The IRS is moving about 1,000 IT employees out of its tech shop, as part of a reorganization plan that’s been underway for months.

Impacted employees say they have few details about what work they’ll be doing, and have been told by the agency to instead “focus on completing an orderly transition of your current work.” The notice they received last week states that they will no longer be working on IRS IT projects.

According to the notice, obtained by Federal News Network, the reassignments will go into effect on Dec. 28.

“As part of the IRS’s restructuring of the IT organization, approximately 1,000 positions across IRS IT are being reassigned,” the Dec. 11 notice states. “Your position is among those identified for a directed reassignment to the Chief Operating Officer.”

Employees who received the email have until Jan. 9 to complete an “orderly transition.” That includes wrapping up current work, offloading assignments and supporting project handoffs.

“You are not expected to take IRS IT project work with you into the COO organization,” the email states. “IRS IT project work will remain within IRS IT.”

Impacted employees told Federal News Network they’re not sure what kind of work they’ll be doing as part of this reassignment. Federal News Network spoke to four IRS employees. The IRS and the Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.

“While this is a permanent realignment out of the CIO organization, it is not a permanent realignment into COO,” a separate internal document states. “We will be collaborating with the Human Capital Office (HCO) to align and qualify employees for positions across IRS and Treasury.”

Reassigned employees are being asked to upload their resumes no later than Jan. 23, 2026.

Two employees who received reassignment notices told Federal News Network that they also received reduction-in-force notices during the recent government shutdown.

Those RIF notices were rescinded, as part of the stopgap spending bill Congress passed in November, ending the 43-day shutdown. Language in the continuing resolution bars agencies from carrying out layoffs through Jan. 30, 2026.

“Morale at the IRS is at an all-time low, and nobody trusts anyone,” one IRS employee told Federal News Network. “This administration is getting precisely what it wanted — to destroy the IRS from within.”

The IRS told employees that the reassignments “are based on organizational alignment decisions and is not a reflection of individual performance.” The agency notice also states that reassignment will not affect an employee’s pay, benefits or bargaining unit status.

“Still complete chaos, grievances being filed for unfair moves without explanation and just fueled by who you know and connections,” a second IRS employee told Federal News Network.

Last month, IRS IT directed hundreds of its employees to complete a “technical skills assessment.” According to two IRS IT employees, the test, conducted by HackerRank, consisted of several multiple-choice questions and a coding question that made up the majority of the overall grade. One employee said the questions “had zero to do with our jobs.”

“They did this to say, ‘Look, 98% of our people failed, so we are going to move you or RIF you,’” the employee said.

The Treasury Department RIF sent RIF notices to 1,377 employees during the shutdown.  Court filings showed most of those notices went to IRS employees, especially those working in human resources and IT.

Sam Corcos, Treasury’s chief information officer and a Department of Government Efficiency representative, defended the IRS layoffs as “painful” in a recent podcast interview, but said they were a necessary tool to get the agency’s stalled IT modernization efforts back on track.

“It’s very hard to fire people. The only way that you can really reduce the size of government is through the reduction-in-force process,” Corcos said on an Oct. 9 episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast.

During the nearly three-hour interview, Corcos said much of his time as Treasury CIO has been focused on projects at the IRS, and that the agency’s IT workforce doesn’t have the necessary skills to deliver on its long-term modernization goals.

“We’re in the process of recomposing the engineering org in the IRS, which is we have too many people within the engineering function who are not engineers,” he said.

“The goal is, let’s find who our engineers are. Let’s move the people who are not into some other function, and then we’re going to bring in more engineers,” he added.

In March, the IRS removed 50 of its IT leaders from their jobs and put them on paid administrative leave. Corcos defended that decision, saying the IRS “has had poor technical leadership for roughly 40 years.”

During the interview, Corcos said the layoffs in the federal government are more restrictive than what’s allowed in the private sector. In practice, he said government RIFs often result in agencies losing younger employees with in-demand skills, but with less tenure — something he said should be corrected.

“When you do these reductions in force, it’s basically tenure. So it doesn’t matter who your top performers are. It’s effectively irrelevant to a RIF. If you want a 20% RIF, you can your 20% youngest people, who are often your top performers, and you’ve got to remove them,” Corcos said. “I think most people would probably say that performance-based RIFs is probably good instead of tenure-based. I’m sure that’s something people are pushing for, but that would make a really big impact.”

The IRS lost more than 25% of its workforce this year, largely through voluntary incentives, including early retirements and the deferred resignation program. Despite these widespread cuts, Corcos said the agency hasn’t seen “that much fallout yet,” because the agency had increased its staffing “to ahistoric levels” under the Biden administration.

“It’s a scalpel. It’s not a chainsaw,” he said.

The IRS, in a separate memo dated Dec. 15, told staff that it is moving ahead with a reorganization of its IT division, its first major restructuring in more than 20 years. IRS IT is replacing its associate chief information officers with four “mission-focused verticals” and five “foundational areas.”

Those four verticals are:

• Taxpayer Services & Online Accounts: Jim Keith
• Tax Processing: Miji Matthews
• Compliance: Eric Markow
• Filing Season & Legislative Deliver: Craig Drake

The five foundational areas are:

• Strategy & Product Management: Courtney Williams
• Data & Platform Engineering: Rob King
• Infrastructure Tech Ops: Lou Capece
• End User Digital Services: Tanya Chiaravalle
• Cybersecurity: Houman Rasouli

“Each area is designed to support a specific part of the tax administration ecosystem and improve how technology and agency needs come together,” the memo states.

According to the internal notice, IRS IT has about 5,100 full-time employees. The agency wrote that reorganization offers a “simplified structure that strengthens the connection between technical work and the agency’s core functions.”

IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya told employees this summer that IRS IT needed to “reset and reassess” in part because more than 2,000 IT employees have left the agency this year.

The memo states that approximately 94% of IRS IT employees work in technical roles. The remaining 6% work in operational or support staff roles — including planning, financial, contractual, governance and program work.

The Treasury Department announced in April that it is planning to consolidate IT, human resources, procurement, travel and other administrative functions carried out by multiple offices at its component agencies.

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A federal judge in San Francisco is reversing the terminations of hundreds of federal employees finalized during the recent government shutdown.

A preliminary injuction, signed Wednesday by Judge Susan Illston, orders the departments of Education and State, as well as the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration, to rescind reduction in force notices for employees who were terminated between Oct. 1 and Nov. 12 — the start and end dates of the shutdown.

“Absent a contrary ruling from a higher court,” Illston is giving agencies until Dec. 23 to carry out the terms of her preliminary injunction.

“Defendants must do what the continuing resolution says. They may not take any further steps to implement or carry out a RIF through January 30, 2026, regardless of when the RIF notice first issued,” Illston wrote.

These agencies sent RIF notices to employees before the recent government shutdown. In most cases, separations were scheduled to take effect in October or November, during the shutdown.

The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association, who are leading a lawsuit with other unions, argued agencies that finalized these RIFs during the government shutdown violated a stopgap spending bill passed by Congress that prohibited layoffs through Jan. 30, 2026.

The court issued a temporary restraining order earlier this month that blocked layoffs of nearly 250 Foreign Service officers from being finalized at the State Department. Those layoffs were originally scheduled for Nov. 10, but were pushed back to Dec. 5, and remain on hold.

The Trump administration has followed a narrower interpretation of the stopgap spending bill, and has only reinstated federal employees who received RIF notices between Oct. 1 and Nov. 12.

The continuing resolution Congress passed on Nov. 12 states that between Nov. 12, 2025 and Jan. 30, 2026, “no federal funds may be used to initiate, carry out, implement, or otherwise notice a reduction in force to reduce the number of employees within any department.”

It also states that “any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an executive agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect.”

At a hearing before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Illston said she would grant the preliminary injunction requested by the unions, because the “chaotic nature of these RIFs has been continuing.”

“The continuing resolution, ending the longest shutdown the government has experienced to date, said that no federal funds would be spent RIF-ing people through Jan. 30. But that is not what is happening in some of these agencies,” Illston said.

The judge’s order will impact about 680 total federal employees. That includes nearly 250 Foreign Service officers at the State Department, 200 employees at GSA, 150 at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and nearly 80 at SBA.

During the hearing, Illston said she would consider the Justice Department’s request to delay her preliminary injunction from going into effect for a few days. This would give the Trump administration time to consider whether it will ask a federal appeals court to stay her ruling.

Illston said this would minimize some of the “whiplash” some federal employees have felt in other court cases, in which lower courts have reinstated them, only for an appeals court to allow layoffs to continue.

“They’d have to send a notice, and then another notice, and a notice saying, ‘Forget what we said yesterday.’ It would be terrible,” Illston said.

Brad Rosenberg, a DOJ attorney representing the Trump administration, said that rescinding layoffs now would be “logistically a big lift” for agencies, especially if the courts later allow those RIFs to proceed.

“If a RIF is rescinded, and if this court either decides at final judgment in this case, or if the government were to appeal, and an appellate court were to stay or vacate this Court’s preliminary injunction, government agencies would presumably have to start all over again with that, with that process, and it would be awfully hard to unscramble that egg,” Rosenberg said.

“That’s not going to provide the type of long-term relief that I suspect plaintiffs are seeking here,” he added.

Rosenberg argued that employees should bring their individual cases before the Merit Systems Protection Board. An appeals court recently allowed President Donald Trump to proceed with firing a Democratic member of the MSPB.

“This is merely the administration trying to carry out its policy objectives. And I realize that those policy objectives have consequences for individuals, and that they can be significant consequences, although we do think that those consequences can be remediated through proper channeling to the Merit Systems Protection Board,” he said.

Danielle Leonard, an attorney representing the plaintiff unions, said the “mandate was clear” from Congress, and that agencies should “nullify those RIFs.”

“We have Congress stepping in here and being incredibly clear about what the public interest needs in this very circumstance, and the public interest is in restoring these employees to their employment status and giving them clarity,” Leonard said. “Congress could have just said, ‘Stop.’ Congress could have just said, ‘Halt, let’s just freeze everything.’ They went further than that,” Leonard said.

Leonard said recently separated federal employees face “real and ongoing harm,” including eviction notices and unpaid bills.

“We have seen agencies exploit their lack of communication to keep employees in the dark, to keep them confused. They have not even told them whether they’re still employed when they directly ask. There absolutely has been harm,” she said.

AFGE National President Everett Kelley called Illston’s ruling “another victory for federal employees and for the rule of law.”

“When Congress voted to end the longest government shutdown in history, it spoke clearly and unambiguously that further reductions-in-force were prohibited, and any RIFs that occurred during the shutdown were required to be reversed. The administration’s continued defiance of that mandate is part of a troubling pattern of egregious actions against federal employees and the American public,” Kelley said.

John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, said Congress was clear that “reductions in force were prohibited” when it passed the continuing resolution, and that the administration’s efforts to proceed with RIFs were “unlawful.”

“Today’s ruling confirms this,” Dinkelman said.  “We will continue to fight to ensure that Foreign Service professionals are treated with the respect the law demands.”

The post Federal judge orders reversal of hundreds of layoffs finalized during shutdown first appeared on Federal News Network.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is exploring workarounds to a new Department of Health and Human Services policy, which sets stricter rules on telework as a reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities.

The HHS policy states all requests for telework, remote work, or reassignment must be reviewed and approved by an assistant secretary or a higher-level official — a decision that is likely to slow the approval process.

The new policy, as Federal News Network reported last week, generally restricts employees from using telework as an “interim accommodation,” while the agency processes their reasonable accommodation request. But faced with a backlog of more than 3,000 reasonable accommodation cases, the CDC is taking an ad-hoc approach to granting temporary medical telework.

According to four CDC employees, supervisors have instructed staff to email their medical documentation directly to Lynda Chapman, the agency’s chief operating officer, to “bypass” the traditional reasonable accommodation system, and receive up to 30 days of telework as an interim accommodation.

“The instructions are for you to email her a letter from your doctor, and she will be the judge of if you can telework for up to 30 days,” a CDC employee told Federal News Network.

A second CDC employee shared a photo with Federal News Network showing that Chapman was recently added as an authorized official to review the employee’s reasonable accommodation materials.

“I think this is very problematic, because she really should not be evaluating people’s health needs,” the employee said. “It should be an RA specialist.”

Two CDC employees told Federal News Network that Chapman is only approving interim telework in a few circumstances — including recovery from surgery, pregnancy or chemotherapy.

This week, the CDC hosted a series of “office hours” sessions with supervisors. During these question-and-answer sessions, the agency’s Office of Human Resources gave supervisors more information about the new reasonable accommodation process.

“I was requested to share my medical information via personal email to Lynda Chapman,” a CDC employee wrote in a screengrab of one of these Q&A sessions. “When I questioned her role prior to sending my file, she denied my request.”

Linnet Griffiths, a former senior advisor to CDC’s chief operating officer who left the agency in April, told Federal News Network that the agency had a “robust system” for processing reasonable accommodations, but said many employees who carried out this work were targeted by reductions in force.

“They have gotten rid of all the RA staff and EEO offices, which is extremely disturbing, because the department already had a lot of RA cases, a backlog that was unbelievable. They were understaffed,” Griffiths said.

Griffiths said human resources employees who left CDC and HHS received specialized training to ensure the agency was following “due diligence” when processing reasonable accommodations. That included making sure the agency complied with requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.

“We had in-house doctors that were specifically trained to review that information and approve whether someone should be eligible for full-time telework,” Griffiths said. “The [CDC] chief operating officer or someone that does not have medical expertise reviewing that information was something we would never do.”

Griffiths said that reasonable accommodation requests often took months to get approved during her tenure at CDC, but said the agency granted full-time telework as an interim accommodation, when deemed necessary by an employee’s doctor.

In a readout from one of these “office hours” meetings, obtained by Federal News Network, agency leadership told supervisors that, under the new HHS policy, they cannot approve interim telework requests, even in cases where telework has already been identified “as the only effective accommodation.”

According to the readout, supervisors were told that expiring telework agreements, granted as an interim accommodation, will not be renewed, and that employees will have to either return to the office or use leave. Supervisors were told that these outcomes were “not denials.” Instead, supervisors were instructed to tell employees that telework could not be granted.

“Several supervisors noted this functions like a denial in practice,” the readout states. “Leadership acknowledged legal risks associated with forcing or effectively compelling leave.”

During one of the sessions, multiple supervisors raised concerns that agency guidance conflicts with federal disability law.

“Leadership directed supervisors to stop discussing legal issues during the session, stating it was not the forum for legal discussion, and advised that such concerns should be raised offline through supervisory channels,” the readout states.

According to the readout, when supervisors raised concern about personal legal exposure, leadership advised supervisors to “consider obtaining professional liability insurance.”

“Overall, the call left many supervisors concerned about how to lawfully provide interim accommodations, the lack of written guidance, and how to avoid harm to employees while complying with the direction given,” the readout states.

A CDC spokesperson said in a statement that interim accommodations, including telework, “may be provided while cases move through the reasonable-accommodation process toward a final determination.”

“This has always been the case,” the CDC spokesperson said.

‘Outsized harm’

Several Senate Democrats, in a letter led by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), said the new HHS policy “will inflict outsized harm on workers with disabilities,” including employees with chronic diseases and compromised immune systems.

“The federal government is a major employer of people with disabilities. It is bound by law not to discriminate against those workers and to take steps to increase employment of workers with disabilities,” the senators wrote.

The senators said department employees “have been harmed” by its new reasonable accommodation policy.

The senators wrote that an HHS employee’s telework accommodation because of a high-risk pregnancy was rescinded. On the day she was supposed to report back to the office, she was rushed to the emergency room by ambulance.

Kaine and Warnock said a disabled veteran’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was exacerbated by a shooting at the CDC’s headquarters this summer, but their telework accommodation was denied, approved, then denied again, “leaving them without direction or guidance.”

HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said in a statement that the department “will respond directly to the senators.”

“Interim accommodations, like telework, may be provided while cases move through the reasonable-accommodation process toward a final determination. The Department remains committed to processing these requests as quickly as possible,” Hilliard said.

The post As HHS restricts telework, CDC asks employees to ‘bypass’ reasonable accommodation process first appeared on Federal News Network.

© AP Photo/David Goldman

Federal appeals court judges are weighing what limits, if any, exist for President Donald Trump to classify which agencies are essential to national security, while rolling back collective bargaining rights in the process.

Trump signed an executive order in March ending collective bargaining rights with federal labor unions at a wide swath of agencies, on the grounds that those agencies primarily serve a national security mission. He followed that initial executive order with a second order in August, exempting more agencies from collective bargaining.

Under the 1978 Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute, national security agencies are exempt from collective bargaining.

District courts temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing its collective bargaining rollback. But the appeals court in May allowed agencies to proceed with enforcement.

A majority of the appeals court determined unions didn’t have the legal right to sue because the Trump administration said it wouldn’t end any collective bargaining agreements while the case is being litigated.

But several agencies have eliminated collective bargaining agreements with their unions after the appeals court’s ruling.

In the latest case, the Department of Homeland Security announced last Friday that it would impose a new “labor framework” in January 2026 that would rescind a collective bargaining agreement between the Transportation Security Administration and the American Federation of Government Employees.

Josh Koppel, a Justice Department attorney representing the Trump administration, said the district court “clearly erred,” when it determined President Donald Trump exceeded his authority in rolling back federal workforce collective bargaining rights.

During oral arguments on Monday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Koppel said national security exemptions under the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute are “a determination for the president to make.”

“Whether an executive agency performs national security work is really a question that the president is best situated to determine — with the president’s understanding of the national security threats, with the president’s understanding of how agencies work together, how they work independently to address those threats, and it’s not something that the courts have particular expertise in,” Koppel said.

“The president is the expert. The executive branch is the expert. Congress also, to some extent, in deciding what is necessary,” he added.

Lawmakers, however, are looking to undo the president’s collective bargaining rollback. The House last week passed the Protect America’s Workforce Act, which would restore collective bargaining rights for a majority of federal employees. The entire Democratic Caucus, along with 20 Republicans, voted in favor of the legislation.

Attorneys representing the plaintiff unions argued that the Trump administration has been overly broad with national security exemptions.

Richard Hirn, an attorney representing the American Foreign Service Association, said the rollback of collective bargaining rights for the State Department’s diplomatic workforce contradicts legislation passed by Congress.

“Congress would never have enacted the Foreign Service Labor-Management Relations Statute … if it had any doubts, as a general rule, it would be consistent with national collective bargaining by the Foreign Service officers, would be consistent with national security,” Hirn said.

“Congress knew what the Foreign Service officers were doing,” he added.

Jason Walta, an attorney representing the Federal Education Association, raised concerns that the Trump administration is selectively enforcing its rollback of collective bargaining rights. The executive orders, he added, carve out an exemption for unions that represent federal police officers and firefighters.

“Even those seem to have a fairly crucial national security function — certainly more crucial than the K-12 teachers that I represent,” Walta said.

Among its members, FEA represents teachers at schools run by the Defense Department.

Walta said the administration has been overly broad in applying a national security mission to an entire department, when that designation only applies to a small portion of its programs.

The entire Energy Department falls under executive order, because of its mission to safeguard the nation’s nuclear stockpile. But the subagency within DOE that performs that function is already excluded under a 2008 executive order from President George W. Bush.

“As I understand the government’s argument, the president could exempt the entire federal government, root and branch, and that would be both unreviewable and a proper exercise of the president’s discretion under this provision,” Walta said.

Paras Shah, an attorney representing the National Treasury Employees Union, told the three-judge panel that the executive order “nullifies most of Congress’s comprehensive federal labor relations scheme.”

“He can do it, and the courts can’t do anything about it so long as he invokes the statute’s narrow national security exemption,” he said.

Shah said the executive order rolled back the collective bargaining rights of three-quarters of the federal employees who had them.

“We can’t collectively bargain for them. Their rights are gone,” he said.

Koppel said those statistics “are a little misleading.” Four agencies that fall under the executive order — the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Justice and Homeland Security — make up about 60-70% of the federal workforce.

“When plaintiffs bandy about these numbers, what they’re really talking about in the main is these really core national security agencies,” Koppel said.

The appeals court judges raised several questions about the scope and limits of the president’s discretion to set these national security exemptions to collective bargaining.

“It is a presidential determination, but the statute provides certain criteria for that determination,” Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, said during oral arguments.

Judge Bradley Garcia, a Biden appointee, said the court “ought not to second-guess” Trump’s determination of which agencies fall under the national security category, but added the “concern would be if the record reveals or suggests that the president didn’t make those determinations.”

“We can try to find out what definition the president applied, and if it is an utterly unreasonable definition, we can, in fact, have to step in and set aside this order,” Garcia said.

The executive order excludes the entire Treasury Department from collective bargaining because it affects the economic strength of the United States.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a Reagan administration appointee, questioned whether the Trump administration was taking an overly broad approach to its national security classifications of entire departments.

“Doesn’t the president then have some obligation to specify what really, where really is the primary function, since the consequence is overwhelmingly felt by people who don’t have that?” Ginsburg asked.

Koppel told the judges that because the Treasury secretary serves on the national security council, the department should be considered a national security agency.

“The president could say this agency — Department of Defense, Department of Energy — has as a primary function national security work, and even if there are subdivisions that do not, that is still the primary function of the agency, and the president doesn’t need to go to a lower level,” Koppel said.

However, Koppel also argued that Trump exempted some agency subdivisions from the executive order, demonstrating that the scope of the executive order was not all-encompassing.

“The president clearly was not just looking at one subdivision, saying, ‘They have a primary function of national security. Therefore, I’m going to exclude the entire agency.’ The president did do tailoring,” he said.

Garcia, however, raised some concerns about the scope of that tailoring.

“One reading of that is that the president applied a reading, under which any employee that does anything that promotes the general welfare of the United States is doing national security work,” Garcia said.

“This is my fundamental question: Your arguments about non-reviewability suggest that the president ought to almost always win in a case like this, but the fact that there are statutory terms — national security, primary — that can be judicially reviewed in edge cases means that your threshold argument that courts never review any determination under the statute is at least on a shaky ground,” he added.

Before getting into the merits of the case, Koppel argued that these cases challenging the breadth of the executive orders should be first heard by the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

“FLRA has jurisdiction to consider whether these agencies are properly excluded from the provisions of the FSMLRS,” Koppel said.

The FLRA often adjudicates whether individual employees perform national security work to determine whether or not an employee can be part of a collective bargaining unit.

Shah said the FLRA is not well-suited to judge whether the executive orders exceed the president’s authority.

Last year, in its ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court struck down a precedent that required courts to defer to federal agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws.

“It’s never decided whether an executive order like this is valid or not, so it cannot apply its distinctive knowledge to that question — especially in this day and age, post-Loper Bright, where anything it says will not get deference in any event,” Shah said.

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The State Department is retroactively promoting hundreds of additional Foreign Service employees, after unilaterally changing the criteria and the panels of individuals who oversee this process.

The American Foreign Service Association said the department recently carried out these retroactive promotions, as part of “targeted administrative actions.”

Earlier this year, the State Department eliminated an employee’s contributions to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) goals from the criteria for promotion within the Foreign Service. Instead, the department said it would vet Foreign Service employees on their “fidelity” to the Trump administration’s policies.

AFSA President John Dinkelman said the State Department retroactively promoted 200 Foreign Service employees, based on these new criteria.

In a departure from past practice, Dinkelman said the State Department isn’t sharing the names of employees receiving these promotions, or the names of those who served on Foreign Service promotion boards.

“We have no idea who made these decisions,” Dinkelman said, adding that the State Department made these “unprecedented changes to the process” without consulting AFSA.

Dinkelman said that the level of transparency is important to ensure the promotion recommendations are unbiased.

The State Department’s inspector general’s office reported in May 2022 that human resources employees frequently gave spots on Foreign Service promotion boards to family members and friends. According to the report, several employees raised concerns that certain board selections amounted to “nepotism and favoritism.”

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in a statement that the Biden administration “imposed ideological litmus tests on civil servants, penalizing competent and deserving government employees in the process.”

“Under President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the State Department rewards excellence, which is the right thing to do for our workforce, for our country, and for the American people,” Pigott said.

In July, the State Department unveiled new criteria for promotions and career advancement in the Foreign Service. Among the changes, the department will assess employees on their “fidelity” to the Trump administration’s policy goals.

The department’s newly released “core precepts” for tenure and promotion will grade Foreign Service on five criteria — fidelity, communication, leadership, management and knowledge.

Previous versions of this scorecard placed greater emphasis on subject matter expertise and assessing an employee’s contributions to DEIA goals.

“The derivative effects of this mean that some poor individual, who actually played by the rules and who fairly demonstrated their adherence to principles that are now distanced by the government, was not promoted, and somebody else has been now placed in front of them in the line,” Dinkelman said.

The department no longer recognizes AFSA as a union, following executive orders that scaled back collective bargaining rights for a majority of the federal workforce.

The State Department’s human resources bureau releases new precepts every three years, outlining the most important qualities Foreign Service officers must demonstrate to advance to higher ranks.

As part of a newly added “fidelity” standard, Foreign Service employees across all ranks will be evaluated on their contributions to “protecting and promoting executive power.”

The fidelity portion of the scorecard links to a White House webpage listing President Donald Trump’s executive orders and presidential actions.

The Bureau of Global Talent Management says that mid-level Foreign Service officers should be able to demonstrate how they are “zealously executing” U.S. government policy.

AFSA also raised concerns in August, when the State Department promoted several Foreign Service officers who received reduction-in-force notices earlier that summer.

The union said the promotion of laid-off diplomats suggested the department may have dismissed some of its top performers.

The State Department sent RIF notices to nearly 1,350 employees in July.

Of those, nearly 250 were Foreign Service officers currently stationed in the U.S. A federal judge in San Francisco has temporarily blocked the State Department from officially separating these employees.

Shortly after sending those layoff notices, the Foreign Service resumed hiring. By the end of January, the Foreign Service will have made enough hires to replace those who received RIF notices.

In September, it brought on a class of more than 100 new Foreign Service officers. This month, another 70 new hires were brought on to serve a five-year appointment as non-career consular fellows.

Dinkelman said that in January, the Foreign Service is scheduled to hire another class of 160 new Foreign Service officers.

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Early in the Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency directed the General Services Administration to cancel hundreds of leases for governmentwide office space.

GSA officials say they successfully terminated hundreds of leases this year, but far fewer than goals set by DOGE.

The latest data from the Government Accountability Office shows GSA carried out 260 lease terminations, saving about $112 million in annual costs. GAO’s findings match up with data available on DOGE’s website. Several sources, including employees at GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told Federal News Network that overall, the agency finalized about 30% of the approximately 900 lease terminations it sent to landlords earlier this year.

GSA began its mass termination of governmentwide leases in the early days of the Trump administration. But by March, the agency began walking back hundreds of those lease terminations, after officials discovered that closing down these offices would impact public-facing benefits and services.

These updated figures come at a time when government officials are taking stock of DOGE’s impact, and whether agencies came close to achieving the Trump administration’s government efficiency goals.

Former DOGE leader Elon Musk told former DOGE spokeswoman Katie Miller in a recent interview that DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts were “somewhat successful,” but said he wouldn’t do it over again.

“We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful,” he told Miller.

Andrew Heller, GSA’s acting Public Buildings Service Commissioner, told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that the agency disposed of 90 properties owned by the federal government in fiscal 2025, eliminating 3 million square feet from the government’s real estate portfolio.

Heller told lawmakers that GSA has identified another 45 properties for “accelerated” disposal. But GSA hasn’t updated its list of properties since May.

“The government no longer needs, nor can it afford to maintain the amount of real estate it currently owns. With your support and with the necessary resources, GSA is well-positioned to right-size the portfolio to support this shared goal,” Heller said at a public buildings subcommittee hearing.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers praised GSA for its cost-cutting efforts, but agreed it still faces major work in shrinking the federal government’s massive real estate portfolio.

“That’s an achievement, but there was also significant chaos and mixed messaging surrounding the disposal of buildings and the termination of leases,” Committee Ranking Member Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) said at Thursday’s hearing.

Subcommittee Ranking Member Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) called DOGE a “textbook example of what happens when you chase cuts without understanding value.”

“It drove federal property decisions at a speed and scale that outran planning operational needs and basic due diligence. Agencies were told to vacate buildings before replacement space was ready. These decisions were driven by targets and assumptions, not by reliable, validated information about how federal space was being used or which functions depended on it,” Stanton said.

Subcommittee Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said GSA is “taking aggressive action to reduce costs,” but said GSA needs to address its growing maintenance backlog.

“Shaving off excess, however, will not unilaterally rectify the numerous challenges we face in federal property, as the maintenance of the buildings is becoming increasingly costly to keep up,” he said.

Under the USE IT Act that former President Joe Biden signed into law at the end of his term, all agencies, starting in January 2026, must be able to show that their buildings meet at least a 60% utilization rate, or come up with plans to relocate. Next month, GSA and the Office of Management and Budget will submit plans to consolidate federal agency headquarters in the national capital area to meet the minimum 60% building occupancy rate target.

The Trump administration has already used this benchmark as justification for moving the Department of Housing and Urban Development out of its headquarters, and moving HUD employees to the National Science Foundation headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.

More broadly, GSA is trying to move more agencies to leased office space, because the agency faces a multi-billion-dollar maintenance and repair backlog on buildings it owns.

Michael Capuano, a member of the Public Buildings Reform Board, which advises GSA on underutilized federal properties it should sell, told the subcommittee that about $50 billion is needed to address a backlog of deferred maintenance and repairs in federal buildings. GSA currently receives about $600 million annually to address those needs. Given those spending levels, Capuano said GSA’s portfolio would have to shrink by about 80% to keep up with its maintenance backlog.

“Everyone realizes this is unrealistic and undesirable,” he said.

Capuano said shifting agencies out of government-owned buildings and into leased office space “does solve many problems.” Agencies, he said, can more easily expand or shrink the amount of office space they need with leased space, and “taxpayers are not forced to pay for empty space that needs maintenance.”

GSA is asking Congress for $365 million for an “optimization” fund that would help it dispose of more underperforming buildings.

“We need to get access to this funding to make some of these improvements happen,” Heller said.

GAO added federal real estate to its list of high-risk federal programs this year, citing a ballooning backlog of maintenance and repair needs. According to GAO, the backlog more than doubled between fiscal 2017 and 2024, from $170 billion to $340 billion.

“Right-sizing the federal government’s real property holdings is long overdue,” Heather Krause, GAO’s manager director of physical infrastructure, told lawmakers.

GSA is trying to manage its governmentwide real estate portfolio with a smaller workforce.  The agency started this year with more than 5,600 employees, but cut its workforce by about 45% under the Trump administration. Heller said GSA rescinded layoffs for about 400 PBS employees, and that almost 300 employees agreed to return to work. He told lawmakers the agency is taking a closer look to see if there are any “additional gaps in our workforce.”

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said there are some federal buildings in D.C. that GSA should offload, but said the agency “has not been coordinating closely enough with D.C. on the disposal of federal buildings.”

“These disposals would save the federal government money, generate tax revenue for D.C., increase housing supply and lead to new mixed-use neighborhoods,” Norton said. “I am deeply concerned that the Trump administration has not developed a plan to dispose of federal buildings in D.C. in a manner that benefits both federal taxpayers and D.C.”

Capuano said that incomplete data makes it harder for the board to identify underutilized federal buildings. GAO reported in 2020 that 67% of addresses in the Federal Real Property Profile were incorrectly formatted or incomplete.

“None of us are in favor of leaving empty buildings in the portfolio. However, it is difficult to locate them,” he said.

The PBRB is set to disband in December 2026. Capuano recommended that Congress either reauthorize the board to continue its work, or pass legislation to create a similar entity, “if for no other reason, to keep the other agencies’ feet to the fire.”

The post GSA terminated hundreds of federal office leases, but far less than DOGE targets first appeared on Federal News Network.

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More than a dozen federal statistical agencies are falling behind on producing high-quality data sets that impact the U.S. economy and government policy.

An annual report from the American Statistical Association finds widespread staffing and spending cuts across the federal government, along with policy changes under the Trump administration, have led to certain public-facing data sets being delayed, suspended or canceled.

Experts who led the report are also concerned by a decline of public trust in federal government data sets.

Former Chief Statistician of the United States Nancy Potok, a co-author of the report, said in a call on Wednesday that “we saw a severe decline in the agency’s ability to meet their missions,” and that the “status quo was no longer satisfactory.”

“What most people noticed was that many statistical products just disappeared. They either were eliminated, in terms of no data collection taking place, because contracts were cut or funding was cut or people weren’t there, or because of the lack of staff and resources,” Potok said.

The association’s annual report found that most statistical agencies lost 20% to 30% of their staff this year, and the Trump administration is pursuing further workforce cuts at these agencies.

The Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics lost nearly all its employees this year, as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing plans to dismantle the department and reassign its programs to other federal agencies. The statistics office currently has three employees.

President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics this summer after the agency produced a monthly jobs report that showed hiring had slowed.

The Social Security Administration’s former chief data officer left the agency after filing a whistleblower complaint alleging that the Department of Government Efficiency improperly put the sensitive data of more than 300 million Americans at risk of exposure.

In May, the DOGE posted on X that the Census Bureau conducts more than 100 additional surveys beyond the decennial population count. DOGE wrote that many of those other surveys are “obsolete,” and that the results are “not being used to drive any action.” DOGE said the Census Bureau has terminated five “wasteful surveys.”

“Some of the existing guardrails are really at risk of being pushed and potentially ignored,” Potok said.

The association’s report last year found that federal statistical agencies are having a harder time producing quality data. Part of the problem is that fewer individuals are filling out the surveys that power this data. A national decline in trust in government corresponds with lower response rates for federal statistical surveys.

Potok said the ASA’s report last year found that “status quo is going to deteriorate over time, and something needs to be done.” However, she said those problems have only gotten worse.

“This is an immediate kind of crisis situation that we have found,” Potok said.

Mike Calabria, the current chief statistician of the U.S., said in a keynote address last month that his priorities are strengthening data security at statistical agencies and reversing a “long-term decline in response rates” for statistical surveys.

“People are going to be more reluctant to respond if they don’t believe that their data is going to be secure and protected,” Calabria said on Nov. 6 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I’m a very big privacy advocate, and I want to make sure that whatever we do collect does not get hacked or breached, or that people feel confident that the data they give the government is not going to be shared in ways that they haven’t consented to.”

A  senior administration official told Federal News Network that the report’s findings amount to “typical swamp lobbying.”

Potok said the Trump administration has taken some steps to support statistical agencies, “but it was far outweighed by the things that happened that weakened them.”

The administration, she added, has exempted the Census Bureau from a governmentwide hiring freeze that ran through Oct. 15. Now that the freeze is over, agencies have been instructed to only hire one new federal employee for every four that leave.

Connie Citro, former director of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said that these agencies produce “bedrock statistics that the financial world, and in general, the world looks to,” and that budgets are not keeping up with demand for data, which has only accelerated with the rise in artificial intelligence tools.

“These weakened resources weaken the ability for agencies to modernize mentor staff, engage with data users and communicate with stakeholders, and all this is essential to set priorities for innovation and move forward,” Citro said.

Since fiscal 2009, eight of the 13 statistical agencies have lost at least 16% of purchasing power, but have been expected to produce more data.

“While there are strong supporters of federal statistics in Congress, we do not have any vocal champions on the Appropriations Committee,” Steve Pierson, ASA’s director of science policy, said on the call.

The report finds the administration has left key leadership unfilled and pursued “disruptive agency relocations” and eliminated statistical products without input from Congress or the public.

“These losses have affected agency work and undermined innovation, modernization, and communication with data users, leaving agencies struggling to meet expanding demands for data that are more granular, timely, and responsive to policymakers’ needs,” the report states.

The report also cites declining public trust in the data these agencies produce. The percentage of U.S. adults who trust federal statistics fell from 57% in June, to 52% in September, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The percentage of people agreeing or strongly agreeing that they can trust federal statistical agencies to keep information about them confidential declined by six percentage points, from 31% to 25%.

Last month, a federal judge blocked the IRS from sharing data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. There are several other pending federal lawsuits challenging similar data-sharing agreements with ICE.

The post ‘Bedrock’ federal data sets are disappearing, as statistical agencies face upheaval first appeared on Federal News Network.

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The IRS is setting new limits on telework for employees who are facing a variety of temporary hardships.

The agency said in an internal memo Monday that hardship-based requests for full-time telework that employees submitted, but were still awaiting approval, will be “closed,” effective immediately.

The memo, obtained by Federal News Network, cites the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate for federal employees as the reason for the policy change.

“As a result of return to office, the current hardship program process and approvals will be adjusted to ensure compliance,” the memo states.

According to the memo, IRS employees are generally limited to five days of telework per calendar year.

Employees can still submit hardship-based telework requests, but approvals must come from the agency’s leadership or its human capital office, which is inundated with paperwork from employees retiring under the deferred resignation program.

The IRS lost more than a quarter of its employees this year through voluntary separation incentives.

Several IRS employees told Federal News Network that the IRS in the past has granted hardship-based telework to accommodate a range of emergencies, including employees facing domestic violence or employees who are immunocompromised following organ transplants.

It’s not clear how long employees will wait for hardship approvals under this policy change. Federal News Network has reached out to the IRS and the Treasury Department for comment.

The memo states that requests for short-term telework arrangements lasting fewer than 90 days will still be reviewed and considered on a case-by-case basis.

Short-term telework arrangements for less than 30 days must get approval from the agency’s human capital office. Hardship requests for more than 30 days of telework will require approval from the agency’s chief operating officer.

The new IRS policy comes as other agencies are setting restrictions on telework as a reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities.

The Department of Health and Human Services rolled out a new reasonable accommodation policy last week that required all telework, remote work, or reassignment requests to be reviewed and approved by an assistant secretary or a higher-level official — a decision that is likely to slow the approval process.

Meanwhile, IRS employees have been under scrutiny from an agency watchdog to ensure they are complying with the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate.

Federal News Network reported in August that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration conducted an audit, at the request of the Treasury Department, to see if IRS employees were reporting to the office as often as they claimed.

The Trump administration, more broadly, has required agencies to collect data, including badge swipes into office buildings, to determine if federal employees are following the return-to-office mandate.

According to the National Treasury Employees Union’s 2022 national agreement with the IRS, when an employee is experiencing a temporary hardship, the agency “will make every reasonable effort to approve a temporary telework location,” including moving the employee to another office location.

Under this labor agreement, the IRS can approve a permanent hardship in cases where an employee or an immediate family member faces a “significant hardship” that threatens their life or livelihood. Examples include seeking specialized care for serious medical conditions that affect major life functions, a spouse faced with relocation or the loss of their job, or employees facing domestic violence or other similar “threats to life or limb.”

Temporary hardship requests are granted on a broader basis than permanent hardship requests. NTEU and the IRS included temporary hardship requests in their labor contract, based on discussions around medical issues impacting an employee’s immediate family members.

The 2022 agreement states the IRS may approve a temporary hardship for up to a year, depending on the circumstances of the hardship and “subject to staffing and workload needs.” Management can further extend a temporary hardship for a maximum of one more year.

IRS denials of hardship requests are supposed to be resolved through the union’s grievance procedure. The IRS, however, no longer recognizes NTEU, given the Trump administration’s rollback of collective bargaining rights across the federal workforce.

NTEU is leading a lawsuit challenging those executive orders targeting federal employee unions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments in the case next Monday.

The IRS memo states that the agency will still grant requests for “situational” telework for “unforeseen, non-recurring emergencies.”

Those include an employee dealing with an illness or medical appointment that would normally require sick leave, an employee needing to stay home to meet with a service provider for urgent home repairs, or a school or caregiving facility closure with less than 24 hours’ notice.

The memo states that IRS managers can provide up to 90 days of telework as an interim accommodation for employees waiting for the agency to process their request for reasonable accommodation.

Federal agencies are required under the Rehabilitation Act to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified employees with disabilities, as long as that accommodation does not result in an “undue hardship” for agencies.

“Treasury recognizes the role that limited telework can play to support achieving the mission and employees’ work-life balance,” the IRS memo states.

However, Tax Notes reported last week that the IRS faces a growing backlog of more than 8,000 reasonable accommodation requests.

The post IRS closes out ‘hardship’ requests for telework, citing return-to-office mandate first appeared on Federal News Network.

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A top human resources official at the State Department, who played a major role in the agency’s widespread reduction in force this summer, is moving on to a new role within the agency.

Lew Olowski, the chief human capital officer for the Bureau of Personnel and Training, is stepping down from that role to become the senior bureau official for the Office of Foreign Missions, two sources familiar with the decision told Federal News Network. The State Department declined to comment.

In this role, Olowski oversaw layoffs of nearly 1,350 State Department employees in July. The department sent reduction-in-force notices to more than 1,100 civil service employees and nearly 250 Foreign Service employees who were based in the United States at the time.

Senior department officials later told Congress that the RIF was the largest and most complex workforce reduction of its kind, and that they carried out the layoffs in consultation with the Office of Personnel Management.

Politico first reported on Olowski’s new role within the State Department.

Most of the employees who received RIF notices this summer officially separated from the agency in September.

The State Department sought to finalize layoffs for nearly 250 Foreign Service officers and several civil service employees last week. But a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the department from officially separating those employees.

The temporary restraining order signed last Thursday is part of an ongoing lawsuit unions filed on the eve of the government shutdown, which blocked the Trump administration from conducting widespread layoffs during a lapse in congressional funds.

The amended lawsuit states that several agencies, including the State Department, aren’t fully adhering to a provision in the shutdown-ending stopgap funding bill that temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out layoffs.

The nonprofit Democracy Forward, which is also part of the lawsuit, said the amended lawsuit seeks to reverse “other unlawful RIF actions” at the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration, as well as the departments of Education and Defense.

A recent survey led by the American Foreign Service Association found the State Department’s diplomatic workforce, given sweeping changes happening under the Trump administration, felt overburdened, under-resourced and more likely to leave in the next few years.

In a survey of more than 2,100 active-duty Foreign Service employees, AFSA found that 98% of respondents reported reduced morale this year. About 86% of respondents said workplace changes since January have affected their ability to advance U.S. diplomatic priorities.

Before the Trump administration, about 17,000 active-duty Foreign Service officers worked for the State Department. AFSA estimates that nearly 25% of its workforce left this year — when counting layoffs, retirements and those who accepted deferred resignation offers.

AFSA said in April that it was “deeply concerned” by Olowski’s appointment to the department’s top HR role, which is typically held by career members of the Foreign Service with decades of relevant experience.

“The Foreign Service is a competitive, merit-based institution, built on a foundation of expertise, service, and nonpartisanship. Placing an untenured, entry-level officer who has only served one complete overseas tour into this critical role, even in an acting capacity, not only disregards that tradition but also sends a clear message about the value this administration places on experience and professional progression,” AFSA wrote.

The post State Department HR chief moving on to new role after carrying out layoffs this summer first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Mahri Stainnak got the call the day after President Donald Trump took office: the Office of Personnel Management’s human resources office was putting them on administrative leave “effective immediately,” while the agency “investigates your radical and wasteful DEI activity.”

Stainnak was surprised by the news. Before the Trump administration, they served as OPM’s deputy director of the governmentwide Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility. But now they worked as the director of OPM’s talent innovation group, a human resources job focused on recruiting and retaining talent across the federal government.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not in diversity, equity and inclusion.’ I started a new role in a job that has nothing to do with diversity, equity and inclusion.’ So I felt incredibly shocked and confused,” Stainnak said.

The second call came 48 hours later: Stainnak, a nonbinary person who had worked in the federal government for more than 16 years, received a reduction in force notice, as part of the Trump administration’s plan to root out DEI programs across the federal government.

Stainnak is now part of a class-action lawsuit filed this week in the D.C. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit, led by the American Civil Liberties Union of D.C., claims the Trump administration unlawfully targeted and fired federal employees perceived to be associated with DEI work — even if their current jobs had nothing to do with it.

Mary Kuntz, an attorney at the law firm Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch, P.C. who is representing the former employees, said the administration’s actions “clearly” violate the Civil Service Reform Act, because employees like Stainnak were fired for previous work in DEI positions.

“You can’t RIF somebody from a position they’re not in,” Kuntz said. “They sought to punish Mahri [Stainnak] for previous DEI work. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.”

Kuntz said the lawsuit claims that the administration’s push to “eviscerate” DEI programs also had a disproportionate impact on people of color, women, non-binary individuals, and violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“The DEI folks were working on behalf of people with disabilities, people who are non-native speakers of English. They were advocating for protected groups,” she said.

On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump pledged to “eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the entire federal government,” and characterized these programs as promoting “un-American” ideology.

On his first days in office, Trump signed executive orders that directed agencies to create lists of employees associated with DEI going back to Nov. 5, 2024 — the date of the presidential election.  The complaint says agencies were directed to remove those employees, “regardless of their current roles or duties.”

“President Trump’s directives did not merely represent a change in presidential priorities — a normal occurrence when presidential administrations change. Rather, they were targeted actions intended to punish perceived political enemies, as well as to eliminate from the federal workforce women, people of color, and those, like plaintiffs, who advocated for or were perceived as advocating for protected racial or gender groups,” the complaint states.

The complaint says agencies set competitive levels for the RIFs so narrowly that federal employees were unable to compete for retention, and that those impacted by RIFs were not considered for reassignment to other jobs.

“I absolutely feel targeted on the basis of what the Trump administration believes my beliefs are, because I was not working in a diversity, equity and inclusion role in any way at the time when the new administration came in, or at the time I was placed on administrative leave,” Stainnak said.

For all the Trump administration’s actions to strip DEI out of the federal workforce, Kuntz said the president’s executive orders don’t go into any detail to define DEI.

“He characterizes them as illegal and discriminatory and various other things … but doesn’t define them,” Kuntz said. “You can’t decide that somebody is a different party than the party in the White House and decide to fire them on that basis.”

The lawsuit states that the total number of federal employees impacted by the DEI rollback fis unknown, but says news reports suggest it could be “potentially in the thousands.”

The complaint states that at least 40 women or non-binary individuals, and more than 40 people of color received layoffs in connection with the Trump administration’s directives.

Stainnak and their colleagues filed an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board in March, but Kuntz said that appeal and similar cases brought before the Office of Special Counsel and agencies’ Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) offices, have stalled.

In their last role, Stainnak helped agencies recruit top talent into the federal workforce. But they said the Trump administration’s purge of DEI workers has pushed out individuals who worked on bipartisan projects.

Former federal employees leading the lawsuit include a former operations manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs who “helped ensure that veterans were not inhibited from accessing earned benefits due to cultural or socioeconomic barriers,” a Department of Homeland Security Employee who led language competency efforts at the border to advance intelligence gathering and the safety of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

“By illegally targeting people based on the Trump administration’s assumptions about our political beliefs, or by targeting us based on who we are, this administration actually is hurting the people who work and live in this country, because now these dedicated, hardworking federal servants are not in their jobs providing the critical services that they do, whether it’s responding to emergencies like hurricanes and making sure folks have drinking water and shelter, or making sure our transportation systems are safe and timely. This action is really hurting the people who live in this country,” Stainnak said.

The post Federal employees who left ‘DEI’ roles still fired under Trump administration purge, lawsuit claims first appeared on Federal News Network.

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The Department of Health and Human Services is setting new restrictions on telework as a reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities.

A new, departmentwide reasonable accommodation policy shared with employees this week states that all requests for telework, remote work, or reassignment must be reviewed and approved by an assistant secretary or a higher-level official — a decision that is likely to slow the approval process.

The new policy, as Federal News Network reported on Monday, generally restricts employees from using telework as an “interim accommodation,” while the agency processes their reasonable accommodation request.

“Telework is not appropriate for an interim accommodation, unless approved at the assistant secretary level or above,” the new policy states.

The updated reasonable accommodation policy, signed on Sept. 15 by HHS Chief Human Capital Officer and Deputy Assistant Secretary Thomas Nagy, Jr., replaces a more than decade-old policy, and applies to all HHS component agencies.

“This policy is effective immediately and must be followed by HHS component in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and departmental policy,” the policy states.

It’s not clear how long it will take HHS to review each individual reasonable accommodation request. But HHS, which now handles all reasonable accommodation requests from its component agencies, faces a backlog of more than 3,000 cases — which it expects will take six to eight months to complete.

The new policy allows frontline supervisors to grant “simple, obvious requests” without consulting with an HHS reasonable accommodation coordinator, but prohibits them from granting telework or remote work.

“Telework and reassignment are not simple, obvious requests,” the policy states.

The policy also directs HHS to collect data on the “number of requests that involve telework or remote work, in whole or in part.”

A memo from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that “all telework related to RAs will be repealed,” and that CDC leadership will no longer be allowed to approve telework as an interim accommodation.

“Staff currently on an agreement will need to report back to the worksite,” the memo states.

The CDC memo states employees can still request telework as a reasonable accommodation, but “until they are reviewed and approved by HHS they must report to the worksite.”

It also states that employees can request what was previously known as “medical telework,” which can be approved by the CDC chief operating officer for around six months in length.

According to the memo, CDC can temporarily grant medical telework to employees who are dealing with recovering from chemotherapy, hip replacement surgery or pregnancy complications.

If HHS rejects a reasonable accommodation, the CDC memo states an employee can challenge the decision before an appeal board. The CDC, however, expects that appeal will “also take months to process,” and that employees must continue to work from the office while the appeal is pending.

“We know this is going to be tough, especially on front-line supervisors,” the CDC memo states.

HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said in a statement that the new reasonable accommodation policy “establishes department-wide procedures to ensure consistency with federal law.”

“Interim accommodations may be provided while cases move through the reasonable-accommodation process toward a final determination. The department remains committed to processing these requests as quickly as possible,” Hilliard said.

Jodi Hershey, a former FEMA reasonable accommodation specialist and the founder of EASE, LLC, a firm that helps employers and employees navigate workplace accessibility issues, said the new policy suggests HHS is “playing fast and loose with the Rehabilitation Act, and what’s required of them” under the legislation.

“This is the most inefficient way to handle reasonable accommodations possible. By centralizing reasonable accommodation-deciding officials, you’re removing the decision from the person who knows the most about the job. The immediate supervisor or manager knows what the job is, how the job is normally performed. They know the employee. When you remove that level of familiarity from the process, and you move it up the chain … that person has no idea what the job even is. They don’t know the person that they’re dealing with. They don’t know the office. They don’t know the particulars at all,” Hershey said.

In a message obtained by Federal News Network, Cheryl Prigodich, principal deputy director for the CDC’s Office of Safety, Security and Asset Management, told an HHS employee that because their one-year reasonable accommodation had expired, they needed to submit a new request for approval.

“The timeframe for approval on your request is not known at this time. In the interim, however, we are not allowed to approve telework as an interim accommodation for a reasonable accommodation,” Prigodich said.

Prigodich told the employee that, according to HHS, employees must either use annual leave, 80 hours of annual ad hoc telework available to each HHS employee, take leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act or report to the workplace “with the possibility of another acceptable accommodation (work tour, physical modifications to the workplace, etc).”

Prigodich directed the employee to submit their request to renew their reasonable accommodation request to the HHS assistant secretary for administration, but recommended that they “efficiently summarize your concern and request (with appropriate documentation) into no greater than a single-page memo.”

“The ASA will not want to comb through previous emails or too many attachments,” Prigodich said.

The one-page request, she added, should include “why no other alternative accommodation will work,” documentation of the disability, and records showing the previously approved reasonable accommodation.

“I know this is frustrating. We are certainly frustrated too — and this represents a significant policy change for a great number of people who rely on this type of accommodation for their personal health and needs,” Prigodich said.

The post CDC tells staff telework reasonable accommodations ‘will be repealed,’ as HHS sets stricter rules first appeared on Federal News Network.

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A federal judge in San Francisco is temporarily blocking the State Department from finalizing hundreds of employee layoffs.

Judge Susan Illston approved a temporary restraining order on Thursday, preventing the department from officially terminating more than 200 employees, most of them Foreign Service officers.

Separately, federal employee unions are asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to reverse more layoffs than agencies have allowed under a spending deal that ended the recent government shutdown.

The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association filed the emergency request for a temporary restraining order to bar the “imminent and unlawful execution” of reduction in force notices the State Department sent this summer.

“The severe threats to the public presented by the imminent State Department actions necessitate a temporary pause to protect the status quo for plaintiffs and the employees they represent who are adversely impacted by these imminent separations,” the emergency request states.

The emergency request is part of an ongoing lawsuit that unions filed on the eve of the government shutdown, which blocked the Trump administration from conducting widespread layoffs during a lapse in congressional funds.

The amended lawsuit states that several agencies, including the State Department, aren’t fully adhering to a provision in the shutdown-ending spending bill that temporarily blocked the Trump administration from carrying out layoffs.

The nonprofit Democracy Forward, which is also part of the lawsuit, said the amended lawsuit seeks to reverse “other unlawful RIF actions” at the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration, as well as the departments of Education and Defense.

“Those RIFs would violate the federal legislation that ended the federal government shutdown, which prohibits implementation of any RIFs through January 30,” the amended complaint states.

The continuing resolution Congress passed on Nov. 12 states that “any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an executive agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect.”

It also states that between Nov. 12, 2025 and Jan. 30, 2026, “no federal funds may be used to initiate, carry out, implement, or otherwise notice a reduction in force to reduce the number of employees within any department.”

Agencies, however, have followed a narrower interpretation of the stopgap spending bill, and have only reinstated federal employees who received RIF notices between Oct. 1 and Nov. 12. The amended lawsuit states that interpretation of the continuing resolution “is significantly under-inclusive.”

Agencies recently told a federal court that they rescinded shutdown-era RIF notices for more than 3,600 employees.

The State Department sent RIF notices to nearly 1,350 employees in July. Most of those employees were officially separated from the agency in September.

But this Friday, Dec. 5, the department plans to officially remove nearly 250 Foreign Service employees and several civil service employees whose separation dates were postponed, because they recently gave birth or faced medical issues.

The State Department claims that the continuing resolution’s layoff protections only apply to RIF notices that went out after Oct. 1.

“Defendants are wrong,” the amended complaint states. “The plain language of the continuing resolution prohibits any actions implementing any RIFs of any employees at any agency between November 12, 2025 and January 30, 2026, and requires recission of any previously issued RIF notices (regardless of when they were issued) if the RIFs were implemented during the shutdown.”

The amended lawsuit also takes issue with how the State Department modified the official separation date for impacted employees.

Foreign Service employees were originally told they would be separated from the agency on Nov. 10,  when the agency was still affected by the government shutdown. But on that date, employees received a notice from the department’s human resources offices that said they would remain on administrative leave so the agency could correct “administrative errors.”

On Monday evening, employees received a notice that said they will be officially separated from the State Department this Friday.

“The RIF notices were not reissued, and employees received nothing further from the State Department regarding the now-expired RIF notices until December 1, 2025,” the amended lawsuit states.

The State Department’s notice to employees cites “formal written guidance” from the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel regarding RIFs that had been issued prior to the shutdown, but further implemented during or after the shutdown. The unions leading the lawsuit say that formal written guidance hasn’t been made publicly available.

“During the shutdown, the State Department continued to implement the stages of these RIFs in preparation for final separation of the employees, including by processing personnel paperwork in advance of the planned separations,” the amended complaint states.

The unions claim that without a temporary restraining order, State Department employees and their families will suffer “irreparable harm,” including a loss of income and health insurance benefits.

“For many of these employees, the imminent loss of employment means a sustained loss of income and benefits in a job market already flooded with unemployed former State Department and USAID employees,” the amended complaint states.

AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement that “Congress clearly stated that no federal employees should lose their jobs due to a reduction-in-force for the duration of the continuing resolution.”

“This means that no RIF should be issued or acted upon, and any RIF terminations that occurred during the shutdown must be reversed,” Kelley said.

AFSA President John Dinkelman said in a statement that these “unlawful separations reveal a callous indifference to the rule of law and the people who carry out America’s diplomatic mission every day.”

The post Federal judge blocks imminent State Dept layoffs, as unions seek to reverse RIFs at other agencies first appeared on Federal News Network.

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The State Department’s diplomatic workforce is feeling overburdened, under-resourced and more likely to leave in the next few years, given sweeping changes happening under the Trump administration, according to a survey conducted by its union.

In a survey of more than 2,100 active-duty Foreign Service employees, the American Foreign Service Association found that 98% of respondents reported reduced morale this year.

About 86% of respondents said workplace changes since January have affected their ability to advance U.S. diplomatic priorities.

Before the Trump administration, about 17,000 active-duty Foreign Service officers worked for the State Department. AFSA estimates that nearly 25% of its workforce left this year — when counting layoffs, retirements and those who accepted deferred resignation offers.

Nearly a third of survey respondents said they have changed their career plans since the beginning of this year.

More than 80% of respondents said they entered the Service intending to serve 20 years or more — but now about 22% of them say they plan to leave the State Department within the next year or two.

AFSA President John Dinkelman said in a call Wednesday that survey results demonstrate a “workplace crisis” at the State Department that will take “years, if not decades, to repair.”

“When we undermine the Foreign Service, we undermine America’s ability to prevent conflict, support our allies, and protect our citizens abroad. In short, we weaken our global leadership,” Dinkelman said.

The State Department sent layoff notices to nearly 1,350 of its employees this summer. Those reductions in force will be finalized, once nearly 250 Foreign Service officers officially separate from the agency this Friday.

The department carried out a massive agency reorganization this year, consolidating and eliminating hundreds of offices.

After sending the mass layoff notices in July, the department began hiring new Foreign Service officers this fall.

Some candidates in the hiring pipeline had to retake a new version of the Foreign Service Officer Test that had been vetted by the Trump administration. The State Department has also made “fidelity” to the administration’s policy goals part of the new criteria to determine if Foreign Service officers are eligible for promotions.

Dinkelman said that the expertise of the Foreign Service “is not easily rebuilt,” and that the State Department will have less experienced diplomats filling its depleted ranks.

“While we certainly will be able to find individuals to enter the service and begin again, those individuals who come in in 2026, ‘27 and ‘28 will not have the expertise, that will have been lost in these previous years, for decades to come,” Dinkelman said.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in a statement that Secretary of State Marco Rubio “values candid insights from patriotic Americans who have chosen to serve their country.”

“In fact, this administration reorganized the entire State Department to ensure those on the front lines – the regional bureaus and the embassies – are in a position to impact policies,” Pigott said. “What we will not tolerate is people using their positions to actively undermine the duly elected president’s objectives.”

AFSA conducted the survey to gather feedback that its members have not been able to share with agency leadership.

Federal News Network first reported this summer that the Trump administration will not conduct the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey this year, a governmentwide scorecard that tracks employee satisfaction.

“We knew that AFSA had a responsibility to step into this breach,” Dinkelman said. “This report offers the first independent snapshot of the Foreign Service during a period of sustained institutional stress.”

The 2024 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government scorecard, which parses FEVS data and is tracked by the Partnership for Public Service, shows the State Department received a 62.8 satisfaction score from employees — and ranked 16th for employee satisfaction among 18 large federal agencies.

About 78% of respondents said they are operating under reduced budgets this year, while 64% said key projects and initiatives are being delayed or suspended.

“I’ve served in hardship posts and multiple unaccompanied tours, but I never expected by my own government to openly disparage public service or the work of public servants,” an anonymous Foreign Service officer told AFSA.

Rohit Nepal, AFSA’s vice president for the State Department, said active-duty Foreign Service officers are being asked to take on more work from offices that have been eliminated, following the reorganization.

More than 60% of survey respondents agreed they are managing “significantly higher workloads due to staffing losses.”

“We’re talking about offices working on some of our highest priorities That could be the war in Gaza, Ukraine, our strategic competition with China. In other words, these folks are being asked to do more without the necessary resources to actually accomplish the job. It’s taking a toll on them,” Nepal said.

Nepal, who is an active-duty Foreign Service officer, said a hiring freeze this year led to key positions going unfilled during his last post in Amman, Jordan.

“We found ourselves unable to hire, even while we were dealing with an exchange of regular Iranian missile exchanges over Jordanian skies during the Israel-Iran war,” he said.

Nepal said Foreign Service officers are “reading the political tea leaves,” and avoiding certain types of jobs.

Nepal said a junior public diplomacy officer told him that they weren’t going to bid on jobs in public diplomacy, because “clearly we don’t care about PD anymore.”

Nepal said another Foreign Service officer with years of experience on refugee and human rights issues told him that “there’s no place for people like her in the department right now.”

“Let’s be clear: American diplomacy is weaker because of this politicization. Talented diplomats aren’t being selected for jobs or are not stepping forward because they believe they can’t get a fair shake in this environment,” Nepal said.

The report calls on Congress to intervene with sweeping changes happening to the agency, and that lawmakers “should make clear that career professionals cannot be punished, reassigned, or dismissed for political reasons.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), co-founder of the Senate Foreign Service Caucus, said in a statement that the report shows “a year of relentless attacks by the administration against these dedicated public servants has left our diplomatic corps in crisis — a vulnerability that our adversaries are all too happy to exploit.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, former Director General of the Foreign Service and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement that “AFSA’s data confirms we’re asking our diplomats to do more with less precisely when robust engagement is needed most.”

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The State Department is telling some employees targeted by mass layoffs this summer that their official separation date is imminent — and is not affected by a shutdown-ending spending deal that forced some agencies to rescind layoff notices.

The department’s human resources office, in a notice sent Monday evening, said Foreign Service employees who received reduction-in-force notices on July 11 will be officially separated from the agency this Friday, Dec. 5.

According to the Bureau of Global Talent Management, State Department attorneys determined that a recent stopgap spending bill passed by Congress, which ended the longest government shutdown, does not require the agency to rescind any RIF notices that were sent before the shutdown.

“Following formal written guidance from both the Office of Management and Budget and Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, the Department of State’s Office of the Legal Adviser has determined that completing the reductions in force (RIFs) noticed prior to the lapse in appropriations does not violate the Antideficiency Act (ADA) or any other restriction within HR 5371,” the memo obtained by Federal News Network states. “Given this determination, the Department will finalize your separation or involuntary retirement on Friday, December 5.”

The department, as part of this update, has modified the official separation date for impacted employees.

Foreign Service employees were originally told they would be separated from the agency on Nov. 10,  when the agency was still affected by the government shutdown. Those employees will now be separated from the State Department on Dec. 5

In a separate notice, Global Talent Management said the State Department is extending administrative leave for all Foreign Service employees who were scheduled for separation as part of the RIF.

“We are reviewing the administrative errors in all SF-50s issued on Friday, November 7, to ensure that all information is accurate,” the notice states, referring to a federal employee’s official employment record.

It’s not clear what administrative errors the department intends to correct. An employee’s SF-50 form shared with Federal News Network shows that Lew Olowski, the department’s top HR official, approved the RIFs to go into effect on Nov. 10.

A State Department spokesperson told Federal News Network that, “since the State Department’s lawful reduction in force (RIF) process was commenced and initiated well before the lapse in appropriations, the eliminated positions are not impacted by the language in the recent continuing resolution.”

“Legal opinions published by both OMB and DOJ confirm that outcome,” the spokesperson said. “The State Department will proceed with executing the RIF process as planned.”

A Foreign Service officer who received a RIF notice told Federal News Network that the State Department “can’t just extend admin leave” to set a new separation date.

The Foreign Service officer, who requested anonymity because they were not cleared to speak to the media, said moving the original Nov. 10 separation date amounts to a “de facto reinstatement,” and that the department would need to issue entirely new RIF notices and provide at least a 60-day notice for that new separation date.

“This entire action just seems patently unlawful, and I do not understand how the department plans to get away with it,” the Foreign Service officer said.

By law, each federal employee subject to a RIF “is entitled to a specific written notice at least 60 full days before the effective date of release.”

According to the SF-50 notice, employees eligible for severance will receive a lump-sum payment on Jan. 1, 2026.

The State Department laid off more than 1,300 employees on July 11. It sent RIF notices to more than 1,100 civil service employees and nearly 250 Foreign Service employees who were based in the United States at the time.

Senior department officials later told Congress that the RIF was the largest and most complex workforce reduction of its kind, and that they carried out the layoffs in consultation with the Office of Personnel Management.

Questions about the possibility of reinstatement primarily focused on laid-off Foreign Service officers, who had been on administrative leave for a longer period than their civil service counterparts.

Foreign Service employees who received RIF notices were scheduled to be officially 120 days out from their RIF notices. But civil service employees who received RIF notices had only 60 days before their official separation.  They left the department in early September.

The State Department and several other agencies have rejected calls from laid-off employees, unions and Democratic lawmakers who say more federal employees are eligible for reinstatement than what the Trump administration has allowed.

The American Foreign Service Association said last month that its interpretation of the continuing resolution passed by Congress on Nov. 12 blocks the State Department from moving forward with its layoff notices.

The continuing resolution Congress passed on Nov. 12 states that “any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an Executive Agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect.”

“We understand that Congress intended for this language to apply to as many federal employees as possible, including those who received layoff notices from the State Department on July 11,” AFSA wrote.

On Tuesday, AFSA said it is working closely with the American Federation of Government Employees and will be pursuing legal action.

“This action flies in the face of the current funding law, which clearly prohibits using any federal resources to carry out layoffs during this period,” AFSA said in a statement. “That includes sending notices, processing paperwork, or taking any step to advance these separations.”

Democratic lawmakers say agencies aren’t reinstating as many federal employees as they should be under the spending deal.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is leading the push for more RIF rescissions, along with several of his Democratic colleagues.

Kaine was one of eight Democratic senators who broke ranks to pass the stopgap spending bill, only after Republicans agreed to include language that would protect federal employees from layoffs at least through Jan. 30, 2026. Kaine and his colleagues backed standalone legislation during the shutdown that would have also barred the Trump administration from moving ahead with its most recent wave of mass layoffs.

Kaine, along with Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), said the continuing resolution — particularly Section 120 of the stopgap bill — placed a moratorium on RIFs involving federal employees, and that the “moratorium is broad, clear and unequivocal.”

Agencies, however, have followed a narrower interpretation, and have only reinstated federal employees who received RIF notices between Oct 1 and Nov. 12. Agencies told a federal court that they rescinded shutdown-era RIF notices for more than 3,600 employees.

Federal News Network first reported that the Small Business Administration told 77 recently laid-off employees this week that they could get their jobs back, but rescinded that offer a day later.

An SBA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “has determined that the most recent continuing resolution signed into law does not apply to any RIFs executed by the SBA.”

The Democratic senators told SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler that the agency is “unlawfully pursuing reductions in force,” and that dozens of recently laid-off employees the agency hasn’t reinstated “have a right to continue their employment.”

A group of 35 former General Services Administration employees also called on the agency to rescind their RIF notices, on the grounds that Congress intended to reinstate them.

GSA’s Associate General Counsel Daniel Hall told their attorneys in a Nov. 24 letter that the RIF notices “were issued before and separate from the lapse in appropriations occurring on October 1, 2025, and are outside of the intended scope of the Act and its provisions on RIFs.”

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The Department of Health and Human Services faces a months-long backlog of reasonable accommodation requests from its employees, as the department embarks on major changes to how it handles these requests.

HHS is preparing to roll out a new reasonable accommodation policy later this week. Several HHS components, however, recently set their own new policies, which more broadly cover telework and how often employees may work from home.

The new policy comes at a time when the Trump administration has called on the federal workforce to show up to the office full-time, and has rolled back options for some employees to work from home full-time or occasionally each two-week pay period.

Federal agencies are required under the Rehabilitation Act to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified employees with disabilities, as long as that accommodation does not result in an “undue hardship” for agencies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told employees in a memo last week that its Accommodation Tracking System (ATS) was shutting down, and that, effective immediately, reasonable accommodations will be “centralized at the HHS level.”

According to the memo obtained by Federal News Network, HHS will need to work through a backlog of about 3,330 of CDC’s pending reasonable accommodation requests.

It’s not clear how long it will take HHS to review each individual reasonable accommodation request, but according to the CDC memo, HHS expects it will take six to eight months to get through the backlog.

It’s not clear if other HHS components are also facing a backlog of reasonable accommodation requests.

The CDC memo states that its Office of Human Resources announced telework “should not be given as an interim accommodation,” while a reasonable accommodation request is under review.

“If the employee requests telework, the employee must still report into the office until a decision is made (or use leave),” the CDC memo states.

HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told Federal News Network in a statement Monday that “HHS is centralizing reasonable accommodation requests in alignment with President Trump’s executive order on return to work.”

“The department remains committed to processing these requests as quickly as possible,” Hilliard said.

The CDC memo also states HHS is expected to release an updated reasonable accommodation policy later this week.

Several CDC employees told Federal News Network that the agency has recently unveiled a new telework policy, in which employees are limited to 80 hours of telework per year, and that reasonable accommodations cannot include regular/scheduled or full-time telework.

A CDC spokesperson said in a statement that “this shift aligns with President Trump’s executive order on returning federal employees to in-person work, ensuring the government is best positioned to deliver results for the American people.

In September, the CDC said it would stop approving telework requests for employees with reasonable accommodations, but temporarily reversed course on that decision, according to internal agency emails obtained by Federal News Network.

A separate email obtained by Federal News Network told HHS employees with pending reasonable accommodations that “all existing reasonable accommodation programs have been consolidated to form the HHS Reasonable Accommodation (RA) Taskforce, servicing the entire HHS workforce.”

The email, sent by an HHS reasonable accommodations coordinator, instructs employees with pending reasonable accommodation requests to complete a questionnaire within seven calendar days, and to submit medical documentation within 20 calendar days.

The email states that failure to submit the required medical documentation by this deadline will result in a “closure of your request.”

The American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, which represents CDC headquarters employees in Atlanta, told members in an email on Nov. 26 that the agency is once again taking steps to end full-time telework for employees with reasonable accommodations.

AFGE Local 2883 wrote that on the first day back to work after the 43-day government shutdown ended, CDC employees were told that supervisors no longer have authority to approve temporary 90-day agreements for full-time telework, and that their temporary accommodations that expired over the shutdown could not be renewed.

“Some were told their current, non-expired RAs were cancelled outright. Still others were told telework is no longer a reasonable accommodation available to CDC staff. Scores of employees with disabilities were instructed to return to the office or take leave,” the union wrote.

AFGE Local 2883 told members that CDC’s actions stand in “direct defiance” of the return-to-office mandate that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office, as well as follow-up guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management.

“This harmful policy change keeps us from doing our jobs for the American people in the best way possible. It works against the safety and well-being of all of our colleagues, including many of whom were forced to return to a campus still marred by unrepaired bullet holes from the August shooting. And it violates our rights as federal workers. It’s against the law to mass-deny any type of reasonable accommodation for everyone in the agency,” the union wrote.

In August, a gunman fired more than 180 shots into the CDC’s headquarters, killing a police officer who responded to the scene.

According to the union, however, HHS reasonable accommodation coordinators have said “telework is still a reasonable accommodation at CDC,” and that existing temporary reasonable accommodations granted on or before Sept. 15 will continue and can be extended or modified as appropriate.

“CDC’s misrepresentation of HHS’s policy on reasonable accommodations terrorized both the supervisors who implemented it and the employees who suffered as a result,” the union wrote. “This is a confusing and stressful time for many of us, especially as there has been no clear guidance across offices for what comes next. We cannot let this chaos and uncertainty stand, and we will demand clear leadership and full transparency.”

Despite these restrictions on telework as reasonable accommodations, some parts of HHS are, more broadly, easing up on work-from-home restrictions.

At the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Administrator Mehmet Oz told staff in a Nov. 14 email that CMS employees will be able to take up to four telework days per month, “in recognition of the hard work that you all have put in this year.”

According to the email, employees who scored a 4.5 or higher on their most recent performance rating will be eligible to take two days of telework per two-week pay period. Employees who scored between 4.49 and 3.0 will be eligible to day a single telework day per pay period.

The new policy went into effect on Nov. 17. Oz told employees that these telework days would not count against the 80 hours of telework that all HHS employees can take each year. CMS did not respond to a request for comment.

Oz told CMS staff that any telework in excess of that 80-hour limit would require an office-level or center-level signoff, including by the political leadership for that component.

“Those requests must include a detailed writeup justifying the exception and need to then be sent forward to be approved by the COO for CMS,” Oz wrote. “All requests beyond the 80 hours will be sent to HHS for tracking and awareness.”

According to the email, new employees won’t be eligible for telework until they are at least six months into the job.

“Once they have completed their probationary period and received their first-year performance review then their telework status can reflect that performance rating,” Oz wrote.

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The Trump administration’s plans to shutter four small agencies are indefinitely on hold, following a court’s recent ruling.

A federal judge in Rhode Island issued a permanent injunction on Nov. 21, blocking the administration from taking any further action to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Minority Business and Development Agency, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and the Interagency Council on Homelessness.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March, eliminating these agencies — and three others — “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” But attorneys general in 21 states sued the administration, arguing that these agency closures would have downstream effects on state-level operations.

The permanent injunction ordered by U.S. District Court Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. prevents the four agencies from “taking any future action to implement, give effect to, comply with, or carry out the directives contained in the Reduction EO.”

McConnell determined that the Trump administration’s decision to conduct widespread layoffs, terminate grants and eliminate programs at these agencies “undermined their ability to perform functions mandated by statute.”

“By now, the question presented in this case is a familiar one: may the executive branch undertake such actions in circumvention of the will of the legislative branch? In recent months, this court — along with other courts across the country — has concluded that it may not. That answer remains the same here,” he wrote.

The agencies targeted for elimination are responsible for funding museums and libraries, mediating labor disputes, supporting minority-owned businesses, and preventing and ending homelessness.

Over the course of several months, the Trump administration fired, placed on administrative leave, or reassigned nearly all employees in these four agencies. The administration cancelled a wide range of grants to the agencies, and cancelled public programs and services that the agencies provided.

McConnell said these decisions left the agencies unable to carry out their statutorily mandated functions, and unable to spend their congressionally appropriated funds.

The court issued a preliminary injunction in May. The Trump administration appealed the district court’s preliminary injunction, but dropped its appeal on Nov. 21, following the judge’s permanent injunction. Federal News Network has reached out to the White House and the Justice Department for comment.

The Supreme Court and federal appeals courts have mostly allowed the Trump administration to proceed with plans to shutter agencies and conduct mass layoffs across the federal workforce.

The Trump administration argued that a preliminary injunction in this case prevented agencies from implementing the president’s priorities.  McConnell, however, said he ruled in favor of the states, given a “plethora of injuries” that would arise, if the court did not intervene.

States told the court that closing IMLS would force the closure of public libraries, force them to implement hiring freezes and stop providing services that support literacy and learning. State universities said they would be forced to lay off employees, eliminate student programming and default on contracts without continued funding for MBDA.

In other cases, states said some of their agencies and programs are at risk of work stoppages and negotiation impasses, without FMCS around to resolve labor disputes. States also told the court they would lose expert assistance on how to reduce homelessness without the Interagency Council on Homelessness.

“All this to say: the injuries alleged are to the States themselves and are far more than merely economic or speculative,” McConnell wrote.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James called the ruling a “major victory in our ongoing work to defend important services.”

“The federal government’s illegal attack on these agencies threatened vital resources for workers, small businesses, and the most vulnerable in our communities,” James said.

The American Library Association said the court’s decision “restores everything that the executive order tried to take away.”

“Convincing a federal judge that shuttering a supposedly obscure agency would have an immediate and devastating impact on millions of Americans is no small feat,” ALA President Sam Helmick said. “Libraries also strengthen local economies by supporting jobseekers, small businesses and community learning. Protecting these resources matters.”

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The Department of Government Efficiency, the driving force behind the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce and executive branch spending, isn’t wrapping up operations sooner than expected, according to several administration officials.

Reuters published a story on Sunday claiming that DOGE no longer exists, about eight months ahead of the deadline set by President Donald Trump. The story drew strong reactions from Trump administration officials, who rejected claims that DOGE is ending before its final day on July 4, 2026.

A DOGE spokesperson told Federal News Network on Tuesday that DOGE and its longer-term, tech-aligned counterpart, the U.S. DOGE Service, both remain — and that the latter organization is moving forward with a full slate of modernization projects.

The spokesperson, in response to written questions, confirmed DOGE still exists as a temporary organization within the U.S. DOGE Service, and that Amy Gleason remains the acting administrator of USDS.

In addition, the spokesperson said the U.S. DOGE Service — a Trump-era rebranding of the U.S. Digital Service — is working on several cross-agency projects. The spokesperson said USDS is actively involved in these projects, but the agencies in charge of these projects oversee staffing and hiring. The list of projects shared with Federal News Network closely resembles the type of work that USDS was involved in before the Trump administration.

“The U.S. DOGE Service remains deeply engaged across government-modernizing critical systems, improving public services, and delivering fast, practical solutions where the country needs them most,” the spokesperson said.

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor wrote on X that “DOGE may not have centralized leadership under USDS,” but the “principles of DOGE remain alive and well.”

Those principles, he added, include deregulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; and reshaping the federal workforce.

Kupor wrote that DOGE “catalyzed these changes,” and that OPM and the Office of Management and Budget “will institutionalize them.”

It’s not clear that DOGE leadership ever set exact demands for its representatives scattered across multiple federal agencies. Current and former DOGE representatives publicly stated that DOGE leadership played a hands-off role in their day-to-day work, and that they identified primarily as employees of their agencies. Former DOGE employees said they rarely heard from Elon Musk, DOGE’s former de facto leader, once they completed their onboarding to join the Trump administration.

DOGE wrote on X that “President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to modernize the federal government and reduce waste, fraud and abuse,” and that it terminated 78 contracts worth $335 million last week.

The DOGE spokesperson said the U.S. DOGE Service is working on a project to use AI to process over 600,000 pieces of federal correspondence each month, and is working with the General Services Administration to advance “responsible AI governmentwide.”

Current U.S. DOGE Service projects include:

• Supporting 18 million students by modernizing the FAFSA system and implementing major student loan and Pell Grant changes.
• Improving access to benefits with a streamlined, public-option verification tool that helps states accelerate community engagement requirements for Medicaid and SNAP approvals.
• Transforming the non-immigrant visa process to support Olympic and World Cup travel with a more reliable, adaptable digital platform.
• Reducing delays for over 600,000 veterans each month through a modernized VA disability compensation application.
• Building a modern National Provider Directory to speed Medicare provider enrollment and enable nationwide interoperability.
• Launching new patient-facing apps and data access tools, first announced at the White House and rolling out beginning January 2026.
• Digitizing the National Firearms Act process, replacing outdated paper systems.
• Using AI responsibly to process over 600,000 pieces of federal correspondence monthly.
• Strengthening Medicare’s digital experience with better security, fraud reporting, caregiver access and reduced paper burden.
•  Improving VA appointment management with integrated scheduling, check-ins, notifications and after-visit support.
• Advancing responsible AI government-wide through partnership with GSA.
• Rapid-response deployments for Customs and Border Protection, FEMA, Medicare claims modernization, FDA data consolidation.

Gleason said in September that agencies don’t have enough tech talent to deliver on the administration’s policy goals, and they would need to boost hiring

“We need to hire and empower great talent in government,” Gleason said on Sept. 4. “There’s not enough tech talent here. We need more of it.”

Under the Trump administration, federal employees have faced mass layoffs and incentives to leave government service. The Partnership for Public Service estimates that, as of October, more than 211,000 employees left the federal workforce this year — either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Gleason, who also serves as a strategic advisor for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said tech hiring is essential to help CMS “build modern services for the American people.” She said the agency, at the beginning of this year, had about 13 engineers managing thousands of contractors.

“If we could hire great talent for tech in the government, I think in five years, we can really transform a lot of these systems to be much more modern and user-friendly, and easy for citizens to engage with what they need,” Gleason said. “But we have to take advantage of hiring.”

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Democratic lawmakers say agencies aren’t reinstating as many federal employees as they should be, as part of a recent spending deal that ended the longest government shutdown.

Employees who received reduction in force (RIF) notices before the government shutdown, but were on track to be officially separated from their agencies during the shutdown, say layoff protections included in the Nov. 12 continuing resolution mean they should get their jobs back.

Agencies, however, have followed a narrower interpretation, and have only reinstated federal employees who received RIF notices between Oct 1 and Nov. 12. Agencies told a federal court last week that they rescinded shutdown-era RIF notices for more than 3,600 employees.

The continuing resolution Congress passed on Nov. 12 states that “any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an Executive Agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is leading the push for more RIF rescissions, along with several of his Democratic colleagues.

Kaine was one of eight Democratic senators who broke ranks to pass the stopgap spending bill, only after Republicans agreed to include language that would protect federal employees from layoffs at least through Jan. 30, 2026. Kaine and his colleagues backed standalone legislation during the shutdown that would have also barred the Trump administration from moving ahead with its most recent wave of mass layoffs.

Kaine, along with Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), told Small Business Agency Administrator Kelly Loeffler that the agency is “unlawfully pursuing reductions in force,” and that dozens of recently laid-off employees the agency hasn’t reinstated “have a right to continue their employment.”

Federal News Network first reported last week that SBA told 77 recently laid-off employees this week that they could get their jobs back, but rescinded that offer a day later. An SBA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “has determined that the most recent continuing resolution signed into law does not apply to any RIFs executed by the SBA.”

The senators said the continuing resolution — particularly Section 120 of the stopgap bill — placed a moratorium on RIFs involving federal employees, and that the “moratorium is broad, clear and unequivocal.”

“Consequently, SBA is without authority to maintain any RIFs that occurred during the lapse in appropriations or to initiate or otherwise carry out any new or previously noticed RIFs,” the senators wrote in a Nov. 20 letter.

The senators are directing SBA to reinstate the SBA employees and “return them to working status with full back pay.” The letter gives SBA until this Friday to comply with their request and provide an update to their offices.

House Small Business Committee Ranking Member Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) also sent a letter to SBA, expressing “serious concern” over the agency’s back-and-forth announcements about RIF rescissions.

Velázquez told Loeffler that “there was no justification for the change,” and that “you have deliberately sought to harm federal employees, who have dedicated their careers to helping entrepreneurs launch and grow their small businesses.”

“The erratic, cruel, and callous manner in which you handled this matter is unacceptable,” she wrote. “The law is clear, and SBA must restore these employees to their positions with back pay, effective immediately.”

Recently laid-off employees at the General Services Administration are calling on the agency to rescind their RIF notices, citing language in the recently passed continuing resolution. The American Foreign Service Association is urging the State Department to reverse RIF notices that went out this summer and took effect during the shutdown.

Recently RIF-ed Justice Department employees are also seeking reinstatement.

A former DOJ employee said about 30 recently laid-off staff from the agency’s Community Relations Service, Office for Access to Justice and the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces are also seeking reinstatement. These are all offices DOJ is seeking to eliminate or consolidate, as part of its agency reorganization plans.

The recently separated employee, who worked for the Community Relations Service, said it’s clear lawmakers meant to cover as many federal employees as possible in the layoff protections.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The former DOJ employee said several individuals seeking reinstatement have appealed to the Merit Systems Protection Board. The former employee, however, said some have not pursued an MSPB appeal because of the cost and the long wait to receive a ruling from the board.

Others are hopeful that a federal lawsuit in Boston challenging the DOJ’s reorganization plans could eventually lead to reinstatement. The lawsuit is challenging the department’s plans to eliminate the Community Relations Service.

On Monday, members of the Congressional Equality Caucus wrote that, without CRS, DOJ would be too understaffed to handle a rise in reported hate crimes in the U.S.

“With these changes, CRS would be unable to perform its statutorily required functions with just one staff member. The dismantling of CRS is not only unlawful, it is also particularly concerning given the rise in community unrest, where CRS’s peacebuilding and mediation services would play a vital role.”

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The IRS, ahead of an upcoming reorganization of its tech office, is putting its IT staff to the test.

The agency, in an email sent Monday, directed its IT workforce to complete a “technical skills assessment.”

IRS Chief Information Officer Kaschit Pandya told employees that the assessment is part of a broader effort to gauge the team’s technical proficiency, ahead of an “IRS IT organizational realignment.”

“Over time, hiring practices and role assignments have evolved, and we want to ensure our technical workforce is accurately aligned with the work ahead. The assessment will help establish a baseline understanding of our collective strengths and areas for development,” Pandya told staff in an email sent Monday.

Pandya’s office is leading the technical skills assessment, in coordination with the Treasury Department, the IRS human capital office and the Office of Personnel Management.

“I want to emphasize that this is a baseline assessment, not a performance rating. Your individual-level results will not affect your pay or grade,” he told staff. “I know this comes during a very busy and uncertain time, and I deeply appreciate your partnership.”

Pandya told staff that a “limited group” of IRS IT employees in technical roles — including developers, testers and artificial intelligence/machine learning engineers have been invited to complete the test. He told staff that, as of Monday, about 100 employees were directed to complete the assessment.

On Friday, an IRS IT employee told Federal News Network that several hundred employees have now completed the assessment, and that it took employees about 90 minutes to complete it.

According to the employee, Pandya told staff in an all-hands meeting on Friday that one of the agency’s goals is to rely more on full-time IT employees, and less on outside contractors. He said during that meeting that IRS IT currently has about 6,000 IT employees and about 4,500 contractors.

“It doesn’t make sense, considering all the RIFs, firings and decisions that ignored expertise,” the IRS IT employee said.

The IRS has lost more than 25% of its workforce so far this year, largely through voluntary separation incentives. Pandya told staff in an email this summer that the agency needs to “reset and reassess,” in part because more than 2,000 IT employees have separated from the IRS since January. The IRS had about 8,500 IT employees at the start of fiscal 2025.

The agency also sent mass layoff notices to its employees during the government shutdown, but has rescinded those notices as required by Congress in its spending deal that ended the shutdown.

The Treasury Department sent reduction-in-force notices to 1,377 employees during the recent government shutdown — as part of a broader RIF that targeted about 4,000 federal workers. Court documents show the IRS employees received the vast majority of those RIF notices, and that they disproportionately impacted human resources and IT personnel at the IRS.

The technical assessment is also in line with goals set by Treasury CIO and Department of Government Efficiency representative Sam Corcos, who recently said IRS IT layoffs were “painful,” but necessary for the agency’s upcoming tech reorganization.

In a recent podcast interview, Corcos said much of his time as Treasury CIO has been focused on projects at the IRS, and that the agency’s IT workforce doesn’t have the necessary skills to deliver on its long-term modernization goals.

“We’re in the process of recomposing the engineering org in the IRS, which is we have too many people within the engineering function who are not engineers,” he said. “The goal is, let’s find who our engineers are. Let’s move the people who are not into some other function, and then we’re going to bring in more engineers.”

Corcos estimated that there are about 100 to 200 IRS IT employees currently at the organization that he trusts to carry out his reorganization plans.

“When you go in and you talk to people, a lot of the people, especially an engineer, the engineers on the team, they want to solve this problem. They don’t feel good about the fact that this thing has been ongoing for 35 years and will probably never get done. They actually want to solve these problems.”

IT employees at several agencies have gone through evaluations and assessments during the Trump administration. Tech employees at the General Services Administration were also interviewed and questioned about their skills and expertise by GSA and DOGE leadership. GSA later downsized its Technology Transformation Services office and shuttered its 18F tech shop.

In March, the IRS removed 50 of its IT leaders from their jobs and put them on paid administrative leave. Corcos defended that decision, saying the IRS “has had poor technical leadership for roughly 40 years.”

Corcos said those former IRS IT leaders pushed back on DOGE’s audit of government contracts. The agency, he added, spent an “astounding” amount on cybersecurity contracts, but former leaders resisted cutting and scaling back any of those contracts.

“The initial leadership team just said, ‘Everything is critical, you can’t cut anything. In fact, we need more,’” Corcos said. “And when we swapped them out for people who were more in the weeds, who knew what these things were, we found actually quite a lot that we could cut.”

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More federal employees who received layoff notices just before the government shutdown are looking to get their jobs back, on the grounds that Congress intended to reinstate them.

Recently laid-off employees at the General Services Administration are calling on the agency to rescind their reduction in force (RIF) notices, citing language in the recently passed continuing resolution that directed agencies to rescind the RIFs.

Attorneys at Gilbert Employment Law, in a letter sent to GSA’s leadership on Wednesday, said their clients, 35 GSA employees who were formally separated from the agency on Oct. 6, should be reinstated.

The GSA employees received their RIF notices on Sept. 24.

The continuing resolution gave agencies until Nov. 18 to notify eligible employees that their RIF notices were being rescinded.

According to the letter, GSA has not sent any RIF rescission notices to the 35 GSA employees, “and has instead taken the position that they will not be reinstated.”

“This is a violation of the statute,” the attorneys wrote.

Guidance from the Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to reinstate employees “affected by a RIF notice issued between October 1, 2025 and November 12, 2025.”

“The clear intent of the Act was to reverse all RIF actions — including separations — taken during the shutdown, not just the issuance of RIF notices,” the attorneys wrote.

Federal News Network has reached out to GSA for comment.

Soon after Congress passed a spending bill last week to end the government shutdown, agencies and unions took a closer look at language ordering agencies to put some layoff notices on hold until the end of January 2026.

The spending deal that Congress passed on Nov. 12 to end the government shutdown states that, “any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an executive agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect.”

The Small Business Administration told dozens of recently laid-off employees this week that they could get their jobs back, but rescinded that offer a day later.

SBA sent RIF notices to 77 employees on Sept. 29, just before the government shutdown.

An SBA spokesperson told Federal News Network on Tuesday that the agency “has determined that the most recent continuing resolution signed into law does not apply to any RIFs executed by the SBA.”

“Therefore, the RIF in question, affecting 77 positions, remains,” the spokesperson said.

Federal News Network spoke with three SBA employees whose RIFs were briefly rescinded.

The employees said attorneys with the American Federation of Government Employees argued that SBA’s RIF notices were covered by the continuing resolution and should be rescinded, because the separation date for employees falls between Oct. 1 and Jan. 30.

One employee said they were told by their supervisor to still come into work on Wednesday, even though SBA’s most recent message told them the RIF notices were still in effect.

“There still seemed to be confusion,” the employee said.

Other unions are also making the case for reinstatement.

The American Foreign Service Association said last week that its interpretation of the spending deal passed by Congress would block the State Department from moving forward with layoff notices it sent to more than 1,300 employees this summer.

“The shutdown just ended for now, but there were a ton of RIFs that happened during the shutdown,” AFGE General Counsel Thomas Dargon told AFSA members in a virtual meeting Thursday. “AFGE filed a lawsuit over that, and we’ve just been hard at work trying to fight back where we can in the courts.”

The spending package passed by Congress states that between the date of enactment and Jan. 30, 2026, “no federal funds may be used to initiate, carry out, implement or otherwise notice a reduction in force to reduce the number of employees within any department, agency or office of the federal government.”

“We understand that Congress intended for this language to apply to as many federal employees as possible, including those who received layoff notices from the State Department on July 11,” AFSA wrote.

AFSA wrote in a follow-up post that it is awaiting details “on how the continuing resolution will be implemented and what it means for Foreign Service members affected by the July layoffs at State.”

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