 months, on a time-limited appointment or are in the midst of being fired are not eligible for the new DRP. Certain employees, such as those working in law enforcement, oil and gas permitting and on wildfire-related matters, are exempt from the offer.

“Effective stewardship requires disciplined management of the resources entrusted to us,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said. “By modernizing our operations we’re strengthening our ability to carry out Interior’s mission and deliver world-class service for the American people.”

Interior spelled out few details of what its modernization effort would entail aside from trimming staff, though Burgum mentioned moving National Park Service to more visitor-facing roles, strengthening support for tribal nations and expediting permitting by “eliminating redundant layers.” The department will focus more resources on water and power missions and "accelerate the delivery of high-quality science.” It will also reduce “administrative burdens” and improve internal operations.

The department previously consolidated its administrative functions, such as human resources, contracting and IT, away from individual bureaus and into Burgum’s office.

Employees have until April 12 to apply for the deferred resignation and must stop working by April 29.

With so many employees exiting Interior within the last year, current staff suggested most of those remaining would not be enticed by a renewed DRP offer. They added, however, that burnout and new assignments could contribute to workers opting leave.

“There is no way I’m leaving unless they force me,” said one employee, noting the dearth of opportunities in the current job market.

During a staff visit in Denver this week, Burgum told employees RIFs were no longer on the table, according to an employee briefed on the matter. Current staff took solace in Interior declining to mention layoffs in its communications on Thursday, a sharp departure from the approach it pursued during DRP offers last year.

“Everyone is already drowning from the people we lost,” one employee said. “They would be shooting themselves in the foot with a RIF.”

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Consumer watchdog agency asks court for permission to slash its workforce by two-thirds

Eric Katz — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:53:19 -0400

A consumer watchdog agency would see its workforce cut in by two-thirds from the staffing levels it employed 15 months ago under a new plan the Trump administration is seeking court approval to implement.

Under the revised layoff plan, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would retain 556 employees. That would be down from more than 1,100 employees currently and more than 1,700 when President Trump took office.

The plan “makes clear that CFPB leadership will not close the agency absent the injunction, contrary to the central factual premise on which the injunction is based,” Trump administration attorneys said in a new filing to an appeals court this week.

Instead, the agency would implement reductions in force to “streamline agency operations” while leaving it sufficiently staffed to meet its legal obligations. Cuts are necessary, the agency argued, because of funding cuts it sustained as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Trump signed into law last year. Some RIFs will be necessary by the fall, it said.

Attorneys for the administration further argued the prohibition on layoffs is overly broad given the new precedent Supreme Court created last year limiting the circumstances in which judges can grant nationwide injunctions.

The administration argued that the ongoing injunction is harming its efforts to carry out standard workforce reshaping efforts.

“A modification of the stay would alleviate ongoing harm to the executive branch’s prerogative to right-size agency operations in line with an important presidential policy,” the attorneys said.

A year ago, the U.S. District Court in Washington paused mass reduction-in-force efforts, after CFPB had tried to lay off 90% of its staff—or around 1,500 employees. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia subsequently ruled that the RIFs could proceed. The court delayed their implementation while a union sought an en banc hearing before the entire appellate panel, however, and that panel in December threw out the initial appellate decision while it prepared to hear oral arguments.

It held those arguments in February but has yet to issue a decision.

Cuts to the agency would most significantly impact the enforcement, operations and supervision divisions, which would see reductions of 80%, 61% and 85%, respectively, compared to when Trump took office. The new staffing levels would align with the Trump administration’s priorities, CFPB said in its new plan, such as reducing the number of enforcement actions.

“Going forward, exercising its discretion in how to conduct enforcement, the current leadership has green-lit certain investigations that continue to align with its priorities,” the bureau said. “But their number and scope also do not require the Enforcement Division staffing at the current levels.”

While the attorneys said the plan amounted to the “particularized assessment” a federal judge previously found the bureau failed to make and demonstrated exactly how each division would meet its statutory requirements, employees said the staffing figures seemed arbitrary.

“How those numbers were arrived at, nobody knows,” one CFPB worker said. “Many statutorily required functions appear to have no employees remaining after a possible RIF.”

Another employee said CFPB could have laid off the majority of staff by now if it had simply followed normal procedures for doing so.

“There’s no logic in anything they do,” the staffer said.

Cat Farman, president of the National Treasury Employees Union chapter that represents CFPB employees called the agency’s assertion that it can carry out all of its duties with one-third the staff “laughable” and “an insult to the intelligence of the judges.”

“This is [acting CFPB Director Russ] Vought’s latest half-baked shutdown plan in his tiresome quest to destroy the CFPB via mass layoffs,” Farman said. “Everyone knows Vought doesn’t want CFPB to exist at all.”

Employees are still working, though they said they are doing so with diminished workloads. Late last year, CFPB attempted to defund the agency and warned employees widespread furloughs would result. The original district court judge on the case prevented that action, however, and funding has since been restored.

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Top Oversight Dem criticizes OPM’s forced distribution plan for federal worker appraisals

Erich Wagner — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:58:42 -0400

The highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee last week urged the Office of Personnel Management to rescind its controversial plan to drastically limit how many federal workers are eligible for top annual performance ratings, arguing the move would impede, rather than facilitate, better agency performance.

Last month, OPM formally proposed regulations that would formally lift the prohibition on the “forced distribution” of performance ratings, meaning agencies would be permitted to set quotas for how many employees could receive each rating. Despite the prohibition still being in place, federal workers widely reported being subjected to forced distributions during their annual reviews last fall. The Trump administration implemented a similar change for members of the Senior Executive Service last year.

In a letter to OPM Director Scott Kupor, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., warned that the measure is likely to reduce employee collaboration and hamper agencies’ mission delivery, rather than reward outstanding achievement and better motivate workers, as the dedicated HR agency has argued. Within government, employees tasked by their agencies with reviewing OPM’s proposal prior to its publication criticized it almost unanimously as counter to merit systems principles and likely to cause conflict within the workplace.

“The latest research indicates that forced distribution systems are likely to degrade, rather than enhance, organizational performance by effectively pitting employees against one another in open competition, reducing incentives for collaboration and knowledge-sharing,” Garcia wrote. “Consistent with these findings, many large companies including Microsoft and General Electric have abandoned forced ranking systems after concluding that such systems damage morale and overall performance.”

Garcia argued that forced distribution systems would violate federal law requiring that performance appraisal systems at federal agencies must evaluate employees based on objective metrics—a quota or ranking system necessarily constitutes a relative metric. And he noted that the agency did not meaningfully explain why OPM is abandoning its long-held assertion that forced distribution is antithetical to good performance management, a requirement when changing federal regulations.

“By design, forced ranking systems overlook objective evaluation of job performance in favor of relative (and potentially subjective) worker rankings, and as such, it remains unclear how this approach could consistently produce ratings that reflect actual job performance rather than artificially imposed quota-based targets,” he wrote. “Further, OPM acknowledges it previously rejected forced distribution as ‘incompatible with effective performance management.’ The current proposal does not substantively engage with that prior determination nor explain why the underlying concerns no longer apply. As such, the proposed rule lacks basic justification.”

The public comment period for OPM’s proposal closed last week.

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A federal office designed to stave off the next financial crisis is being dismantled by the Trump administration

Eric Katz — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:59:58 -0400

The Trump administration is looking to lay off staff—after already pushing out nearly half of the workforce—at a small federal office with a daunting mission: providing analysis to stave off the next financial crisis.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research began President Trump’s second term with 196 employees. It now has about 100 and is looking to get down to 70, according to a current and former employee and documents obtained by Government Executive. OFR leadership informed staff earlier this month that it would institute reductions in force in the coming weeks, after which the office will have shed about 64% of its workforce since last January.

“I think it’s scary and concerning,” said one employee still remaining at OFR. “We are already a small office but we have people who are focused on a number of different areas…that are crucial for the functioning of the U.S. economy.”

Trump previously laid off dozens of OFR staff in his first term, though staffing was slowly rebuilt under the Biden administration.

Congress initially stood up the office as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to collect data and publish analysis related to potential risks to the financial sector and the U.S. economy. It reports to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a separate entity within Treasury made up of various regulators in government.

Congressional Republicans sought to essentially eliminate OFR entirely as part of last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, saying the office was duplicative and FSOC can conduct its own research. The Senate parliamentarian ultimately ruled the provision could not be included in the bill due to the mechanism lawmakers were using to pass it.

Congress created OFR in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis to address the lack of data that precipitated it. Last June, a group of more than 50 former Federal Reserve chairs, other former government officials and academics released a letter in support of OFR, noting it fills critical research gaps and offers key insights into economic risks.

“History shows that financial crises have high socio-economic costs and that the economic recovery from such crises tends to be protracted,” they said. “Defunding or significantly downsizing the OFR and its financial data and analytics would be a mistake, particularly so given today’s elevated macro-financial uncertainties.”

Democrats in Congress similarly said the moves were ill-advised.

“As risks emerge in the financial system and cracks in credit markets spread, the Trump administration is gutting the office designed to evaluate financial risks in a giveaway to Wall Street,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, told Government Executive. “This is just the latest move by President Trump and his financial regulators to undermine financial stability and pave the way for another crash.”

OFR management first told employees of its layoff plans early last year before offering multiple rounds of “deferred resignation” that enabled employees to sit on paid leave for several months before leaving government. The RIFs were postponed on multiple occasions by various litigation, but the administration now has the green light to move forward. Most agencies appeared to have shelved layoff plans after the federal government pushed out more than 300,000 employees through attrition and separation incentives, but OFR is resuming its efforts.

Treasury officially sent notice of the upcoming RIFs to staff on March 2, saying OFR is "transitioning to [a] new organization structure" and "a significant number of positions will be abolished." Lincoln Foran, who is currently serving as OFR’s director, called a town hall meeting with staff with one hour’s notice to inform employees of the plans. Foran had recently joined OFR and his announcement was the first time he had addressed the workforce. He sought to empathize with employees by telling them it was a tough situation, but one he understood because his father worked at Bear Stearns, an investment banking firm that failed during the 2008 financial crisis.

“The line did not go over as he intended,” an employee present said.

The layoffs are expected to take effect by mid-May. Employees were provided another opportunity to take a “deferred resignation,” meaning they would sit on paid leave through September before leaving the agency.

OFR is funded by fees levied on large financial institutions, meaning cuts to the office does not contribute to deficit reduction. The agency told employees that Treasury’s decision to shrink its budget in fiscal 2026 necessitated the layoffs.

“OFR is supposed to be an early warning system for problems in the financial system, and they don’t want that early warning system,” the current employee said of the Trump administration’s motives. “They don’t want those risks being pointed out.”

Treasury did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

The office’s statutory requirement makes it difficult to eliminate entirely, but the administration has worked to limit the publication of data and written products. The data team has already seen its staff reduced to just a few people due the mass exodus that occurred last year, a current and former employee said. Other teams have been cut in half or more.

“We talk about shining light into financial areas that aren’t often exposed,” one employee said of the agency’s mission, “and that’s not seen as a plus.”

The employee stressed that their work is not redundant to that done at other agencies, but instead conducted to support their work.

“It’s going to be a loss to the financial world when we are essentially kneecapped,” they said. It’s going to be more difficult to get the work done, and I think that's the plan. That’s the desired goal.”

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‘Blatant disrespect’: Judge contemplates contempt proceedings after VA re-terminated union contract

Erich Wagner — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:36:44 -0400

A federal judge in Rhode Island on Friday moved to enforce her court order earlier this month requiring the Veterans Affairs Department to restore its contract with the American Federation of Government Employees and warned of possible contempt proceedings, after the department tried to terminate the agreement a second time Thursday.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose issued a preliminary injunction mandating the VA to reinstate its CBA with AFGE, having found that the department’s August termination of the contract violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act. But last week, the union reported that while the department had technically reinstated their collective bargaining agreement, management still refused to honor any of the contract’s provisions.

On Thursday night, on the eve of a hearing on the union’s request that the judge enforce her decision, the VA issued a new notice stating that it had again terminated AFGE’s CBA and claimed that action made the court proceedings related to its original termination last August moot.

“I think, because of the VA’s retermination of the CBA last night, this plaintiff’s motion to enforce here is moot,” said Tyler Becker, an attorney at the Justice Department. “[Nothing] at this point suggests that [AFGE is] challenging the retermination or anything that would allow this court to enjoin the retermination. Given the changed factual circumstances, in addition to the clarification order Monday, this motion to enforce is moot.”

Travis Silva, an attorney representing the union, argued that the move was an intentional end-run around the judge’s order. He noted that the department’s attorneys described at length both what compliance with an injunction would entail, including the collection of dues and participation in grievance proceedings, and virtually none of those steps had been taken by management.

“The fact that there is defiance I don’t think is reasonably in dispute,” he said. “We’ve laid out the many ways in which the Department of Veterans Affairs is not complying with the master [collective bargaining] agreement. They talked over and over in their briefings and in oral argumetns what substantive compliance looks like—it was their irreparable harm argument, it was in their balance of the equities argument—it was there for the court. They understand what compliance looks like and they simply aren’t doing it.”

DuBose agreed. In addition to issuing a new order to enforce compliance of the injunction, with a requirement that the department prove it has done so to the court by April 1, she ordered the agency to submit arguments by Tuesday spelling out why the department should not be held in contempt of court for a “blatant violation” of the initial injunction.

“There is a process that the defendants certainly could follow to seek redress from either a higher court to stay my preliminary order or seek a rehearing because of changed circumstances—none of that happened here,” she said. “There was a late-night refiling of a retermination, which throws everything this court attempted to do and clarify into chaos. For yout o suggest that all the work done prior to this retermination is mooted out and we kind of disregard it is really a blatant disrespect for not just this court’s order but for the rule of law.”

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

"VA workers did not choose this fight—the Trump administration brought it to them," she said. "VA employees come to work every day focused on one thing: serving veterans. They deserve a voice in their workplace. The judge’s consideration of contempt for the VA’s attempt to avoid compliance and disregard the court’s order further demonstrates how little this administration cares for the frontline workers serving and protecting our veterans. The NVAC will not rest until every VA facility in this country is honoring our union contract."

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