Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Eric Katz

The White House is ordering agencies to place its new app on all employees’ government phones

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:31:00 -0400

Updated May 23 at 10:19 a.m.

The White House recently unveiled a new app to give the public “unfiltered” access to “key priorities,” “historic moments” and “policy breakthroughs.” Now, it’s directing agencies to help install it on the government phones of federal employees.

The Trump administration launched the app, which promises to “[keep] you connected to President Donald J. Trump and his administration like never before,” in March.

The push to install the app on the devices of millions of government employees drew surprise from current and former federal officials, who called the move highly unusual and even dangerous.

The White House launched its new app in March 2026.

In at least one agency, the automatic downloads will start next week in a move directed by the White House itself, according to internal communications obtained by Government Executive. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, agency chief information officers got orders from the federal CIO, Greg Barbaccia, to help the White House understand the mechanics of installing the app across all government-furnished mobile phones in the executive branch, according to an internal email obtained by Government Executive.

“The White House App gives all Americans direct access to White House live streams, breaking news alerts, new policy initiatives, social media posts, and more,” said Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson. “Government devices typically include pre-installed apps that provide value to government employees’ day-to-day work.”

The move is “dangerous,” Sonny Hashmi, a former longtime government IT executive, told Government Executive.

Cybersecurity researchers warned about vulnerabilities in the app soon after it debuted, like how it shares the IP addresses, time zones and other data of users with third-party services. The app also raised initial concerns about its potential GPS tracking capability, but the White House has since removed that functionality.

Forcing agencies to install it on employee’s government furnished phones should be “cause for alarm,” said Hashmi, who worked at the General Services Administration for years, most recently as a Biden administration appointee. “Any app that is installed on government issued devices can potentially create backdoor access to government networks behind the firewall.”

The Federal Aviation Administration told employees on Friday that its IT team “will automatically install ‘The White House’ application on all FAA-issued iPhones and iPads, as mandated by the White House,” adding the process would occur automatically and employees “do not need to take any action.”

“The application will grant access to breaking news, policy updates, livestreams, videos, photos, social media content, and exclusive early-access information,” it said.

The app includes official statements and policy announcements from the administration, as well as a feed of social media posts from White House accounts and the president.

A button gives the option to “text President Trump,” which, when clicked, opens a text message to a pre-selected number with the default text “Greatest President Ever!” Sending the text signs the user up for alerts, which individuals can also do through the app itself.

While the instructions to install the administration’s app on government phones may sound like a way to simply communicate with the government workforce more directly, “this isn’t really operational,” former government tech official David Nesting told Government Executive, pointing to the fact that it’s the same app available to the general public.

“It's just making sure all federal employees are forced to see the same propaganda they push out to the public,” said Nesting, who previously worked in career, civil service government roles as the deputy CIO at OPM and also did stints at the federal Office of the Chief Information Officer and U.S. Digital Service before it was DOGE.

The app includes videos and messaging that are overtly political or directly related to campaigns, the type of material with which employees are typically discouraged from engaging while on the clock due to the non-partisan nature of their work.

Barbaccia’s email to government IT executives suggests that how to force the app to install across phones wasn’t immediately apparent to the White House, as it requested help with the “mechanics” of pushing the app out across government phones.

This marks at least the second time the administration has sought to make it easier to communicate with the entire federal workforce all at once.

In the days after Trump moved back into the White House last year, the Office of Personnel Management set up a new, first of its kind governmentwide email system – something that didn’t previously exist. It later used the new system to send out the administration’s “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation offer to get hundreds of thousands of federal employees to resign from their roles.

This story has been updated with comment from the White House.

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HHS to start Schedule P/C conversions while withholding details on new RIFs

Eric Katz and Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:39:00 -0400

The Health and Human Services Department has started the process of converting some of its employees to Schedule Policy/Career, a new job classification with weaker protections that many civil servants and good government experts fear is an attempt to replace career staff with political appointees.

HHS on Friday afternoon sent an email to supervisors that the initial conversions are “expected to apply to a relatively modest number of GS-15 positions — on the order of hundreds, not thousands — with additional tranches to follow as implementation progresses.”

Officials have estimated that around 50,000 agency staffers governmentwide will be targeted for conversion. Employees designated for the new schedule will no longer have the same notice and appeal rights regarding adverse actions, such as firings and suspensions, as the vast majority of the civil service enjoys.

“Conversion to Schedule P/C is based on the nature of a position, not the performance or conduct of an individual,” according to the email obtained by Government Executive. “These actions are administrative in nature and are not intended to be punitive or to signal concerns about an employee’s work.”

Schedule P/C is a revived iteration of Schedule F, an unsuccessful effort from President Donald Trump’s first term to remove most civil service job protections for federal employees in “policy-related” positions, making them at-will workers who can be fired for virtually any reason.

An HHS official told Government Executive that the reclassifications to Schedule P/C will only take effect after Trump issues an executive order.

“This will strengthen accountability for positions with significant policy-influencing responsibilities and applies to a relatively modest number of positions,” the official said in a statement.

The Schedule P/C email at HHS was first reported by Reuters.

Agencies across government had to turn over by April 2025 their recommendations for which staff would fall under the new classification. Some agencies began notifying impacted workers they would be converted to at-will status last year, but the administration walked those back as the notices were deemed premature.

The Office of Personnel Management cemented Schedule P/C regulations with a final rule in November, and all agencies are expected to begin notifying impacted staff of their conversions under that policy following Trump’s forthcoming executive order.

As the Trump administration has sought to downsize the civil service, the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit recently reported that the number of career employees in the Senior Executive Service has decreased by nearly 30% since 2025. Conversely, the federal political appointee workforce is at its largest size in decades.

Layoffs

Also on Friday, employees from agencies across HHS reported there was another round of reductions in force. But they were uncertain about the scale and why impacted workers had been targeted.

Over the weekend, an organization of former and current National Institutes of Health employees put out a video saying that the layoffs seemed to affect staffers who had initially expressed an interest in one of the administration’s retirement incentives and, therefore, were exempt from last year’s layoffs.

“Often these people were the only person in their entire department that wasn’t RIF’d last April,” said Jenna Norton — an NIH employee, speaking in her personal capacity — in the video. “They’ve sort of been hanging out, waiting, knowing this was coming for months. And Friday, it finally happened.”

Similarly, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an employee familiar with the matter told Government Executive that the newly laid off staffers were a part of teams that had been entirely eliminated during the 2025 layoffs, but they were spared for unclear reasons and, unlike at NIH, had not indicated any interest in a separation incentive. The CDC employee said that supervisors assumed the retention of these workers was an oversight and did not ask questions, hoping to avoid what eventually transpired on Friday.

Affected workers at CDC are slated to be off boarded in 90 days.

In several instances over the last year, HHS has unwound small patches of the roughly 10,000 layoffs it implemented last April. The department shed roughly one-quarter of its workforce last year, or around 20,000 employees, through the layoffs and various separation incentives. Now, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pledging to hire 12,000 new staff to fill gaps in the department.

HHS did not respond to a question about the recent RIFs.

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10 years after OPM data breach, identity protection benefits for affected feds start to expire

Eric Katz and David DiMolfetta — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:14:00 -0400

A decade after the 2015 breach of the Office of Personnel Management exposed roughly 22 million records, identity theft protection services for affected federal workers and their families are beginning to expire, marking the end of a long-running federal response to one of the government’s most damaging cyber intrusions.

Those who signed up for the MyIDCare program OPM established 10 years ago are receiving emails on a rolling basis informing them their services will expire 10 years to the day of their enrollment. The notices began going out to enrollees late last year and will continue through September, the end of the current fiscal year.

“This is to notify you that the credit monitoring and identity theft insurance coverage you were provided by the Federal government has a 10-year term, which ends on [10 years after enrollment date],” reads an April email viewed by Government Executive from MyIDCare, the OPM-backed service that offered credit monitoring, dark web scanning, insurance and recovery services to those impacted in the breach. The emails are now being sent to breach victims who enrolled in the services.

“This service was provided following the 2015 OPM cybersecurity incidents and has helped safeguard your identity. OPM provided identity and credit monitoring through MylDCare, powered by IDX, in accordance with the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017 for a period of 10 years from 2015 - 2025,” it adds. The email gives users the ability to continue coverage, and links to a URL where they can explore options.

The hack was discovered in 2015, but the intrusions, which were overwhelmingly assessed to have been linked to China, began at least a year prior. OPM disclosed two data breaches in 2015: one that exposed the personnel files of all current and former federal employees and another that released the personally identifiable information of all applicants for security clearances, as well as their families. More than 22.1 million people were impacted by the breaches.

Shortly after the hack was discovered, OPM offered three years and up to $1 million worth of protection services. Congress subsequently required the agency to expand the program to cover 10 years and up to $5 million.

OPM signed two contracts with ID Experts — now IDX — to provide the services, the first worth $340 million and the second worth up to $416 million.

Funding for services officially ended at the end of September, when the federal fiscal year calendar resets.

An OPM spokesperson said the agency looked into extending the program but decided it was too expensive.

“OPM evaluated extending the contract and determined it would not be a responsible use of taxpayer resources, given the high cost of the program and the very low level of claims in recent years,” an agency spokesperson said. “OPM remains committed to protecting sensitive data through robust cybersecurity, privacy, and risk management programs, with continuous monitoring to safeguard personnel information.”

The Government Accountability Office has criticized OPM for overpaying for the services, saying the level of coverage is “likely unnecessary” and may be distorting the identity theft insurance market.

Plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit reached a settlement in 2022 with the government that made $63 million available for those who could demonstrate financial hardship as a result of the breach. A federal judge closed out the case in 2024 after OPM and the Treasury Department doled out just $4.8 million to just more than 5,000 individuals. The remaining $58.2 million was returned to the U.S. Treasury.

One former federal contractor affected in the breach, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, reflected that personally identifying information exposed in the hack used to be viewed as the “most detrimental thing to all of us.”

Today, that’s no longer the case. “Our information continues to be pilfered time and time again,” the former contractor added. “It’s just fascinating how far we’ve come from caring about security and wanting to take the right measures to treating it like an afterthought.”

The end-of-services notifications caught some recipients by surprise. IDX has since peppered recipients with marketing emails imploring them to re-enroll in the service at their own expense, offering 50% off discounts and warning “you’re unprotected” in subject lines.

“It’s disturbing given that the government’s negligence caused people’s personal information to be stolen, and China still has that information,” said one former federal employee who received the termination notice.

One current senior federal agency official affected in the breach told Government Executive that 10 years is sufficient for coverage. “I can understand why they cut it off. It costs money to do that,” the senior official said.

The official added: “I think it’s incumbent on people themselves to protect their credit in their reporting and make sure they keep tabs on it. You can’t expect the government to continue to do that.” They said they would consider enrolling in the plan offered by IDX to continue coverage.

Some lawmakers have continued to push for lifetime coverage for those impacted by the breach, though legislative efforts have failed to advance. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. in a letter to OPM last year highlighted the ongoing threats that breach victims still face.

“The federal workforce was dangerously exposed by the 2015 OPM breach, and millions of impacted individuals will continue to be at risk because of the breach, likely for the remainder of their lives,” Warner said. “Current and former public servants should not be abandoned to bear the risks of the federal government’s failure to protect their sensitive information.”

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

Eric Katz — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:39:00 -0400

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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VA has touted appointment wait time reductions, but new data shows a more mixed reality

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:23:00 -0400

The Trump administration has frequently said that appointment wait times at the Veterans Affairs Department are improving despite widespread reductions to its workforce, but internal data reveal a varied picture of how long patients are waiting for health care in some facilities and specialties.

Many VA facilities are struggling to provide veterans with timely access to care in areas like neurology, post-traumatic stress disorder treatment and oncology, according to data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Some facilities and some specialties have fared better, allowing veterans to access appointments more quickly, but the data does not show consistent, comprehensive progress toward faster care for new patients.

“Our wait times were going up,” VA Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers at a House hearing in February. “So we decided to do something a little unique in this town, we decided to do something about it. We've actually seen over the past year our wait times stabilize or go down.”

The reality of the situation is more complicated.

VA provided wait time data to American Bridge, a Democratic group that gave the raw data to Government Executive.

That data included information from 134 of VA’s 170 medical centers across 10 key specialties with significant data, which collectively make up the bulk of appointments out of dozens of specialties—primary care, mental health treatment individually and in a group setting, substance abuse treatment, PTSD, neurology, physical therapy, pulmonary, oncology and urology.

Government Executive analyzed average wait times for new patients in the first four months of fiscal 2026, October 2025 to January 2026, and compared it to the same period of fiscal 2025, which marked the final four months of the Biden administration. The data did not include appointment volume, which VA does not publish publicly, but instead illustrates how the department is performing on a facility-by-facility basis across different lines of care. The focus of this report is on how the surge of veterans newly seeking VA care are faring given the changes it is undergoing.

VA itself maintains an access standard for how long veterans should wait for direct care conducted by VA itself—20 days for primary and mental health care, and 28 days for specialty treatment—after which point veterans are eligible to seek care outside the VA on the government’s dime.

At the start of fiscal 2026, five of the 10 practice areas saw a majority of facilities met that standard. That’s the same number as a year prior.

For three specialties—physical therapy, substance use disorder and oncology—the number of facilities meeting the VA’s standard actually declined from the previous year, although for seven others, the number of facilities meeting the standard increased.

For neurology, just 7% of facilities met the goal to get veterans an appointment within 28 days, which actually marked a slight improvement from the prior year. Wait times for neurology appointments in the VA’s medical center in Omaha saw the biggest increase, from an average of 27 days to 127 days. In Dallas, wait times jumped from 87 days to 130.

Quinn Slaven, a VA spokesperson, disputed Government Executive’s analysis, saying it relied on incomplete data that fails to account for all of the department’s areas of care and the volume of appointments at each facility, “regardless of whether they serve a few patients or thousands.” VA did not make that data available.

The information at the basis of this report shows how department facilities in the dataset are performing around the country. Slaven also took issue with the focus on new patient data, noting existing patients “make up more than 80% of patients seen by VA staff, and that for this group, average wait times are lower now than they were in FY2024 for primary care, specialty care and mental health care."

In Trump’s second term, Slaven said, “average patient wait times have fallen in four of six major categories of care, after they rose in five of six categories under Biden.” The six broad categories are primary, mental health and specialty care for both new patients, and the same for existing patients. He did not say which categories changed or provide data on those changes.

Collins has consistently beat the drum to highlight improvements in VA wait times. In February he told Fox News that “by better focusing our resources…our wait times in hospitals are improving.” In March he tweeted “it’s a new day at VA” and the department is “slashing wait times.” This week he told Newsmax that he changed the culture at VA to focus on veterans, which led to a “great transformation” and bringing down wait times.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle told Government Executive, however, the data showed VA has yet to make the consistent strides that department officials have suggested it has already achieved.

“While it is encouraging to see wait times improve in certain specialty areas at the Department of Veterans Affairs, there is still more work to be done,” said Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who chairs the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. “No veteran, especially those facing cancer, addiction or mental health conditions, should have to wait days, weeks or months to receive the care they have earned through their service.”

Progress on wait times is mixed across different specialties. Although about 36% of locations taking new urology patients saw improvements in average wait times, the wait times at half of the VHA’s locations in the dataset got worse. Wait times for the remainder were stable.

Half of the locations offering oncology appointments also saw worsening wait times, with only 31% improving.

For VHA locations offering treatment for substance use, PTSD and neurology, about 48% of facilities saw deterioration in wait times, with only 35%, 45% and 44% seeing improvements, respectively.

Staffing changes

Collins last year put forward a plan to slash VA by 80,000 employees through layoffs and various incentives, but pared back the plan after it received bipartisan pushback. He boasted that VA successfully reached his stated goal of shedding 30,000 employees in fiscal 2025.

As of February, VHA had lost a net 18,626 employees since Trump took office, when accounting for hiring, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. VA has seen a net loss of around 1,100 physicians and nearly 3,000 nurses, as well as 800 medical support assistants who handle appointment scheduling.

One senior VHA official who spoke to Government Executive on the condition of anonymity to openly evaluate the data, said it showed the department may have been getting ahead of itself in flaunting its accomplishments.

“I also think there is a danger in celebrating too soon or overreacting too soon,” the official said. “There really is a lot of movement based on normal change in the organization.”

Across each specialty at all 134 facilities, VA saw 486 specialties experience worsening average wait times of at least two days. The department saw 427 specialties with wait times improving by at least two days. The remainder stayed fairly stable.

In total, about 42% of specialties on a per facility basis saw patients waiting longer for an appointment, while 37% saw improvements.

Among those with wait time changes of more than two days in either direction, eight specialties saw more facilities with increased wait times rather than decreases. Primary and pulmonary care were the only areas that saw more facilities demonstrate significant improvement.

The data did not offer insights into overall average wait times on a per specialty or department-wide basis.

Dr. Steven Braverman, who led multiple VA medical centers and regional offices before becoming the VHA chief operating officer from late 2024 through September 2025, said that “it is clear from these data that there is a mixed picture of improvement and worsening despite VHA’s efforts toward improvement across the board.”

He noted that larger facilities are facing more difficulties in meeting primary and mental health care standards and are more vulnerable to increases in demand for basic services. Smaller facilities, meanwhile, struggled to keep pace with specialty wait time standards and are particularly vulnerable to the departure of staff in those fields.

Without personnel data and veteran enrollment data, it can be difficult to assign causation for changing wait times, said Braverman, who previously served for nearly 30 years in various Army medical roles.

That said, “very few facilities currently failing to meet wait time standards demonstrated improvement over the past year,” Braverman said. “That suggests a demand versus capacity mismatch that won’t be fixed by efficiency or productivity improvements. That requires increase in hiring or clinical infrastructure to meet growing demand.”

Strains on capacity

Capacity has become a more acute concern after Biden signed the PACT Act into law in 2022, which made millions of veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins newly eligible for care and precipitated the hiring surge VHA oversaw in the previous administration. The law has both boosted enrollment of new patients and made existing patients eligible for increased level of care.

VA has noted it delivered more appointments than ever before in fiscal 2025 and earlier this month highlighted that 100,000 veterans have newly signed up for health care through VA in 2026, with signups happening at a faster clip than in recent years.

“In FY2025, VA completed 82,083,918 direct care appointments, up 4.1% from FY2024. This overall improvement in average wait times has occurred even as VA is making more direct care appointments than ever,” Slaven said. VA did not provide any data on overall wait times.

The department has highlighted that it has opened 34 new health care facilities across the country since Trump took office, much of which was authorized and funded by the PACT Act. It has allowed for more flexible appointment scheduling at off hours, which it said has led to improved service.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the veterans panel, said that staffing cuts are leading to worse outcomes at VA.

“These findings contradict the Trump Administration’s continued claims that its draconian workforce cuts and hemorrhaging of frontline VA staff have no impact on veterans’ care,” Blumenthal said. “The resulting harm is visible in the increased wait times at many VA facilities nationwide.”

The senator noted VHA has implemented new restrictions on hiring, with special permission required to cross established staffing ceilings, and eliminated many vacant roles. He also called on VA to tap into its statutory authority to pay some doctors more than the $400,000 salaries at which they are currently capped.

Wait times at VA are a longstanding area of concern and they received particular attention in 2014 following a nationwide scandal in which the department was found to have been manipulating its data. That led to widespread reforms, including two efforts to boost veterans’ ability to receive private sector care on the government dime. The Trump administration has sought to boost the use of “community care” after saying its predecessors made the process overly onerous. Moran and others are looking to codify those changes.

VA officials recently told lawmakers that veterans are waiting between four and 54 days for an appointment when referred out to the private sector, depending on where they are and what service they are seeking.

In a January Senate hearing, some lawmakers accused Collins of bringing chaos to VA. The secretary told senators the results spoke for themselves.

“It’s amazing to me that we’ve actually lowered wait times,” said Collins. “It’s amazing to me that through this process we’ve made it easier for our veterans to get this healthcare service they need. If that’s chaos, maybe we’re in the right direction.”

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Civilian agencies face 10% cuts in Trump’s 2027 budget

Eric Katz — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0400

President Trump on Friday proposed a $2.2 trillion fiscal 2027 budget, an overall increase on current spending that would include cutting non-defense agencies by 10%, or by $73 billion.

The proposed reductions were far less severe than the 22% in non-defense spending that the White House suggested chopping in his fiscal 2026 blueprint after Congress largely ignored those suggestions, though most major agencies would still see their budgets reduced under the new submission.

As Trump previously touted, defense spending in the new plan would spike by 44% to $1.5 trillion. A handful of other agencies would also see an increase compared to current spending: The Justice Department would receive a 13% boost mostly to supplement law enforcement efforts. The Veterans Affairs Department would receive a 9% bump, including an additional $800 million for electronic health records modernization. The Transportation Department would see a 6% increase, including a $1.3 billion increase for infrastructure and an additional $481 million for the Federal Aviation Administration to support air traffic controller hiring and additional modernization efforts. A 2% bump for the Energy Department would go toward the National Nuclear Security Administration; the rest of Energy would see an 11% spending decrease.

While nearly all agencies would experience a cut, those reductions were, nearly across the board, less than Trump proposed in his first budget. The biggest cuts would be the most significant at the Small Business Administration at 67%, the National Science Foundation at 55% and the Environmental Protection Agency at 52%. The president requested cuts of more than 25% to the departments of Health and Human Services, Interior and Housing and Urban Development in his first spending proposal last year, but he is now seeking reductions of 12%-13% for those agencies.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said the fiscal 2027 budget builds on the cuts the administration secured in the fiscal 2026 appropriations bills.

“These final appropriations bills rooted out wasteful spending that the administration had identified across federal agencies,” Vought said. “The enacted bills also put us on a path to eliminate ineffective federal agencies that do not serve a useful purpose.”

The budget would eliminate 11 federal programs the administration deemed “woke,” such as the Education Department’s Teacher Quality Partnerships, HUD’s Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing and the EPA’s Environmental Justice Program. EPA, HUD and the Internal Revenue Service would face additional cuts in areas the administration said amounted to the “weaponization of the federal government.”

All told, the budget would eliminate dozens of grant and assistance programs focused on scientific and medical research, climate change, job training, housing, energy costs for low income Americans, refugees and migrants, disaster preparedness and many other areas across government.

The proposal would provide $50 million to the Agriculture Department to carry out its reorganization and mandatory relocations of thousands of employees and make investments to help HHS stand up its Administration for a Health America. Other major agency reform proposals in the budget included unifying federal firefighting into one agency, privatizing airport screenings at small airports, consolidating offices within DHS, eliminating an office focused on federal contractor oversight and slashing “layers of bureaucracy” at VA.

The White House said its budget would boost funding for federal law enforcement by 15% compared to current spending, including for more Homeland Security Department agents and additional federal prosecutors. The Drug Enforcement Administration, Secret Service and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security would all see increased funds for law enforcement hiring. The White House also highlighted a 12% increase for the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review to support more courtroom space for deportation hearings.

Vought said the federal government has entered a new era of budgeting. OMB projected the government would slash spending at non-defense agencies by 24% in the next decade.

“A historic paradigm shift in the budget process is occurring and is producing real results for the American public,” the OMB director said. “Fiscal futility is ending. Now that our fiscal ship has turned to face in the right direction, I look forward to working with you to continue moving forward.”

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Mullin confirmed to lead DHS as shutdown drags on and 100,000 employees remain unpaid

Eric Katz — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:58:00 -0400

The Homeland Security Department will have a new secretary after the Senate confirmed Markwayne Mullin in a 54-45 vote to the role Monday evening, paving the way for a new chapter in the tumultuous period for the agency that has spearheaded President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Mullin, who will soon resign his seat as a Republican senator from Oklahoma, will replace Kristi Noem at DHS, who drew bipartisan condemnation for her handling of Trump’s mass deportation effort and appeared to lose the president’s trust when she recently told Congress he was aware of a controversial ad campaign touting the department’s efforts. Mullin will inherit a department that is currently shut down after its funding lapsed last month, though more than 90% of its employees are still working. More than 100,000 of those are doing so without immediate pay.

Mullin said during his confirmation hearing he would seek to rebuild staffing areas that previously implemented cuts, though he lamented that the shutdown is exacerbating staffing losses. The new secretary, who began serving in the House in 2013 and in the Senate in 2023, highlighted to lawmakers during his confirmation hearing last week several additional areas in which he would differentiate himself from his predecessor.

He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be restructured but not eliminated, as Noem called for last year. He also vowed to end the controversial policy Noem instituted that required secretarial approval for any spending of more than $100,000. Detractors of the policy noted it bogged down critical funding efforts, including during disaster response.

“I'm not a micro manager,” Mullin said. “We put people in, we empower them to make decisions.”

Noem has faced criticism for allegedly interfering with ongoing investigations by the DHS inspector general. Mullin vowed not to stand in the way of the IG’s work and said he would not seek retribution against employees who have publicly criticized the department. He also apologized for calling Alex Pretti a “deranged individual” after DHS personnel fatally shot him in January.

Mullin won approval along largely partisan lines, though Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against his former colleague while Sens. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., voted for him.

While Mullin has vowed to institute some changes at DHS, he did not make any promises to alleviate Democrats' concerns regarding the practices of its law enforcement personnel.

Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding DHS until the White House agrees to reforms at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. They have repeatedly sought to fund the Transportation Security Administration and other non-immigration components of DHS—including on Saturday in a rare weekend session—but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.

Trump has since deployed ICE personnel into airports to help reduce the long lines that have resulted from TSA employees calling out during the shutdown, though their impact is expected to be minimal.

Lawmakers have met with Tom Homan, the White House border czar, in recent days in hopes of reaching an agreement on reforms that Democrats would accept in exchange for funding all of DHS, but they have yet to strike such a deal.

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‘No practical use': TSA experts say Trump’s ICE deployments won’t help with airport security

Eric Katz — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:04:00 -0400

President Trump will beginning Monday shift Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel to airports to provide security there in a move he said will alleviate long lines created by shutdown-induced callouts but which experienced TSA officials said would have minimal impact.

The unusual approach comes as Trump administration officials have repeatedly lamented that Transportation Security Administration employees are calling out and quitting the agency due to the shutdown’s impact on paychecks, lengthening wait times at many airports around the country. Details of the assignments were not clear as of Sunday, despite Trump declaring that the airport deployments would occur on Monday. Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, told CNN on Sunday that he was “working on the plan” and would come up with one soon.

Several current and former TSA officials told Government Executive that ICE personnel will be limited in what they can accomplish at airports, as they will not have the requisite training to check identification, examine luggage x-rays or provide other key security services. TSA employees go through classroom and on-the-job training before they can staff those roles, the officials said.

“It serves no practical use,” said one former official with decades of federal experience who declined to be named out of fear of professional reprisal. “It's a political, publicity action, not a practical solution.”

Homan suggested ICE employees could staff the areas where travelers exit their terminals, though former officials noted many airports already use non-TSA personnel for those areas.

A second former senior TSA official added there are almost no functions ICE staff would be capable of offering.

“They can basically provide little help,” the former senior employee said.

In some airports, such as in Houston, call outs during the shutdown have reached 50%, forcing TSA to close lanes and leaving travelers waiting for hours to get through security. Employees have now missed at least one full paycheck after receiving a partial paycheck last month during the shutdown that began Feb. 14. Staff are guaranteed full back pay for their hours worked once the government reopens.

After seeing consistent staffing growth for the previous five years, TSA lost around 3,000 employees in 2025, or around 5% of its workforce, due to various firings and attrition measures. The agency has seen more than 400 employees leave the agency since the shutdown began, the White House said on Sunday.

Congressional Democrats are holding out on funding the Homeland Security Department until the White House agrees to reforms for law enforcement personnel carrying out President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown. They have repeatedly sought to fund TSA and other non-immigration components of DHS—including on Saturday in a rare weekend session—but Republicans have blocked all of those efforts.

“If the Democrats do not allow for just and proper security at our airports, and elsewhere throughout our country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before,” Trump said on Sunday, making the announcement just one day before he said the deployments would begin.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA staff, said those workers spend months learning specific skills that enable them to detect explosives, weapons and individuals looking to evade security. They are recertified on an ongoing basis after receiving extensive instruction and seeking to replace them with ICE personnel would only exacerbate the problem.

“You cannot improvise that,” Kelley said. “Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one.”

Lawmakers have met with Homan in recent days in hopes of reaching an agreement on reforms that Democrats would accept in exchange for funding all of DHS, but they have yet to strike such a deal.

Kelley added that turning to ICE could prove dangerous, given that the allegations of excessive force that they have faced.

“Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe,” Kelley said. “They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.”

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Inside DOGE’s early days of pressure campaigns, rule breaking and ‘chaos’

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:37:24 -0400

In the span of 77 minutes on a late-March Monday in 2025, an associate of the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency sent Michael McDonald, the acting head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, three emails asking for his cellphone number.

“Mike - Call me when you get the chance. We need a game plan for effectuating [reductions in force], final grant terminations and contract cancellations by tomorrow AM. We will carry these plans out before the end of the week,” wrote that associate, Justin Fox, in the last one.

“We're getting pressure from the top on this and we'd prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you're no longer interested,” the email read.

It had been a few weeks since Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, also an employee inside DOGE, had first met with McDonald. They’d been sent into the agency by Steve Davis, the operational head of DOGE at the time and key ally of billionaire Elon Musk, to make cuts after President Donald Trump fired the former head of the agency.

In the coming days, NEH, which primarily funds research and preservation projects at universities and museums, would issue termination letters for about 1,400 grants and send layoff notices to 116 of its employees—two-thirds of its workforce.

A coalition of humanities organizations has since sued NEH over the grant cuts. Clips from depositions done in the course of the lawsuit have gone viral for what many see as Cavanaugh and Fox’s disdain for NEH work, and for their inability or unwillingness to define diversity, equity and inclusion, given that DOGE cancelled many grants under the banner of ridding the government of DEI.

At one point, Fox said that a grant for a documentary about the Colfax Massacre, believed to be the deadliest incident of racial violence during Reconstruction, represented DEI because it “focused on a singular race,” meaning that “it’s not for the benefit of humankind.” He later said that wasn’t what he meant after being read back his testimony, noting that it’s “very subjective.”

McDonald, a long-tenured career employee who Trump tapped to lead NEH on a temporary basis, made clear in his own deposition that his “political views align with those of the administration.”

He sought to work hand in glove with DOGE, but even he expressed reservations about its sweeping approach and disregard for agency rules. In the more than 20 years he had worked at NEH, the agency had canceled fewer than six grants, he said.

A Manhattan judge ordered that the videos be taken down on Friday after the government said that Fox had been harassed and gotten death threats because of them.

Government Executive had already reviewed all of them, more than 23 hours in total. They offer rare insight into how DOGE operated last year as it fanned out across government agencies, including details on its disjointed reporting structure, its chaotic decision making process and its zealous pressure campaign against career civil servants and Trump administration appointees alike.

Previous reporting from Government Executive and other media outlets demonstrated these tactics employed at NEH were similar to those DOGE deployed throughout government, though the depositions provide an unprecedented look at an entity that had gone to great lengths to conceal its operations.

‘A rather stressful period’

At NEH, Fox’s emails were a “time-pressure tactic,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition, admitting that he and Fox weren’t themselves getting any pressure from “the top.”

“Mike’s perception of where DOGE sat within the federal government was we had a direct line of communication with the White House,” he said of the acting chair. “We would tell Mike that we were getting pressure from basically the White House to effectuate these contract and grant terminations that were aligned with the [executive order], so it was a time-pressure tactic.”

The DOGE team went so far as to tell NEH leadership to disregard its internal rules and not question the legality of its actions.

“What I told them was that these are the procedures in place that we normally follow,” McDonald said of his conversations with DOGE at the time. “They said that there was no need to follow the procedures, and if there was litigation, which has since occurred, this would be addressed in the litigation.”

The acting chair made clear that the tactics DOGE deployed were effective.

"It was a rather stressful period and we were all under a lot of pressure,” McDonald said, adding Fox had insisted on an arbitrary deadline in March to issue the grant terminations. “So yeah, there was frustration over the overall process, the time constraints that were put upon us, or me in particular.”

Fox and Cavanaugh were at NEH as part of their work on the “small agencies team” at DOGE, of which Cavanaugh was the “informal” lead. Cavanaugh led the first meeting with McDonald, and Fox subsequently took the lead role in reviewing the agency’s books for cuts.

The goal was to identify wasteful spending within the “useless” small agencies in the federal government or effectively eliminate them altogether, said Cavanaugh. In doing so, he and Fox were “comfortable applying pressure to the extent we needed to,” he said.

“We wanted to try and get the agency heads to act quickly on their proposed plans,” he said. “I’ve done the same thing at other agencies.”

Cavanaugh, Fox and the others on their team worked out of the General Services Administration with other DOGE employees.

The team’s structure was loose—Cavanaugh said in the deposition that he reported to Davis, who he says wasn’t intimately involved in his day-to-day work. Fox, meanwhile, viewed GSA’s then-acting administrator Stephen Ehikian as his boss.

“DOGE felt more like a club of folks with a different mission than traditional folks that were career employees,” said Fox, who was being paid a $150,000 salary at GSA.

Other DOGE employees were based at different executive offices, although they often detailed out to additional agencies from those home offices, making it difficult to know who was from where, said Cavanaugh.

At the top of DOGE, Cavanaugh said he viewed Davis as the leader, despite the Trump administration repeatedly labeling Amy Gleason as the acting administrator of the cost-cutting enterprise. Cavanaugh noted during his deposition that he didn’t know how Gleason’s role related to Davis’ job, or even what her role was. She never led any of the weekly or biweekly DOGE meetings while he was in government.

The depositions also offer a glimpse into the ad hoc nature of the DOGE recruiting process.

A 2020 graduate of the University of Virginia who worked in private equity, Fox got involved in DOGE through a friend whose father, Anthony Armstrong, was a “mentor.” Currently the chief financial officer at Musk’s xAI, Armstrong himself worked at the Office of Personnel Management as part of DOGE.

Asked if he formally interviewed for his government job, Fox initially said that he “didn’t remember,” before saying that he talked to several then-leaders at GSA over the secure messaging app Signal before joining.

Cavanaugh joined DOGE after starting a series of tech companies. Before that, he attended Indiana University for one year. Venture capital fund manager Baris Akis, who he called an “informal” recruiter for DOGE, introduced him to Davis. Cavanaugh had no government or political experience and hadn’t taken any government-focused classes.

He joined DOGE after three conversations with Baris and Davis, went through a day or two of standard onboarding for GSA and got to work. He didn’t receive any specific training, he said. NEH officials testified that the DOGE duo possessed no expertise in NEH’s typical work.

Flouting rules

In January, government employees began combing through open grants at NEH to rate how they fared in terms of DEI, “gender ideology,” and environmental justice—all concepts Trump had tasked agencies with rooting out in a day-one executive order.

Fox conducted additional reviews once he and Cavanaugh landed at the agency, especially concentrating on the grants that NEH staff had marked as “NA” for DEI and, after that, all the grants awarded during the Biden administration.

He used ChatGPT to screen grant descriptions for DEI involvement, asking for responses under 120 characters.

This tactic was apparently not known to the head of the small agencies DOGE team at the time, as Cavanaugh said during his deposition that Fox didn’t use AI to come up with the DEI decisions, adding that it was “well understood” that “how we reviewed grants at DOGE for DEI is by reading them.”

The pair also cancelled grants under the mandate to rid the government of “waste” and reduce the deficit, said Cavanaugh.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Government Executive that “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government” when asked to comment.

“In just a year, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” he said.

One of Cavanaugh’s first assignments at DOGE was to re-interview engineering, product management and design employees at GSA. Those conducting the meetings sometimes refused to identify themselves, Government Executive previously reported. DOGE also re-interviewed existing employees elsewhere.

“I believe my inputs on the interviews with employees were then provided to the head of GSA when eventual RIF plans were conducted at GSA,” said Cavanaugh during his deposition.

DOGE’s approach to assessing career employees appeared to flout federal statute and procedure. At NEH, Cavanaugh said that DOGE team members gained system administrator access that allowed them to view details about how employees were using their emails. It also enabled them to make changes without input from the agency’s head of technology.

Such email access was used “mostly in the context of conducting RIF plans,” he said, adding that he and his colleagues were monitoring employees’ email usage and levels of engagement.

Under federal law, agencies can use four factors for determining who gets laid off: the tenure of the employee — e.g. whether the individual is a permanent staffer or a temporary one — their veteran status, their length of service and their performance rating. The latter evaluation is determined through a set process involving the employee's supervisor. RIF statute does not provide for a process that would require employees to interview to justify their jobs, nor does it allow for the monitoring of employee account activity.

NEH ultimately laid off two-thirds of its staff, while GSA sent RIF notices to large portions of its human resources, IT and public buildings teams.

DOGE pushed for high-level access to systems at other agencies, too, another move outside of typical government procedure.

The approach was “part of our operating procedure” for DOGE, “discussed openly during all-hands meetings,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition. It “allowed us to operate as if we were an administrator within the agency for provisioning email accounts, access to critical systems, etc.”

This push for administrative access circumvents many of the cybersecurity policies followed by government agencies, where employees typically only have access to the systems they need to perform their work.

Having more employees with direct access to normally walled-off systems can increase the risk of data breaches, widen the attack surface for hackers and create insider threat risks. Whistleblowers have accused DOGE employees of exfiltrating sensitive data using secretive methods, planning to take sensitive government data with them to private employers and more at other government agencies.

DOGE makes its move

At NEH, more than 1,000 grantees received emails on April 2 from a Microsoft email account—not an NEH email—set up by DOGE, cancelling their grants. It was a “day of chaos,” one person familiar with DOGE’s time at NEH told Government Executive, as staff didn’t know what grants were being cancelled, or even that they were being cancelled that day at all.

NEH employees found out about grant cancellations when they began receiving emails from confused grantees wanting to know if the email was legitimate, they said. Some thought it was a phishing email. Employees themselves could not initially confirm the authenticity of the cancellations, as the notices had been sent by DOGE outside of official channels.

The next day, the agency put most of its staff on administrative leave. As with grantees, they also received this news from an external email address, “NEH_HR@nehemail.onmicrosoft.com.” A week after that, staff began receiving reduction-in-force notices.

NEH staffing has gone from 215 employees in 2024 to 57 as of January—about 75%—according to government data, and it has reorganized from seven divisions down to four.

The largest staffing cuts were to the program officers at NEH, humanities experts with advanced degrees hired to run peer review panels, read application drafts for potential grantees and more, according to the person familiar.

Adam Wolfson, a top NEH official who previously served as its acting director, said in his own deposition that DOGE called the shots on the layoffs.

“I believe they were the ones who said ‘you need to reduce by a certain amount,’” Wolfson said.

Since last spring, NEH has awarded handpicked projects that promote traditionalism and Western civilization, the New York Times has reported. Typically, the agency awards grants through a competitive process, though it now maintains a fraction of its previous capacity to do so.

‘Make decisions and act quickly’

In his testimony, McDonald said he made the final call on which grants to cancel, though he conceded he was following DOGE’s lead.

McDonald said Cavanaugh and Fox “instructed” him to cancel certain grants on a specific timeframe, and he did not feel like he could “disobey.”

“Either way, as you've made clear, it's your decision on whether to discontinue funding on any of the projects on this list,” McDonald said in an email about grants cancellations to the pair at the time.

Cavanaugh said that “the general pacing of DOGE was to try and make decisions and act quickly to avoid government employees dragging their feet on cancellations.”

McDonald noted that Fox directed him to identify a “core” team of employees who would not stand in DOGE’s way as it was executing its plans. The DOGE officials entered NEH with significant skepticism toward the career workforce, McDonald said, despite there being “no factual basis for [them] to believe that.”

That is why DOGE employees insisted on sending out the grant cancellation notices themselves, despite NEH maintaining its own process for doing so.

“The DOGE team was concerned about the degree of cooperation that they would get from the NEH staff,” McDonald said. “Therefore, they preferred to do it, to use their own process for doing it, to avoid the possibility that staff that was opposed to what we were doing would seek in some way to impede it.”

Wolfson agreed with McDonald that there was no cause for DOGE's paranoia.

“I'm a civil servant,” Wolfson said in his own deposition. “I try to be neutral and to assist the leadership of the agency in accomplishing what they want to accomplish.”

Asked whether he could have pushed back on DOGE’s aggressive tactics, McDonald—who is now under consideration to be the permanent nominee to lead NEH—demurred, noting the question was no longer relevant.

“We're going down a hypothetical road about what would have ensued if I had done that,” he said, “which we'll never know.”

Although troves of relevant emails have been made public as part of the lawsuit, some of the records of DOGE’s work at the agency won’t ever be available. Cavanaugh and Fox both said that they used the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal and its autodelete feature extensively to communicate during their time in DOGE.

Fox said that Armstrong told him to download the app when he first approached him about DOGE.

“I remember him being very focused on switching to Signal to talk about anything,” said Fox.

DOGE adopted a records retention policy in late March telling staffers to preserve messages on Signal and on personal devices in compliance with the Presidential Records Act—and to turn off the app’s auto-delete feature—in the wake of the Signal scandal at the Pentagon.

But Cavanaugh appears to have continued using Signal, and he switched between his personal and government devices interchangeably for official agency work. He said that he sent Davis a spreadsheet of cancelled grants and contracts weekly via Signal, at Davis’ request.

Asked who else he communicated with at DOGE via Signal, Cavanaugh said, “it’d be a pretty long list.”

He and Fox left DOGE in August and September, respectively, and have been working at a company they co-founded.

Both testified during their depositions that they joined DOGE because they were eager to decrease the federal deficit, although Fox admitted it wasn’t an interest of his until Armstrong reached out to him.

“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” a lawyer asked Cavanaugh.

“No, we didn’t,” he replied.

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Trump to fire DHS Secretary Noem, selects Mullin as successor

Eric Katz — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:01:00 -0500

Updated March 5 at 3:14 p.m.

Kristi Noem will step down as Homeland Security Department secretary at the end of the month, President Trump announced on Thursday, marking a new chapter in a tumultuous period for the agency that has overseen the administration’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Trump will nominate Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., to replace her, he said. He suggested the change would take effect March 31, though the DHS secretary requires Senate confirmation and the timing for such a vote is not yet clear. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. Noem will be the first cabinet secretary to leave their position in Trump's second term.

DHS is currently shut down after its funding lapsed last month, though more than 90% of its employees are still working. Many of those are doing so without immediate pay.

Noem’s firing came after she testified in Congress on back-to-back days this week, where she faced pointed questions from members of both parties on the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by DHS employees, the aggressive tactics used in immigration enforcement and the spending on a contract for advertising in which the secretary was featured prominently. Noem said Trump personally signed off on that spending, which Trump on Thursday denied to Reuters.

Noem also presided over a rapid hiring surge at the department, focused primarily on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. ICE more than doubled its workforce in 2025, when it brought on more than 10,000 employees. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed into law last year provided $165 billion for DHS, including $16 billion for staffing.

Mullin began serving in the House in 2013 and in the Senate in 2023. Trump called him a “MAGA warrior” and said the senator “knows the wisdom and courage required to advance our America first agenda.”

“Markwayne will work tirelessly to keep our border secure, stop migrant crime, murders and other criminals for illegally entering our country, end the scourge of illegal drugs and make America safe again,” Trump said. “Markwayne will make a spectacular secretary of Homeland Security.”

Mullin told reporters his selection was "a little bit of a surprise," but that he was "excited about this opportunity."

"There's a lot of work we need to do and I'm excited about it," Mullin said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Noem's removal would not lead to a change in Democrats' strategy in holding up DHS funding.

"This is a problem of policy, not personnel," Schumer said. "The rot is deep. No one person can straigthen this up until the president changes the whole agency, stops the violence and reins in ICE."

Trump said Noem will become special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, an upcoming conference on western hemisphere security.

This story has been updated with additional detail.

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VA doesn't know how many calls it's answering or how long veterans are waiting to get through

Eric Katz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:46:11 -0500

The Veterans Affairs Department is failing to track how many calls from its patients it is answering and what is happening with those calls, according to a flash report from the agency’s watchdog, which said the failures are putting vulnerable veterans at risk.

In 13 of the 15 medical facilities the inspector general reviewed, key data including caller hang up rates, answer rates and average wait times were not being tracked. At those facilities, around 1 million of the 2.1 million calls received in the one-year period ending July 31, 2025, were not tracked.

The situation was particularly acute for “high-risk” patients seeking radiology or mental health services, the auditors found. Around 45% of the untracked calls were to clinics in those two fields, which the IG said put “veterans who may need timely and critical care at risk.”

VA in 2023 issued a directive requiring that all phone service lines collect and analyze data, and set the goal of answering at least 80% of calls within 30 seconds and allowing less than 5% of calls to be abandoned.

The IG said it spoke to veterans who faced delays, causing uncertainty and frustration. In one example, a veteran’s spouse said she made multiple calls to her local VA to schedule a radiology appointment but those calls went to voicemail with no response within the promised 24-hour window. Her husband’s cancer may have spread, the auditors found, making the appointment critical. In other cases, the watchdog observed veterans who resorted to driving to medical facilities to make appointments because they could not get through on the phones.

“As a result of the issues identified, veterans may face delays and scheduling challenges in receiving care,” the IG said. “Further, absent data may prevent leaders from identifying problems or taking corrective action to ensure timely, seamless care.”

A VA Office of Information and Technology official confirmed to the watchdog that the department “lacks a system to capture call performance data for specialty clinics that use individual or shared phone lines.” Of the 13 facilities that lacked key data, however, seven had no plans to address the IG’s findings.

The IG said it is “committed to issuing timely reports” that help VA deliver high-quality care to veterans, which spurred the watchdog to put forward an “advisory memorandum” as it completes its full audit. That more comprehensive report is still forthcoming.

“The OIG is disseminating these findings to ensure all VHA medical facilities are aware of and can proactively start collecting and overseeing specialty care call data,” the watchdog said.

VA has boasted that wait times for mental health appointments were under six days for established patients and 19 days for new patients in fiscal 2025. Congressional Democrats and some VA employees have disputed those numbers. The department has lost 1,500 schedulers among the roughly 30,000 total employees it has lost since last January.

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‘Suicide is only one option': Social Security staff newly assigned to phone duties raise concerns over training

Eric Katz — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:32:00 -0500

The Social Security Administration has instructed employees newly assigned to answering phones to tell callers expressing suicidal thoughts that suicide is “one option,” raising concerns from employees and experts in the field who called the approach unorthodox.

SSA recently began shifting new swaths of its workforce to phone answering duty, including those who normally receive and process retirement and disability claims, manage the agency’s technology and work in the agency's finances unit. Those employees received brief, three-hour training before they began answering calls.

As part of that training, they were warned some callers may express suicidal ideation and presented with examples using a theoretical employee named Fiona.

“It's important for Fiona to keep the caller engaged and to remind her that suicide is only one option,” the animated trainer told employees in the video, a copy of which was obtained by Government Executive, “and that there is no urgency to make any decisions.”

Employees at the training, which occurred on Jan. 26 for benefits authorizers and post-entitlement technical experts, were taken aback by the comment and asked their supervisors for clarity. One employee at the training said there was “disbelief that it was just said” among those in the room.

Caitlin Thompson, a clinical psychologist who spent eight years at the Veterans Affairs Department as a clinical care coordinator on the Veterans Crisis Line and later as the department’s national director of suicide prevention, said SSA's approach did not follow commonly accepted best practices.

“It’s not a normal thing to say,” Thompson said. “No. That’s not the thing you say to somebody who might be suicidal.”

Instead, SSA would be better suited telling employees to ask callers if they feel safe in the immediate term and if they say no, to tell the caller that they will work with their supervisor to get them in touch with a crisis line.

“It’s a very specific thing to be able to talk to people,” Thompson said, noting that employees were not hired or properly trained to handle issues that arise on phone calls like those SSA processes. Of potentially suicidal callers, she added, “It can’t just be a ‘sorry to hear that.’”

An SSA spokesperson said their phone agents can sometimes handle “difficult calls” from vulnerable Americans at “the most challenging moments of their lives,” and the employees are trained to encourage the callers to stay on line while they are connected with the suicide prevention hotline.

“SSA trains employees to handle callers in potential crisis situations with calm and compassionate service,” the spokesperson said. “The trainings provided by SSA equip employees with the knowledge to meet callers with understanding and begin discussing how SSA can best get them the help they need.”

The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention maintains a best practices framework for suicide crisis lines, which emphasizes that suicide should not be presented as “acceptable.”

“Research tells us that messages that present simplistic explanations for suicide, glamorize or romanticize suicide, or portray suicide as a common or acceptable response to adversity may spur imitation of suicidal behavior among marginalized individuals,” according to the framework.

Another individual who spent their career overseeing suicide crisis lines said it was appropriate for Social Security to prepare its employees for callers who may be expressing suicidal thoughts. Any potentially stressful situation puts people at an elevated risk for crisis, the person said, and callers into SSA could feel helpless. They said the agency’s approach, however, appeared to fall short.

“The whole thing is odd,” the long-tenured expert in the field said. Employees should be trained to recognize signs of crisis, tell callers expressing those signs that it seems like they could use some support and arrange a “warm handoff” to a crisis line, they added.

Presenting suicide as “one option” opens the door to a path the Social Security employee is not equipped to handle, the person said.

“If that is the one thing that they are being told to say, it puts the person on both sides in a potentially precarious situation,” they said.

Reassigned workers are ostensibly handling simple calls, such as those involving changes of address, updates on claims status or Social Security card replacements. Those who have already started their new assignments said the calls just in the first week have become more complex than those for which they were trained, however. Callers presented complicated issues related to their incarceration or immigration status, the employees said.

Presented with these claims from employees, a senior SSA official told Government Executive last week that the workers were mistaken.

“If there's going to be this claim that individuals aren't receiving the necessary training, I mean, it's just not true,” the official said.

The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a trained listener, call or text 988. Visit 988lifeline.org for crisis chat services or for more information.

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Social Security is directing employees who normally process benefits to answer phones instead

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:56:00 -0500

Updated Feb. 9 at 9:52 a.m.

The Social Security Administration is shifting more employees to its phone line, a move that employees say risks adding to backlogs and processing times for the public as employees who typically handle those workloads are reassigned to take calls.

Employees who receive and process retirement and disability claims, manage the agency’s technology and work in the agency's finances unit will be answering SSA’s phone line after only hours of training. The reshuffling comes after SSA pushed out over 7,400 employees last year, according to newly released government data. That total eclipsed the Trump administration’s intended target of shedding 7,000 SSA workers, a target it announced a year ago.

That loss of workers included 1,387 contact representatives at the SSA, which is now fielding applications for replacements at several locations around the country.

The total number of affected employees now being moved to answer phones is unclear. Last month, the agency moved up to 800 employees from its processing centers, field office support units and workload support units to call answering duties, according to an email notice obtained by Government Executive.

On Wednesday, the agency said that it would be moving employees from its disability adjudication, financial and management, field office services, risk and quality, digital services and chief information officer units, according to another email. The employees SSA reassigned last week included benefits authorizers, claims authorizers and post-entitlement technical experts, who process claims and appeals to help seniors and disabled Americans receive their benefits.

These employees are on top of at least 1,000 field offices employees SSA moved to its phone line over the summer. The agency reassigned an additional 500 field office employees to 1-800 number duties in December, according to the union representing those workers.

Reassigned employees said it made little sense to answer calls for individuals awaiting information about the status of their claims and benefits while removing the people responsible for processing those claims and benefits.

“Why are we being forced away from the backlog of appeals and cases and forced onto the phones to take calls from people wondering what the status of their claim is and where their back benefits are?” one reassigned employee asked. “We are the workers who process the claims they are waiting for.”

Both processing centers and workload support units “are behind in those workloads,” another employee said. SSA workers said they fear falling further behind, or unwinding some of the progress they have made.

SSA’s processing center backlog—which stood at 6 million pending cases last year—is down by nearly 20% or over a million cases, the agency told Congress in November. It includes claims, but also other transactions like address changes.

Field offices maintained a 12 million case backlog, which includes both claims and other types of transactions, The Washington Post reported late last year.

“Most of the calls we are receiving are inquiries about why their claim or paperwork hasn't been processed. Well, those things aren't getting done because the people who normally do it are answering phones,” said one SSA field office employee in an office where some employees have been answering the 1-800 number since the summer.

The agency has touted reductions to its disability claims backlog, which as of December sat at 844,081 cases, down from a high in June 2024 of 1.26 million pending claims. That workload is mostly handled by states, although SSA has been supporting that work.

Several employees at processing centers said they received only three hours of training before being placed onto phone answering duties that same day. That is despite the agency telling its union that workers in other parts of the agency would receive eight hours of training. Employees said even that level of training would be insufficient due the complexity of issues that can arise on a call, even the simpler matters that SSA said are being routed their way.

Staff at every SSA processing center is thought to be taking reassignments to phone duties, employees said. At one facility, at least, an employee said every benefits authorizer is now answering phones full time.

“We aren’t doing other work so there will be a backlog of that,” the employee said.

An employee at another facility said management has sent at least 50 employees to phone duty. At the end of that to-be-determined rotation, another 50 employees will take their place.

“So the backlog we were doing so well at reducing will now grow,” the employee said.

An SSA spokesperson declined to address concerns that the reassignments would cause backlogs to spike, saying instead that the agency was shifting employees around to ensure it is operating at “peak efficiency.”

“With our focus on technology and process engineering, we have realized significant operational efficiencies throughout the agency, allowing us to deploy additional staff to assist customers on the National 800 Number,” said the spokesperson, who declined to be named. “This strategic deployment furthers our efforts to deliver the world-class customer service the American people deserve."

Many of the employees reassigned to phone duty have never performed such work previously and were asked to begin immediately after receiving a three-hour training. Others worked the phones during a surge several years ago, but did so only after receiving months of training and being shadowed by a full-time phone operator. In their normal day jobs, the employees have no direct contact with the public.

While employees have familiarity with some of the issues that callers to the SSA 1-800 number will pose, they said they do not have the full knowledge base. Some employees in their normal duties work only on retirement claims, for example, while others only on disability cases. Employees began answering phones the day after they found out about the reassignments, according to multiple impacted workers.

Rich Couture, spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees chapter that represents SSA employees, said the agency needs more staff for answering calls and throughout its divisions. He expressed concern that claims processing work will now pile up while reassigned employees struggle to adapt to new roles for which they are ill-prepared.

SSA has “pushed out thousands of experienced frontline workers through buyouts and layoff threats, including many seasoned 1-800-number employees,” Couture said. “Those unnecessary losses aggravated the agency’s already-diminished service capacity, given our 50-year staffing low.”

Frank Bosignano, SSA’s administrator, has deployed a similarly unorthodox approach at his federal side gig: CEO of the Internal Revenue Service. At the tax agency, Government Executive reported that Bosignano is moving hundreds of human resources and other staff with no experience working directly on tax issues to phone-answering duties. IRS has shed more than 20,000 employees since President Trump took office and has struggled to hire in preparation for tax filing season, leading the agency to tap HR employees to ensure “tax season doesn’t grind to a halt.”

SSA employees noted they did not have the proper equipment or software access to begin the work and in some cases were unable to go into the office to seek a resolution due to snow-related closures. Reassigned workers said they are “panicking” about their new roles.

“They are all very upset, frustrated, angry,” one employee said, adding that managers are similarly displeased as they are losing staff while still under pressure to meet case completion quotas.

Reassigned workers are ostensibly handling simple calls, such as those involving changes of address, updates on claims status or Social Security card replacements. They do not actually process claims, as many of the employees would be doing in their normal day jobs. Those who have already started their new assignments said the calls just in the first week have become more complex than those for which they were trained, however.

One caller asked for a new card but was incarcerated, a reassigned employee said, adding complicated layers to the resolution process. Other calls involved individuals who were in the middle of the immigration process and were not sure if they had existing Social Security numbers, had the same number as someone else or only spoke Spanish. Staff were not trained for those circumstances, the employee said, leading to delays and management’s involvement.

Presented with these claims from employees, a senior SSA official said the workers were mistaken.

“If there's going to be this claim that individuals aren't receiving the necessary training, I mean, it's just not true,” the official said.

A spokesperson added that SSA employees will receive "appropriate training" and "ongoing technical support."

“Through technology and intelligent call routing these employees will handle calls in line with their training to assist customers at the first point of contact,” the spokesperson said. “If additional support is requested, there is an escalation process in place to transfer these calls to lead technical staff to meet the customer’s needs in these situations.”

Another employee said a lack of familiarity with the software used to answer phones has created obstacles and delays in handling calls. Staff have encountered difficulty in identifying supervisors or customer service representatives with experience to assist them, even as staff have received some additional on-the-job training.

“It's literally been learning as we go,” the reassigned employee said. “We are still lost.”

This story has been updated with additional detail.

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'Setting this agency up for failure': Amid staffing crunch, IRS taps employees with no relevant experience to assist during filing season

Eric Katz — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

The Internal Revenue Service is asking seasoned employees without any direct tax experience to perform entry-level tasks of answering phones and processing tax returns, a step impacted staff call unprecedented as the agency scrambles to prepare for filing season.

The reassigned workers, who are being detailed out on an involuntary basis, are coming from the IRS human resources and, potentially, the IT departments. Some employees reported that supervisors first asked for anyone who had experience in the front-line fields to consider the roles, but they ultimately chose many individuals with no prior experience working directly on tax issues.

The details come as IRS has dramatically slashed its workforce, cutting more than 20,000 employees—or more than 20% of total staff—in the last year. The divisions seeking internal staffing support have seen similarly significant losses to their workforces and have struggled to rebuild in time for filing season, according to a new report from the IRS inspector general.

The divisions in IRS that process tax returns and provide telephonic and in-person customer service, as well as other duties related to filing season, have lost 8,300 workers, or 17% of their staff, the IG found.

The IRS division tasked with processing original and amended tax returns has hired just 50 employees in anticipation of the 2026 filing season, or 2% of its authorized level. It can take up to 80 days to train new employees, the IG said, meaning employees hired now may not be ready to assist during filing season at all. Accounts Management, which handles IRS customer service, has hired just 66% of the filing season employees for which it has been authorized.

The IG warned the shortfalls could lead to delayed returns and slow service for taxpayers in the upcoming season and said the impacts have already been felt. Tax return backlogs were still elevated as a result of the pandemic, the IG said, but have soared higher due to staffing losses in IRS. The total now stands at 2 million, up 33% from a year ago.

The reassignments were issued “so tax season doesn’t grind to a halt,” said one employee whose office is losing employees to the new roles. The employees will face 120-day details to perform the front-line work, which employees said is not something that had ever previously been considered. Alex Kweskin, the agency's chief human capital officer, told employees at a town hall meeting on Wednesday the details could be extended to up to 180 days. IRS is seeking 500 employees, according to two employees familiar with the plans, who said further details are also expected from IT. The HR employees will start their new duties later this month.

Employees said supervisors initially sought volunteers, but the temporary details later became assigned and mandatory. They noted most of the employees being asked to accept the details are farther along in their careers and working more specialized jobs than those who typically work in them, meaning IRS would be paying them double or triple what a normal customer service representative or tax examiner would make.

“My team is about as far removed from tax work as possible,” the employee said.

Another employee who will begin a detail in the coming weeks said they and their colleagues who would be reassigned “have no experience in taxpayer services.” Detailed employees will have limited capacity to stop fraudulent returns, assist small businesses or otherwise help taxpayers due to their lack of training and understanding of the tax system, they said, adding “the error rate is going to skyrocket.”

“They are setting this agency up for failure for this tax season for sure,” the employee said. “It’s going to make a bigger impact than people realize.”

IRS declined to comment for this story.

The looming requests for the IT shop come at a tumultuous time for that division. Last year it reassigned 1,500 employees to the office of the chief operating officer, with no detail on what their new roles would entail. Those employees were recently told the agency is working with IRS CEO Frank Bisignano to determine temporary assignments for the displaced workers. Employees have remained on the payroll with no work assignments since December. One such worker said he hoped to avoid being detailed to a taxpayer services role.

“It would be a disaster,” the employee said. “Many of us don’t have this kind of knowledge to do an effective job for taxpayers.”

As IRS adjusts to its new staffing realities, the agency is lowering its goal of phone calls it services from 85% down to 70%. Many of the technologies IRS said it would leverage to make up for the staffing losses are not yet ready, the IG found in its report.

Hiring has slowed in part due to Bisignano and Treasury now having to sign off on every job posting and every hire, the watchdog added.

One employee whose office is sending staff to fill the details noted it has never backfilled after the deferred resignation program and the temporary details would therefore have an outsized effect on efforts to fulfill normal duties. Another employee said the entire ethics team, with the exception of one person, is being detailed to taxpayer services.

“They are leaving one person to deliver ethics training for the entire agency,” the employee said. “It’s an impossible task for one person.”

The same worker added employees in charge of recruiting and hiring are being detailed out, making it more difficult for IRS to bring on the staff the IG said it is failing to hire.

IRS is now the latest agency in the Trump administration to ask employees to move around to fill vacancies it spurred. The Agriculture Department, which shed more than 15,000 employees since President Trump took office, last month asked employees to transfer into “critical” vacancies as it threatened more cuts. The National Weather Service previously offered employees opportunities to transfer to fill key roles that had been left unoccupied. The Justice Department last year asked employees within its Civil Rights Division to take reassignments to fill roles in areas related to education, employment and voting after leaders cited the “deep need” created by significant vacancies.

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Partial shutdown ends less than 4 days after it began

Eric Katz — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:07:00 -0500

Federal agencies are set to reopen after the House on Tuesday approved a spending package funding those forced to close their doors over the weekend, ending the shutdown less than four days after it began.

All but the Homeland Security Department, which will be funded on a stopgap basis through Feb. 13, will now receive their full fiscal 2026 appropriation. Employees across a slew of agencies impacted by partial shutdown were sent home on furlough on Monday, but will now return to work—most likely on Wednesday.

The departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury, as well as other related agencies, such as the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, experienced a funding lapse that began Saturday morning. The Senate approved the spending package on Friday, but the House was on recess and could not act until it returned on Monday.

House Democrats declined to provide the votes for an expedited consideration of the bill, leading the partial shutdown to go on for one more day. A procedural vote on Tuesday appeared as though it might fail and derail efforts to reopen the government, but a few Republican holdouts ultimately opted to move the package forward.

Ultimately most Democrats voted against the final bill and most Republicans supported it.

The Office of Management and Budget on Friday informed agencies a funding lapse would occur and they should initiate shutdown procedures, even as the White House agency expressed hope the partial government closure would be short-lived. Agencies took varying approaches over the weekend and on Monday, leading to some confusion over exactly how employees should proceed.

Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and much of DHS remained open, either due to alternative funding streams or the nature of their work. The Federal Aviation Administration, HUD and HHS and other agencies cumulatively sent tens of thousands of employees home on furlough.

Employees from several agencies told Government Executive they had been told to expect to report to work on Wednesday if the House acted on Tuesday afternoon. Lawmakers included in the bill language guaranteeing furloughed workers will receive back pay.

Many of the agencies now funded through September will experience minor cuts to their budgets relative to fiscal 2025, but will avoid the significantly more drastic cuts proposed by President Trump. Government Executive’s analysis of the bills contained in the spending package can be found here, here and here.

Lawmakers will next turn to finding a path forward on full-year funding for DHS, though leaders have already expressed pessimism about reaching a solution before the Feb. 13 deadline. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has laid out his caucus’ demands for changes at DHS, including the removal of masks by DHS law enforcement personnel, mandated use of body cameras, a requirement for third-party warrants to enter homes, the end of roving patrols in metropolitan areas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and more uniform restrictions on use of force by federal agents.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has called some of those requests non-starters.

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Shutdown deal struck after failed Senate vote

Eric Katz — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:02:00 -0500

Updated at 9:18 p.m. ET

Senate Democrats and the White House came to an agreement late Thursday to fund the vast majority of federal agencies through the end of the fiscal year, and a two-week stopgap measure to fund the Homeland Security Department while continued negotiations take place over reforms at DHS.

Senate leaders worked into the evening to schedule a vote. It is unclear when the House, which is in recess until Monday, will vote on the measure.

“Hopefully, both Republicans and Democrats will give a very much needed Bipartisan “YES” Vote,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The deal came hours after eight Republicans joined all Democrats in defeating a previous measure, which the House had approved with broad bipartisan support. It was set to coast to President Trump’s desk until Border Patrol agents fatally shot Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, leading to demands from Senate Democrats that more restrictions be placed on the Homeland Security Department’s immigration enforcement efforts as part of the agency’s funding bill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., subsequently laid out his caucus’ demands for DHS reforms, including the removal of masks by DHS law enforcement personnel, mandated use of body cameras, a requirement for third-party warrants to enter homes, the end of roving patrols in metropolitan areas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and more uniform restrictions on use of force by federal agents. Democrats engaged the White House on those requests and ultimately negotiated a bipartisan path forward.

Lawmakers in both parties had expressed an openness to carving out DHS appropriations and passing the other five spending bills still outstanding. The package funds the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury, as well as other related agencies. Under the plan, Congress would approve a stopgap continuing resolution for DHS to allow for negotiations to continue for two weeks.

The failed bill would have almost certainly led to at least a short shutdown, however, as funding those agencies was set to expire first thing Saturday.

With a deal getting signed into law imminent, the Office of Management and Budget could instruct agencies to delay shutdown procedures. OMB pursued such an approach in 2018 when funding briefly expired for agencies but it declared the impasse was merely a “short, technical lapse.” It advised employees to show up to work due to the imminence of a resolution, though the situation created widespread confusion across federal agencies.

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Man fatally shot by Border Patrol agents was a federal employee at VA

Eric Katz — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:12:00 -0500

Federal agents on Saturday fatally shot a man protesting immigration enforcement activities in Minneapolis. The man was later revealed to be an employee of the Veterans Affairs Department, working as an intensive care unit nurse at the medical center in the city where he was killed.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, was taken to the ground by several federal agents before one of them shot him. Pretti gathered with other protestors as Border Patrol was conducting what it called a targeted operation to detain an individual it said was in the country illegally.

Trump administration officials accused Pretti of approaching Border Patrol agents with a weapon and resisting efforts to disarm him. They said, without evidence, that Pretti was looking to “massacre law enforcement.” Analysis of videos of the incident by media organizations such as The New York Times found the evidence contradicted that version of events, as Pretti approached the with only his phone and his firearm was holstered and concealed until after the agents had forcefully brought him to the ground.

As a VA nurse, Pretti was a member of the American Federation of Government Employees chapter at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. AFGE President Everett Kelley said Pretti "dedicated his life to serving American veterans."

“Our union is heartbroken,” Kelley said. “An AFGE member is dead. And a family’s life has been forever changed.”

Kelley blamed President Trump’s policies for creating the environment in which Pretti’s death occurred, though he encouraged his members to demonstrate restraint.

“I urge everyone to remain disciplined and measured in public, even as we are rightly angry,” Kelley said. “Still, we must do what we can to maintain peace and calm.”

The Trump administration was quick to denounce Pretti despite his work for the administration and with veterans, with Homeland Security Department Secretary Kristi Noem quickly labeling him a domestic terrorist. VA did not respond to a request for comment. Records indicate Pretti worked for VA since at least 2016.

Pretti’s death marked the third shooting by federal law enforcement in Minnesota in recent weeks. Earlier this month, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, who was protesting the agency’s enforcement activities from her vehicle. Officers shot another man who was fleeing his attempted arrest.

Doug Massey, president of the AFGE chapter that represents employees in VA's headquarters, said the pain of Pretti's death would be widespread.

“Alex…was known by colleagues, friends, and family as a compassionate caregiver who was deeply committed to helping others,” Massey said. “His senseless death is a profound loss to his loved ones, his patients, and our union family.”

The shooting could have further implications for federal employees: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in response to the shooting that his party would not agree to a six-bill funding package next week if it contains DHS appropriations. Half of the 12-annual must pass spending bills for fiscal 2026 have already cleared Congress, but the remaining six are still pending before the Senate. The House already approved them.

In addition to DHS, those measures would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury, as well as other related agencies. They are currently operating under a stopgap continuing resolution that is set to expire Jan. 30. Lawmakers could opt to fund just those agencies and negotiate separately over DHS, though such an approach would require new votes in both the House and Senate.

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GSA backs off planned layoffs within its technology team after court order

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:19:00 -0500

The General Services Administration is abandoning plans for additional layoffs within its Technology Transformation Services after a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration must pause any layoffs underway and rescind layoffs issued since the start of the government shutdown on Oct. 1.

TTS director Thomas Shedd told employees via email this week that the agency is rescinding the notices of an intention to issue a reduction in force, or layoff, that it sent to employees within the TTS Office of Awards, Regulatory and Oversight Systems and its Digital Services Division in April.

TTS oversees technology solutions like the government’s identity proofing system, Login.gov; FedRAMP, a security standards program for cloud products and services; and Cloud.gov, a shared service for government agencies to move to the cloud.

Shedd told staff in March that the TTS workforce would be cut in half as the team narrowed its work to only that required by statute, deemed “critical” or within the priorities of the administration.

Overall, TTS staffing is down by 67% since Jan. 25, according to a recent inspector general report. GSA completely eliminated the tech consultancy within TTS, called 18F, in March.

Shedd told the inspector general that TTS “made the most aggressive changes to meet workforce optimization mandates, due in part to its small size and political leadership.”

GSA will "continue to assess workforce needs and priorities as we consider any future re-sizing efforts for these teams" at the end of January, he told staff in the recent email. “TTS will explore gaps across the organization and consider staff reassignments.”

“TTS continues to evaluate its workforce needs, acting in the best interest of the customer agencies we serve and the American taxpayers,” a GSA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW in a statement.

The new GSA inspector general report listed fallout from staffing reductions as a top challenge for the agency, which will soon have new leadership on board. The Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s nominee for the agency head, financial executive Ed Forst, on Thursday.

“Although the president directed agencies to develop reorganization plans to most efficiently deliver their statutorily required functions, GSA undertook widespread staffing reductions before it had effective reorganization plans in place,” the report reads. “This resulted in a series of unintended consequences. GSA should assess its reorganization efforts to ensure it has the resources and skill sets necessary to fulfill its statutory mission while meeting the president’s call for efficiency and savings.”

In one case, a construction contractor partnering with GSA reached out to the IG because the entire Public Buildings Service team it had worked with was gone and it no longer had any contacts within the agency. GSA can no longer adequately manage its construction workload due to staffing cuts, the auditors said, nor can it properly oversee or negotiate the federal government's leases.

The IG found similar issues plaguing GSA throughout its operational areas. GSA has shed 40% of its IT workforce since January, for example.

At TTS, GSA sent approximately 130 notices of an “intention” to RIF in April to people within its Office of the Integrated Award Environment and Office of Regulatory and Oversight Systems, as well as parts of the Office of Solutions.

TTS staff received additional communication regarding the potential RIFs following the court order this week, which applied specifically to the departments of Education and State, as well as GSA and the Small Business Administration. That order sought to bring the Trump administration in compliance with the spending law that ended the shutdown last month.

“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” through Jan. 30, the continuing resolution ordered. Shedd told staff that TTS would determine its next steps for potential further employee cuts at that time.

Two regional GSA employees unaffiliated with TTS who originally received layoff notices in April testified in the RIF lawsuit that they received final separation notices during the shutdown. The court ordered all of those layoffs rescinded.

While it did not appear the TTS workforce received any communication regarding their intent-to-RIF notices during the shutdown, GSA has still opted to — for now — rescind those actions as well.

“There was never a clear justification made for why these cuts made sense, other than ‘we just want fewer of you here.’ Which is hilarious because the affected teams are made up of engineers, designers, and program managers — the exact skill sets the administration is now trying to recruit,” one current GSA employee told Nextgov/FCW about TTS cuts.

“All they accomplished was traumatizing and distracting a hundred people for eight months by having the daily threat of being fired effective immediately hanging over them,” they said.

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Air traffic controllers calling out sick during shutdown may have acted illegally, FAA chief says

Eric Katz — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:45:00 -0500

The Trump administration is asking “tough questions” of certain air traffic controllers who did not report to work during the recent government shutdown, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration told lawmakers on Tuesday, after suggesting they may have taken unlawful action in response to their delayed paychecks.

Call outs of FAA employees led to major disruptions to air travel during the record-setting shutdown that ended last month, eventually leading the agency to mandate reductions in the number of fights taking place each day. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford defended that decision before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Tuesday, though he said in some cases evidence suggested employees may have taken organized action to exacerbate the situation.

On a typical day, FAA takes action at a handful of facilities to correct for staffing issues. During the shutdown, that skyrocketed to a peak of 80 facilities per day. At some facilities, Bedford said, zero air traffic controllers showed up for work on some days.

“None of the controllers showed up for work,” Bedford said. “So we do have to ask some tough questions about: was that a job action.”

Federal employees are statutorily barred from participating in strikes or work slowdowns and in 1981, President Reagan summarily fired all air traffic controllers when they organized a work stoppage. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association worked closely with the Trump administration during the shutdown and repeatedly told its members it did not condone any collective action. Bedford suggested there may still be some disciplinary action forthcoming.

“That's not tolerable,” the administrator said of potential organized call outs. “So I think there is an accountability.”

FAA did not respond to an inquiry into whether or how many probes into employees are ongoing.

Transportation Department Secretary Sean Duffy previously suggested air traffic controllers who called out during the shutdown could face consequences, but he pointed to those who missed extended periods of time before the the employees saw their first paychecks delayed. Bedford, meanwhile, referred specifically to employees who may have collaborated with their colleagues to ensure no controllers reported to work.

Duffy’s comments followed similar remarks by President Trump who said controllers who missed time during the shutdown should be fired. Trump also vowed to provide $10,000 to FAA employees who showed up to work each day during the shutdown, though those bonuses only went out to a small fraction of qualified employees.

FAA has for many years lamented severe staffing shortages and Duffy has vowed to “supercharge” hiring for controllers. The agency met its goal of onboarding more than 2,000 such employees in fiscal 2025, Bedford said, and aims to hire between 2,200 and 2,500 ATCs in the current fiscal year on the way to hiring 8,900 employees over a four-year period. Additionally, FAA has boosted its inspector and engineer workforce with hastened hiring authority, relocation incentives and a focus on critical locations. Still, the administrator conceded the staffing issue is likely to linger.

“That’s the challenge,” Bedford said of high turnover rates. “We still see a lot of retirements. We see folks who frankly cannot take the pace of the work. We have a retention issue within the controller workforce.”

He added there was no “magic fix” to the staffing and retention issues, saying significant reforms and a collaborative relationship with NATCA would be required. President Trump has sought to unilaterally revoke collective bargaining rights for most federal employees, though he allowed for a carveout at FAA.

“When will we get our towers fully staffed?” Bedford said. “The honest answer is, if we continue business as usual, never. We’ll never catch up. The system is designed to be understaffed.”

While threatening discipline for some employees for their actions during it, Bedford acknowledged the shutdown had taken its toll on the workforce and recruiting efforts.

“Clearly the FAA culture needs a reset,” he said.

Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., questioned whether his comments, and those of Duffy and Trump, that denigrated those who called out during the shutdown would help achieve that goal.

“People get sick during a government shutdown,” Scholten said. “Threatening to fire them and maybe making people afraid, forcing them to potentially come to work when they're under the weather. Do you think that has an impact on morale?”

One FAA employee told Government Executive the approach would hamper the agency’s staffing efforts.

“The hostile environment is not helping efforts to hire ATCs,” the employee said. “Controllers are already leaving at higher rates than before this [administration] and it is a direct result of this irresponsible behavior.”

While he said it would yield long-term benefits, Bedford suggested the agency’s significant modernization overhaul would also lead to added turnover. FAA received $12.5 billion for its effort as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, though the administrator stressed that was just a down payment on the total cost for his plans. Lawmakers criticized the selection of Peraton to oversee the project, citing its lack of direct experience in the field, though Bedford said FAA was not outsourcing the project and he would serve as chief accountability officer. He predicted the changes would lead to significant disruptions that upsets the workforce.

“It's uncomfortable for their bureaucracy,” Bedford said. “Some of them will leave. There will be turnover associated with that as we turn these processes on their head.”

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Government to reopen after House votes to end longest-ever shutdown

Eric Katz — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 12:09:00 -0500

Updated Nov. 13 at 8:13 a.m.

The federal government is set to reopen after being shut down for a record-setting 43 days after the House on Wednesday evening approved a bill to resume operations across agencies.

President Trump quickly signed the spending package into law, meaning agencies were set to open Thursday morning. Most agencies are now funded through January under the new stopgap continuing resolution, though the Veterans Affairs Department, Agriculture Department and legislative branch agencies are funded through September.

More than one million federal employees who worked or were furloughed during the shutdown without pay will soon begin receiving regular paychecks, as well as backpay for the checks they missed for the duration of the funding lapse. Around 650,000 furloughed workers are expected to quickly return to their offices and begin digging out from the piles of missed work during the shutdown, with most of those employees likely expected back first-thing Thursday. The funding deal guarantees those workers receive backpay despite the Trump administration threatening to flout a 2019 law that already required such retroactive compensation.

Ahead of the House vote on Wednesday, the White House said the spending package “ends disruptions to programs the American people rely on and ensures the thousands of federal employees who have been forced to work without a paycheck, such as air traffic controllers, will be promptly paid.” Trump said upon signing the measure that normal operations would resume and demonstrated he would “never give into extortion.”

As in the Senate, Democrats voted against the deal as it did not take any affirmative step to abate health care premium increases for millions of Americans next year, the key demand that led to the shutdown in the first place. The agreement came together over the weekend when eight Senate Democrats joined nearly all Republicans to approve the bill after stating the funding lapse was hurting too many people to allow it to continue.

In one concession to Democrats, the bill will unwind the more than 4,000 layoffs the Trump administration issued during the shutdown. Those reductions in force are currently paused by a federal court, though the injunction is only slated to last as long as the shutdown is in effect. The Trump administration has mostly not indicated whether it would seek to move forward with the RIFs after the government reopens.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday the now-reversed layoffs marked just a small proportion of the hundreds of thousands of federal workers the Trump administration has removed from or incentivized to leave government.

“We've done a lot of great work on that front and we will continue to, but obviously the president's main priority was to reopen the federal government and get people back to work, and that's what this deal accomplishes,” Leavitt said.

The legislation will ban all agencies from carrying out any RIFs through January. The package of three full-year funding bills largely rejects funding cuts proposed by President Trump, particularly those within USDA.

The measure will also ensure the Trump administration follows a 2019 law that guarantees backpay for all federal workers furloughed during the shutdown, something the White House had suggested it would not do. Those who worked during the shutdown are also guaranteed retroactive pay.

Most employees were prepared to return to work on Thursday. Typically, the process of reopening government formally begins when the Office of Management and Budget director issues a memo ordering furloughed employees to return to work and for agencies to reopen in a “prompt and orderly manner.” OMB also maintains a checklist for agencies to resume normal activities, spelling out considerations related to communications with employees, getting employees paid as quickly as possible, prioritizing the workload and handling contracts.

Furloughed federal workers are generally told not to check their government email or use their official devices during a shutdown, though they are instructed to stay apprised of the news and to check in when funding appears imminent. Already on Wednesday ahead of the House vote, several employees told Government Executive they had received either formal communications or informal messages from their supervisors. The Interior Department, for example, told employees to prepare to report for duty on Thursday, some of whom were told they could telework if necessary. One furloughed Agriculture Department was initially told to report on Friday, but by Wednesday evening the message was updated fo instead show up on Thursday.

The Health and Human Services Department sent a note to employees that it was hopeful the shutdown would end Wednesday.

“All employees who were furloughed must report for duty at their official duty station on Thursday, Nov. 13 if the bill is signed into law tonight or tomorrow morning,” HHS said.

Late Wednesday night, OMB Director Russ Vought issued a memorandum officially telling agencies to reopen on Thursday. He thanked federal employees for their “work on behalf of the American people to usher in President Trump's Golden Age of America.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

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Senate moves shutdown-ending deal that would ensure backpay and unwind some federal layoffs

Eric Katz — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:47:00 -0500

The Senate on Sunday took a first step toward ending the longest-ever government shutdown, clearing a procedural hurdle to approve a package that would keep agencies funded through at least January and walk back thousands of federal employee layoffs.

The agreement came together on the shutdown’s 40th day and would approve full-year appropriations for the Veterans Affairs Department, Agriculture Department and the legislative branch. All other agencies would operate at their fiscal 2025 levels under a continuing resolution that would expire after Jan. 30.

Most Democrats still voted against the deal as it will not take any affirmative step to abate health care premium increases for millions of Americans next year, the key demand that led to the shutdown in the first place. Still, a sufficient number of Senate Democrats joined nearly all Republicans to approve the bill after stating the funding lapse was hurting too many people for it to continue. The upper chamber must still take additional votes to send the measure to the House, though the bill could wind up on President Trump’s desk later this week.

The court injunction applies to the duration of the shutdown and the Trump administration mostly had not indicated whether it would seek to move forward with the RIFs after the government reopens. In the interim, the employees remain on the rolls in a paid leave status. Some agencies, such as the Interior Department, have suggested the shutdown had no bearing on their layoffs plans.

The legislation would ban all agencies from carrying out any RIFs through January. The package of three full-year funding bills would largely reject funding cuts proposed by President Trump, particularly those within USDA.

The measure will also ensure the Trump administration follows a 2019 law that guarantees back pay for all federal workers furloughed during the shutdown, something the White House had suggested it would not do. Those who worked during the shutdown are also guaranteed retroactive pay.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he voted for the bill in part to protect federal employees, though his state counterpart, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., voted against it.

“This legislation will protect federal workers from baseless firings, reinstate those who have been wrongfully terminated during the shutdown, and ensure federal workers receive back pay, as required by a law I got passed in 2019,” Kaine said. “That's a critical step that will help federal employees and all Americans who rely on government services.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who also represents one of the largest shares of federal workers, voted against the measure despite pleading to continue fighting for civil servants.

“I am prepared to work toward a compromise, but this funding bill before us tonight does not come close to meeting those terms,” Van Hollen said, adding the measure failed to prevent the Trump administration from “ignoring the law and withholding funds for important priorities.”

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., announced on Sunday that as part of the deal he will allow a vote in December on continuing Affordable Care Act subsidies. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has not made the same promise.

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‘We’re closer to the end': Lawmakers signal some progress in bipartisan talks to end shutdown

Eric Katz — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 17:21:00 -0500

A bipartisan group of lawmakers said on Tuesday they have made slight progress toward ending the government shutdown, which is poised to become the longest in U.S. history after another failed vote will drag it into its 36th day.

Senators are getting closer to an agreement on a package of full-year appropriations bills for certain agencies and an accompanying stopgap bill to reopen the rest of government until a to-be-determined date. Lawmakers in both parties suggested many details still needed to be ironed out and there was not yet any broad agreement, but suggested the two sides were having ongoing conversations that have proven productive.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., declined to discuss the nature of the negotiations, saying only that they are in a pivotal moment.

“I don't want to characterize conversations,” Peters said. “We're in a sensitive time right now. It's important to say we're still talking and hopefully progress will be made.”

In a note of barely perceptible optimism, Sen. Mark Kelly, D- Ariz., said the Senate has inched closer to a resolution.

“Maybe we're moving.” Kelly said. “We're closer to the end of this than we are to the beginning.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said progress has been made in those conversations.

“The talks are more productive,” Collins said. “It's still a challenge, and there are issues to be solved.”

The senators are considering three full-year appropriations bills—to fund the Veterans Affairs Department, the Agriculture Department and the legislative branch—marking one-fourth of the twelve spending bills Congress must pass each year. The Senate approved a package earlier this year, but negotiators are working on a version that could clear the House and, potentially, be attached to a continuing resolution to temporarily fund the rest of government.

Republican senators noted that issues on the three-bill “minibus” have mostly been ironed out, though details remained under wraps. The Senate and House have passed vastly different fiscal 2026 appropriations bills, with the latter measures introducing significant cuts that the upper chamber largely avoided in its bipartisan legislative proposals.

Senate Democrats held a lengthy, two-plus hour meeting Tuesday afternoon, though they did not announce any strategy once it concluded.

“We had a very good caucus, and we're exploring all the options,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters after the lunch.Peters said after the meeting that conversations on how to end the shutdown were “still a work in progress,” adding the meeting was so long because “there was a lot to discuss.”

While the Senate rejected the House-backed continuing resolution that would fund agencies through Nov. 21 for the 14th time on Tuesday, it appears the legislation is no longer operative. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, D-S.D., said a new CR—for agencies not otherwise funded by full-year spending bills, should such a deal come together—with a later expiration has become necessary.

“The Nov. 21 deadline no longer makes a lot of sense, so clearly it would need to be extended,” Thune said. He added the new deadline was still being discussed but the goal was to avoid another year-long CR.

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Employees are receiving renewed furlough notices as shutdown enters second month, this time without back pay guarantees

Eric Katz — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:20:00 -0400

The government shutdown is poised to enter its second month on Saturday, meaning agencies across government on Friday once again sent furlough notices to hundreds of thousands of workers.

To maintain clarity between shutdown furloughs and more permanent and planned cost-saving measures, notices are required to go out every 30 days. The current funding lapse entered its 31st day on Friday—and could next week surpass the record-setting, 35-day impasse from 2018-2019—which required a fresh, formal update from agencies letting around 650,000 employees know they should remain at home without working.

The new notices largely included the same boilerplate language as the originals that went out at the outset of the shutdown, those from several agencies viewed by Government Executive showed, with one notable difference: they no longer contained language assuring employees that back pay was guaranteed when the shutdown concluded.

“The Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 provides that employees shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations ends,” read a General Services Administration furlough notice sent on Oct. 1.

“As soon as possible after the appropriations lapse ends, you will be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations, in accordance with 31 U.S.C. § 1341(c) and other applicable laws,” read another from the Interior Department.

In both cases, and all others reviewed by Government Executive, that language was removed.

The change was expected, as the Trump administration has, mostly, argued in recent weeks that it has no obligation to grant retroactive compensation to employees, despite President Trump in 2019 signing into law a measure that guaranteed it in all future shutdowns.

The Internal Revenue Service delayed its furloughs by a week at the shutdown’s outset, but eventually sent messages to employees noting back pay was guaranteed. The following day, it sent a new message that its previous email contained incorrect information. It deleted the original email from all employees’ inboxes.

Shortly after the shutdown began, as Government Executive first reported, the Office of Management and Budget deleted from its guidance any reference to the 2019 law or back pay for furloughed federal workers. OMB subsequently released new legal guidance suggesting Congress must take legislative action to authorize back pay.

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress rejected the Trump administration's newly minted legal argument, saying the matter was settled and the workers were guaranteed retroactive pay. Legal experts said the plain reading of the law and its legislative history made clear Congress intended to ensure back pay for those furloughed in all future shutdowns, and the Trump administration’s own guidance on the law in 2019 stated it applied in perpetuity.

In federal court this week in a case regarding layoffs, a Justice Department attorney also contradicted the White House’s new argument.

“We're dealing with a class of employees who are furloughed, who are not working on specific government actions,” said Michael Velchik, the Justice lawyer. “They're incurring future obligations to the federal taxpayer, who will then have to pay back pay wages for these individuals who are not working.”

The total the government would have to pay employees for not working could reach unprecedented heights next week. The Senate adjourned on Thursday and is not set to reconvene until Monday evening, when no vote to reopen government is scheduled. The House remains on recess indefinitely after Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., canceled votes for the seventh consecutive week next week.

Senate Democrats have not backed down from their demand that any bill to reopen government address premium hikes scheduled to take effect in January for Americans who receive health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Democrats have also sought assurances that Trump cannot unilaterally claw back money that Congress authorizes. Republicans have remained steadfast they will only negotiate over those issues once the shutdown ends.

The impacts of the shutdown continue to compound. Tens of millions of Americans are slated to lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on Nov. 1. Major airports across the country have also issued delays due to staffing issues, as absenteeism among air traffic controllers who are working without pay continues to rise. Hundreds of thousands of employees who are currently “excepted” during the shutdown because their jobs are necessary to protect life or property missed full paychecks within the last week.

President Trump this week called for the end of the 60-vote filibuster threshold to end the shutdown, but most congressional Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have said they have no interest in doing so.

Some lawmakers have noted encouraging, bipartisan talks on full-year appropriations bills, but a clear path out of the shutdown has yet to emerge.

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Shutdown furloughs will permanently cost the economy at least $7 billion, CBO says

Eric Katz — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:46:00 -0400

Forcing a large swath of the federal workforce not to work for going on a full month is having significant and lasting impacts on the economy, according to a non-partisan legislative branch review, causing a loss of at least $7 billion dollars from the gross domestic product.

That figure would grow to $11 billion if the shutdown lasts another two weeks or $14 billion if it were to last until Nov. 26, the Congressional Budget Office found in a report on Wednesday. Unlike many other economic impacts of the shutdown, CBO noted the losses accrued from employees not conducting their normal work cannot be recovered.

“In CBO’s assessment, the shutdown will delay federal spending and have a negative effect on the economy that will mostly, but not entirely, reverse once the shutdown ends,” CBO said.

Most federal employees are currently either furloughed and not working or excepted, meaning they are working only on the promise of retroactive pay. Because all of those employees will receive back pay—CBO assumed furloughed workers would receive delayed compensation despite the Trump administration’s insistence that it does not have to enforce a law that requires it—the loss of economic activity that stems from employees not receiving paychecks will mostly be reversed when the government reopens.

Already, CBO estimated, GDP is likely to dip by about 1% in the current quarter relative to expectations if no shutdown had occurred. It will then pick back up by 1.4% in the next quarter, according to the analysts’ estimates, and then slowly taper back toward normal expectations.

The most permanent impact of the shutdown, CBO said, would stem from the output lost from the weeks federal employees spent not working that could never be recovered. That lost productivity, the agency said, will have a permanent impact on the U.S. economy.

Federal employees have so far missed a cumulative $9 billion in paychecks, the analysts found, including about $5 billion from those still working. If the shutdown were to last another four weeks, the total figure would climb to $23 billion.

CBO acknowledged spending habits from federal employees could still be altered by the shutdown even once they are made whole.

“How federal employees and contractors respond to the delay in compensation is uncertain,” CBO said.

Agencies have also so far delayed spending on $24 billion in goods and services, though CBO said that spending will eventually go out the door.

CBO followed legal analysts, congressional Republicans and many others who have dismissed the Trump administration’s argument that back pay is not guaranteed for furloughed workers. In federal court on Tuesday in a case regarding layoffs, a Justice Department attorney also contradicted the White House’s argument.

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Shutdown layoffs indefinitely blocked following new court injunction

Eric Katz — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:30:00 -0400

A federal judge on Tuesday indefinitely blocked the Trump administration from carrying out layoffs during the government shutdown, saying the president’s actions were likely unlawful and taken for the purposes of political retribution.

The White House’s argument that agencies are no longer required to carry out certain programs during a shutdown is incorrect, San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said, and the administration did not have the authority to order cuts at specific agencies. Illston’s preliminary injunction will prevent both new RIFs from being issued and pause any implementation of the roughly 4,000 layoffs that agencies have already ordered.

The judge said she would clarify the exact scope of the order later on Tuesday in writing, but added in essence federal agencies “are enjoined from issuing any more RIF notices.” Michael Velchik, a Justice Department attorney arguing on behalf of the administration, asked that cuts in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Interior Department not be included in the order as those layoffs were underway long before the shutdown commenced. Illston said she would likely hold a further evidentiary hearing to make that determination.

USPTO already sent RIF notices to about 1% of its workforce, while Interior is planning to lay off thousands of workers.

“Our team is honored to represent the civil servants who are fighting back against President Trump's dangerous agenda, and to have won this crucial injunction that will help stop federal workers from continuing to be targeted and harassed by this administration during the shutdown,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, who is leading the lawsuit on behalf of the several unions who brought it.

Illston noted the declarations submitted to the court were “very affecting,” citing a Housing and Urban Development Department worker who received a layoff notice earlier this month and said he had “never gone through any as traumatizing as what I am now experiencing” including his combat service. She also noted another employee who said she would not be able to afford surgery related to a liver transplant if their RIF took effect.

In addition to the “statutes and administrative procedure and the like, we are also talking about human lives and these human lives are being dramatically affected by the activities that we are discussing this morning,” Illston said.

She added it was “ironic” the administration may be violating the Antideficiency Act—the 19th century law that governs federal spending during a shutdown—by carving out human resources employees from furloughs so they could carry out RIFs. She also cited Trump’s and Office of Management and Director Russ Vought’s claims that RIFs would target “Democrat programs” in saying the cuts were intended as “political retribution.”

For the government’s part, Velchik argued that it was “obviously true” that if Congress does not explicitly fund a program, the executive branch should not carry it out. Additionally, he said, RIFs are permitted before, during or after a shutdown. During a funding lapse, however, the government has “all the more reason” to engage in layoffs, he said. Such an approach was not “arbitrary and capricious,” but instead “good policy” because the impacted employees are furloughed and incurring future obligations including back pay when the government reopens.

The argument could raise eyebrows in legal circles as the Trump administration has for the last several weeks suggested it is not required to offer back pay—despite a 2019 law that explicitly requires it—and Congress must instead affirmatively act to authorize it.

Velchik further argued that because Trump previously used the “you’re fired,” catchphrase, he should have the authority to carry out mass layoffs across the federal workforce.

“Like, this is what they voted for,” Velchik said. “Above all else, this is what he’s known for doing.”

Danielle Leonard, an attorney at Altshuler Berzon representing the plaintiffs, said the government was making an absurd argument that it could lay off the entire federal workforce if the government were shut down for one day. She lamented that the administration has not been more forthcoming with information about where more RIFs are planned and asked Illston to compel the government to make more details available.

Illston said she was still weighing whether to grant that request but thought the government made a strong argument that it should be required to do so.

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