Posts tagged OPM
Trump strips civil service protections from thousands of workers
June 8, 2026 // The reclassification is part of a wider campaign by Trump to downsize the civil service and realign it toward his policy goals. The administration has developed rules to have federal employees sign nondisclosure agreements, extend suitability standards, end certain layoff protections, cap performance ratings and weaken safeguards for probationary workers. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told reporters the administration needs people in policy-making positions willing to carry out the president’s directives. It doesn’t matter what political views those federal employees may have, he said. “But if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives of the administration, then this provides a mechanism, obviously, for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will,” Kupor said.
Trump administration proposes having all federal workers sign NDAs
May 28, 2026 // But the federal workforce’s largest union, the American Federation of Government Employees, decried the draft as an attempt to silence staffers, noting the proposal “sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information.” The union said it believes the administration will push agencies to require their employees to sign the NDA and then fire those who refuse.
Federal union projects to lose ‘tens of thousands’ of members, court filing shows
April 26, 2026 // The National Treasury Employees Union said in a filing Thursday that President Donald Trump’s April 2025 executive order on exclusions from federal labor-management relations programs and subsequent Office of Personnel Management rulemaking has resulted in “irreparable harm” to the labor group. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit previously ruled that harm of that kind was merely “speculative because [the harms] would materialize only after an agency terminates a collective-bargaining agreement.” Since the appeals court issued that opinion in May 2025, OPM told agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreements with the NTEU, and nine agencies have issued letters doing just that, according to the new court filing. Roughly half of the workers that NTEU represented before Trump’s order came from these agencies, the labor group said.
DoD moves to end most collective bargaining agreements
April 17, 2026 // While court orders temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to rescind collective bargaining rights from federal employees in some cases, a recent administration memo urged agencies to move forward with implementing the executive order.
VA re-terminates AFGE contract for 300K employees, despite court order to restore it
March 30, 2026 // The Office of Personnel Management initially told agencies to hold off on terminating labor contracts with unions while legal challenges were still pending. But OPM reversed course last month, when it advised agencies to proceed with either amending or fully canceling their collective bargaining agreements. In granting her preliminary injunction, DuBose wrote that she did not determine whether the Trump administration exceeded its legal authority when it issued its executive orders rolling back collective bargaining rights. The legality of the executive order is still under review by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
The Trump administration paid these employees not to work for more than a year. It just called them back
March 26, 2026 // “The department made the choice to bring these employees back to work to focus on other, non-DEI related tasks,” the spokesperson said. “To be good stewards of taxpayer money, it was common-sense to repurpose these employees to carry out the department's mission. We are proud to say the department will no longer push a woke agenda like DEI initiatives which were designed in the previous administration to divide America.” In the intervening year, employees who did not seek other employment frequently felt like they were on the verge of losing theirs. “The year has been marked with depression and anxiety,” the employee said. “We would hear rumblings that something would happen ‘soon’ but that would be said several times and nothing would happen.”
Social Security ordered to restore telework; EPA and NASA roll back collective bargaining
March 15, 2026 // A provision in AFGE’s collective bargaining agreement with SSA gives agency management “sole discretion to temporarily change, reduce, or suspend approved telework day(s) for any employee(s), office, component, or agency-wide due to operational needs.” The contract also gives agency management sole discretion to change, reduce, or suspend approved telework for any employee due to their performance.
Trump administration wants to streamline federal worker layoffs
March 10, 2026 // The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR arm, published a proposed rule Thursday that it says will streamline the layoff process and put a new emphasis on job performance rankings rather than seniority. The new proposal will now undergo a 60-day comment period and has already faced pushback from the largest federal workers’ union, which has argued that the performance review system has been manipulated to cap how many employees receive high rankings.
OPM to tighten reins on federal employees’ performance reviews
February 26, 2026 // In proposed regulations issued Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management outlined plans for removing a current ban on a “forced distribution” of federal employee performance evaluations. Once finalized, the regulations would lead to limits on how many employees can be ranked as high performers in their annual reviews.
Vernuccio Op-ed: Trump Reveals True Cost of Federal Collective Bargaining
February 23, 2026 // Bottom line: Taxpayers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, not on core government functions, but simply dealing with federal labor unions. What, exactly, are they bargaining over? For the most part, federal unions can’t bargain over wages or benefits. Instead, as my organization has found, taxpayers are funding negotiations that neither benefit federal workers nor have anything to do with serving the public. Case in point: One federal union bargained with the government over whether employees could wear spandex to work. The union argued that wearing spandex was a fundamental right. Taxpayers covered the cost of such absurd discussions.