FedFam

09/14/2026

Shout out to all the 0560s dealing with the end of the fiscal year! ❤️💸

09/14/2026

☀️ Good morning Fam!! September 14, 2026. 56 days until Open Season.

A federal judge ruled Friday that DHS broke the law when it moved to cut FEMA's workforce in half. The opinion is worth reading closely, including the part about deleted messages.

📍 The core finding: Judge Susan Illston found DHS "unlawfully usurped the authority" of FEMA "to make its own personnel decisions." The law at the center is the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, passed in 2005 after the government's response to that storm, which says the department "may not substantially or significantly reduce the authorities, responsibilities, or functions of" FEMA.

📍 What DHS did: Directed FEMA leadership to plan for a 50 percent staffing cut, and stripped FEMA of its longstanding authority to renew CORE appointments, the Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery Employees hired on two to four year terms to work across disasters rather than one at a time. Thousands had already received notices their positions would not be renewed.

📍 The line that will get quoted: On the target of 11,383 employees for the coming fiscal year, roughly half the workforce at the time, Illston wrote, "Frankly, the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air." She found DHS acted arbitrarily and capriciously, adding that "there is no evidence in the record reflecting reasoned decision-making for this about-face."

📍 And the detail every federal employee should notice: "Supervisors within FEMA, and FEMA's Chief Human Capital Officer at the time, did not agree with the 50% staffing cut." The career people said no. It happened anyway. The court also found FEMA itself acted unlawfully, through a former official, by accepting DHS control over those decisions.

📍 The Signal problem: The court found that senior FEMA and DHS officials discussed staffing through Signal on personal phones, with auto-delete settings that erased messages within one to four weeks. The judge described the deletions as intentional and said they complicated her review of how the staffing targets were developed. One unresolved question in the case is simply where the 50 percent figure came from.

📍 What happens next: Illston did not order a specific remedy. She directed both sides to meet and work out relief. This is part of the larger AFGE-led litigation challenging the workforce reductions.

📍 FEMA's position, stated fairly: A spokesperson said the agency is ready for the 2026 hurricane season, that it maintains a roster of experienced leadership and support staff across headquarters and regional offices, and that no position is without experienced leadership. The agency declined to comment on personnel matters and ongoing litigation.

📍 Why this matters beyond FEMA: The ruling turns on a simple idea. When Congress writes a statute placing authority with a specific agency, a parent department cannot quietly take that authority for itself. That reasoning could reach other agencies with similar statutory protections.

📍 And the timing: This landed during hurricane season, at an agency GAO already found had shed roughly 4,500 employees in 18 months without ever assessing what capacity it needed to keep.

To the CORE reservists who got a non-renewal notice and have been in limbo since: a federal judge just said that was unlawful. Watch for what the remedy looks like.

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🔗 thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/6086363-trump-fema-cuts-illegal-federal-judge/

09/13/2026

☀️ Good morning Fam!! September 13, 2026. 57 days until Open Season.

A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled Friday that agencies have to stop asking job applicants which Trump executive order matters most to them.

📍 What the question was: OPM's Merit Hiring Plan, issued in May 2025, added four essay questions to most federal job applications. The third asked applicants how they would advance the president's policies and to name an executive order or initiative "significant to" them. It applied to every federal job at GS-5 and above.

📍 What the judge found: District Judge George O'Toole concluded the question likely violates applicants' First Amendment rights. His reasoning is worth reading closely. "The plain language of Question Three calls for the applicant's personal views on a political topic, and directly links that personal view to the duties of the desired civil service job."

📍 And the detail that decided it: OPM's own guidance said answers should not be used as an ideological litmus test. The judge pointed out that this limitation appears nowhere in the question as applicants actually see it. In other words, the government knew the line existed and did not put it where the people answering could see it.

📍 What convinced him it was real harm: A sworn declaration from an AFGE member who said she felt compelled to give an answer contrary to her own views, because she believed either not answering or answering honestly would hurt her application. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

📍 The government's procedural argument, and why it failed: Administration attorneys argued the unions should have gone through the FLRA or the MSPB first and appealed from there. O'Toole disagreed, finding the constitutional claims were "wholly collateral" to those processes, since the alleged injury happens when the question is asked, regardless of whether anyone gets hired.

📍 What the ruling does not do. This is important. The judge stayed the question going forward, so agencies must stop asking it while the litigation continues. But he found he could not stop agencies from considering answers they have already collected. His logic was consistent with the unions' own framing, since they argued the injury occurs independent of any hiring decision. So if you already answered it, that answer is still in your file.

📍 The reactions: AFGE President Everett Kelley said federal employees should be hired based solely on their ability to do the job, not their allegiance to any administration. Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, which helped litigate the case, framed it as reaffirming a century of merit-based hiring.

📍 What this means practically: If you are applying for a federal job right now, that question should not appear. If it does, screenshot it and tell your union. And if you are helping a laid-off colleague through an application, this is worth passing along.

📍 One honest caveat: This is a stay pending litigation, not a final ruling. The case continues, and an appeal is likely.

The question is off the application. For now.

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🔗 govexec.com/workforce/2026/09/judge-halts-favorite-eo-question-federal-job-applications/415952/

09/12/2026

☀️ Good morning Fam!! September 12, 2026. 58 days until Open Season. Weekend roundup.

Two numbers this week: October 5, when the Douglas factors disappear, and 2.67 million, which is the smallest this workforce has been since 1966. Here is your week.

📍 The Douglas factors are finished as of October 5. The MSPB published its final rule September 3 ending 45 years of the 12-point framework used to judge whether a penalty fit the offense. Going forward the board applies a reasonableness standard instead. Parties can still raise individual considerations, but agencies no longer have to address them all, and the board can no longer overturn an otherwise reasonable penalty because the analysis was incomplete. It applies to appeals filed on or after that date. One warning worth taking seriously: InformedFed expects this to be misapplied at the agency level, because so many senior labor relations specialists left through the buyouts.
🔗 Federal News Network / FEDweek / InformedFed — September 3-8, 2026

📍 The federal workforce is now 2.67 million, the smallest since May 1966. That is from the BLS August employment report. The pace of reductions has slowed considerably compared to last year, but the cumulative effect puts the workforce more than 270,000 below where it stood in January 2025. The next figure comes in the September jobs report on October 2.
🔗 Bureau of Labor Statistics / OPM / FedSmith — September 6, 2026

📍 Bump and retreat is gone, and this one deserves your attention. OPM's first implementation guidance on the new RIF rules clarifies what replaced it. Under the old system, an employee facing layoff could displace a lower-ranked colleague in the same competitive area under defined conditions. Now you get assignment rights to a qualifying position held by someone with lower retention standing in your same tenure group. That is a significantly narrower set of places to land, and the downward displacement option is gone. RIF appeals go to OPM, not the MSPB.
🔗 FEDweek / Federal News Network — September 8, 2026

📍 The pay freeze is still not locked in. FedSmith laid out two ways it could still become a raise before the December executive order. Congress can override it through appropriations, which is exactly what happened in 2019 when a Democratic House passed a 1.9 percent increase that Trump signed. And OPM's special rate authority can be used outside the alternative pay plan, which is how law enforcement got 3.8 percent. Nothing is final until that executive order is signed.
🔗 FedSmith / Government Executive — September 9, 2026

📍 One year after GPO and WEP repeal, here is who actually benefited. The biggest winners were long-career CSRS employees with substantial Social Security earnings from earlier private sector work, and surviving spouses of CSRS retirees whose survivor benefits had been offset entirely. FERS retirees saw little direct change, since they pay full Social Security taxes and were generally not subject to either provision.
🔗 FEDweek — September 9, 2026

📍 Emergency leave transfer is open for the Washington wildfires. If you were affected by the fires, colleagues across government can donate annual leave to you. Check OPM's memo for the covered locations and ask your HR office how to apply. If you have leave to give, ask how to donate.
🔗 Federal Managers Association / OPM — September 8, 2026

📍 And a retirement distinction that costs people real money. Deferring a FERS retirement means leaving before you meet the age and service requirements and collecting later, and it permanently costs you FEHB coverage. Postponing means leaving after you meet the minimums but delaying the annuity start to avoid a penalty, and it lets you keep FEHB. Choosing wrong can leave you buying private insurance during the gap before Medicare.
🔗 FEDweek — September 8, 2026

📍 One more, on safety. A TIGTA report found the IRS records most threats against employees on time but needs to improve how it communicates reporting requirements to staff and managers. IRS employees face an elevated threat environment, and that guidance matters.
🔗 FEDweek / TIGTA — September 8, 2026

A lot moved this week. We read all of it so you do not have to.

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09/11/2026

New Substack.

Twenty-five years later, the federal workforce is still carrying September 11.

09/11/2026

☀️ Good morning Fam. September 11, 2026. Twenty-five years.

At 9:37 that morning the Pentagon was an office, full of people who had gotten coffee and sat down to an ordinary Tuesday. Budget analysts were working spreadsheets, personnel specialists were pushing paperwork, and somebody was fixing a login. One hundred twenty-five people inside were killed, and a lot of them did the same unglamorous federal work that fills buildings in every state in this country.

📍 Who got there first: Arlington County firefighters, alongside crews from Fort Myer, which means the nation's military headquarters was saved by a county fire department. Behind them came FBI agents working the largest crime scene in American history, FEMA search and rescue teams from across the country, medical examiners who spent months on identification, and people who went back into a burning building for coworkers.

📍 The part that never ended: The World Trade Center Health Program, run by NIOSH inside the CDC, now cares for more than 130,000 responders and survivors, and more people have died from 9/11-related illness than died that day. Somebody at NIOSH is reviewing a cancer certification this morning and somebody at DOJ is processing a claim for a widow, which is twenty-five years of quietly taking care of the people who were standing underneath it.

📍 What got rebuilt afterward: DHS was assembled out of 22 separate agencies, TSA hired and trained more than 50,000 screeners inside a year, and the intelligence community, the FBI, disaster response, and information sharing were all redesigned by career civil servants who wrote the rules, built the systems, and absorbed the criticism when things went wrong.

📍 The people still at the desk: A twenty-five-year-old GS-9 that morning is fifty today and has served under five presidents, having watched it on a break room television, gone back to work, and kept going back through every shutdown, every reorganization, and every hard year since, including this one.

📍 What we want to say: If you were in federal service that day, this community is thinking about you, and if you lost coworkers, twenty-five years does not make it any shorter. And if you are a TSA officer standing at a checkpoint today, in a job that exists because of that morning, every day it does not happen again is partly because you were standing there.

The news will be here tomorrow. Today is for remembering.

🇺🇸💙

09/10/2026

🌙 Good evening Fam. September 10, 2026. The Law Nobody Told You About.

🚨 Worth noting who wrote this: Joshua Gotbaum, who ran the PBGC under Obama, and Sean O'Keefe, who ran NASA under George W. Bush and was Navy Secretary under his father. A Democrat and a Republican, writing together.

There is a federal statute that protects you if you are ever ordered to do something illegal. It passed Congress unanimously. It was signed by President Trump in 2017. And most federal employees have never heard of it.

📍 What it is: The Follow the Rules Act, which amended the prohibited personnel practices statute. Under it, you cannot be fired, demoted, or sanctioned in any way for refusing to carry out an order that would violate the Constitution, a statute, an agency rule, an appropriation, or a federal regulation.

📍 Who is telling you this: A Brookings piece published today by Joshua Gotbaum, who led the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation under President Obama, and Sean O'Keefe, who ran NASA under President George W. Bush and served as Secretary of the Navy. A Democrat and a Republican making the same argument, which is fitting for a law that passed unanimously.

📍 The limit, and this is the most important part: This is not about policy disagreement. The law does not let you refuse an order because you dislike the policy behind it, or because you think a different approach would work better. That is not what it covers, and treating it that way will not end well for you.

📍 The second limit: Your own belief that an order is unlawful is not the final word either. That determination ultimately gets made by the MSPB, or by a military court for service members. The protection exists, but somebody else decides whether it applied.

📍 Where the authors connect it: Every federal employee swears an oath to faithfully discharge the duties of the office, and that oath requires compliance with the nation's laws. Their point is that the obligation does not change from administration to administration. It is the same oath whoever is in the building.

📍 If you are ever in that position, you have places to turn: The Rise Up Federal Workers Legal Defense Network. The Orders Project. The Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale. Your union. And you can file a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel or the MSPB. The authors note plainly that both of those agencies have been weakened, and we have reported on that here repeatedly, so go in with clear eyes.

📍 On the Supreme Court question people keep asking: The authors address it directly. Trump v. Slaughter, which held that the president may generally remove heads of independent agencies at will, may or may not eventually reach lower-level employees. But it does not give anyone the right to order an illegal act, and it does not excuse anyone from refusing one. The Follow the Rules Act still applies.

📍 Their closing argument, and it is a fair one: It takes real courage to refuse an unlawful order, because people fear for their reputation, their job, and sometimes worse. Some employees have simply quit rather than comply. How many more would have stood their ground if they had known the law was behind them?

📍 Our practical note: If you ever find yourself in this situation, get advice before you act, put your concerns in writing, keep copies outside government systems, and involve your union or an attorney early. The protection is real. Using it well requires documentation.

Most of you will never need this. Everyone should know it exists.

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🔗 brookings.edu/articles/when-told-to-break-the-law-must-feds-just-follow-orders/

09/10/2026

🥪 The Half Hour. September 10, 2026. Ten Days to Write It.

Take your break, Fam. The rating cycle closes September 20. Here is how to actually write the thing.

📍 Why this matters more than it used to: Calibration panels are new this year, and they are made up of people who have never met you. Executives, senior managers, HR, officials from other units. OPM's own manual tells them to find "defensible distinctions among high performers" and asks whether distinctions can be "documented objectively." Whatever you write is your entire representation in that room.

📍 Write to the four questions the panel is told to ask. What did you accomplish. What effect did it have. How challenging was it. Did you sustain it across the year or was it one good quarter.

📍 So instead of this: "Provided excellent customer service and consistently met deadlines."

📍 Write this: "Processed 1,340 claims against a unit average of 890, with an error rate under 2 percent. Cleared a 400-case backlog inherited in March while maintaining current workload. Sustained through all four quarters."

📍 Numbers beat adjectives every time. Volume, error rates, dollars saved, days shortened, people trained, backlogs cleared. If you cannot count it, describe the consequence. Who was affected and what would have happened if the work had not been done.

📍 Name the hard part explicitly. Difficulty is one of the criteria, and panels cannot see it from a distance. If you did the work short-staffed, absorbed a departed colleague's portfolio, learned a new system mid-year, or handled something nobody else in the office could do, say so plainly.

📍 Connect it to the mission. Not the vague version. The specific version. Not "supported agency goals" but "kept the certification pipeline moving so 200 applicants were not delayed."

📍 A few practical things: Keep it to accomplishments rather than duties, because your position description already covers duties. Cover the whole year rather than just the last two months, since recency bias is real and works against you. And send it to your supervisor in writing, because your supervisor has to carry your case into a room you will never see, and they can only carry what you gave them.

📍 One honest note. Under the new caps, roughly 30 percent can land in the top two levels, down from about 65 percent in 2024. Excellent work will land at fully successful for a lot of people this year. That is the system, not a verdict on you. Write the best version anyway, because these ratings now weigh more than seniority in RIF retention.

Ten days. Open a blank document tonight.

Back to it, Fam. 💙

09/10/2026

☀️ Good morning Fam!! September 10, 2026. 60 days until Open Season.

Half of all federal firings will run through the new suitability system. That is not the union's number. That is OPM's own estimate, and it is the center of the lawsuit four unions filed this week.

📍 Who is suing: AFSCME, AFGE, NFFE, and IFPTE, with Democracy Forward assisting. They are asking a court to block two OPM rules.

📍 The first rule, on suitability: Published in the Federal Register August 3. It lets OPM decide on its own whether a front-line federal employee is unsuitable for their position and order them removed, taking that decision away from the agency that actually employs the person. The unions argue the standards are broad and subjective enough to reach political speech, which in their view invites removals of employees who speak up.

📍 The second rule, on performance: Published July 7. It replaces measurement against objective standards with rating on a curve. The unions' argument is that large numbers of genuinely high performers will be rated lower for reasons unrelated to their actual performance, which makes them easier to discipline and easier to fire.

📍 Their legal theory: Both rules discard decades of precedent and conflict with the statutes Congress passed to build a merit-based civil service. That is the same statutory-authority argument employment attorneys have said is the strongest line of attack.

📍 AFSCME President Patrick Moran's framing: "The federal workers who keep our food supply safe and air travel secure should be able to do their jobs without worrying about political hacks firing them without cause. They deserve to be evaluated based on whether they are doing a good job for our country, not pitted against one another."

📍 The administration's position, stated fairly: OPM has argued the old performance system was broken, pointing to about 43 percent of employees receiving the top rating in 2024 and roughly 0.3 percent rated below expectations. On suitability, Director Scott Kupor has said the government long had stronger tools to keep misconduct out than to address it once someone is already employed. Reasonable people can hold both of those views and still be uneasy about how much discretion moved to one agency.

📍 Where this stands: Both rules are already in effect. No injunction has been granted. Courts have generally been reluctant to block executive branch personnel rules before ruling on the merits, so do not plan around a win.

📍 What that means for you today: The rating cycle closes September 20 under the new caps, and the calibration panels work from what is written down. Get your accomplishments to your supervisor this week, specific and tied to mission impact. If you face a suitability action, you have 30 days to file with OPM and the review is on the written record, so get an attorney early.

Half of all firings. Worth knowing what system yours would go through.

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🔗 afscme.org/blog/union-lawsuit-challenges-trump-rules-that-harm-federal-workers/

09/10/2026

🌙 Good evening Fam. September 9, 2026. New Chief, Sixty Days Out.

The division that runs Open Season got a new leader yesterday, sixty days before the busiest stretch of its year, right after losing people to a buyout round.

📍 Who is taking over: Matthew Kiley started September 8 as associate director of OPM's healthcare and insurance division. He led the Office of Health Policy at HHS from November 2019 to January 2021, where he worked on eliminating surprise medical billing, drug pricing, and rural health issues, and was involved in allocating ventilators and relief funds during the pandemic response. Before government he founded a management consulting firm serving insurance and healthcare clients, and earlier worked at Aramark, McKinsey, and Berkshire Hathaway's insurance group. That is a real resume for this job.

📍 Who he replaces: Shane Stevens, who announced in May that he was voluntarily stepping down.

📍 The timing is the story. Back on June 30 we told you OPM had offered its own healthcare and insurance employees another round of deferred resignation, ahead of what it called an organizational change. Those who took it went on paid administrative leave at the end of August and will formally separate in March 2027. So the division is thinner now than it was in the spring, and a new leader walked in yesterday.

📍 The agency-wide picture, from GAO: OPM cut its total headcount by 35 percent between December 2024 and March 2026. More than half of the people who left had eleven or more years of service. Nearly 60 percent went through the deferred resignation program. GAO's conclusion was direct, saying the reductions "have reduced institutional knowledge and operational capacity at the agency."

📍 OPM's position, stated fairly: A spokesperson told Government Executive in July that "we feel very confident in our staffing levels and OPM's ability to deliver on a successful open season." Kiley and OPM did not respond to requests for comment on his appointment.

📍 What this means for you practically: Open Season runs November 9 through December 14, and this year every family member addition gets verified by your agency. If there are hiccups anywhere in the system, they will show up in that window, when several million people are trying to make changes at once.

📍 So do the parts you control early. Get your eligibility documents in hand now rather than in December. Make your elections early in the window instead of the last week. And if you are adding a spouse or child, expect the verification step to take time.

📍 And the context that makes this matter: FEHB enrollees paid an average of 12.3 percent more toward premiums this year, PSHB enrollees 11.3 percent. Rates for 2027 have not been announced yet. Whoever is running that division will be delivering that news in about a month.

Sixty days. Get your paperwork together.

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🔗 govexec.com/management/2026/09/opm-new-healthcare-insurance-chief-open-season/415787/