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Shaun Southworth leading a federal employment training session with members of the Southworth PC team
 

An Off-Duty LinkedIn Post and Immediate Administrative Leave: The Speech Rules Federal Employees Should Know

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Off-duty social media posts can cost federal employees more than they expect. A director at the General Services Administration posted his opinion about a federal hiring rule on hi...

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Forced Agency Relocations: What the Law Requires When You Cannot Move

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Forced agency relocations are reaching federal employees at six or more agencies this summer, and NPR’s review of public records and internal communications this week describes a r...

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Senate Passes Its Own Funding Bill 89-4: What Changed, and What Didn’t

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Federal employees tracking government shutdown risk got a new data point Monday: the Senate voted 89-4 to advance its own stopgap funding bill, and it does not match the one the Ho...

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Ninety Seconds Before the Rules Change Again: A Monday Practice

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Federal employees are starting another week with headlines saying the rules changed again — and for a lot of people the shoulders are already up at the ears before the first cup of...

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VA Union Contract and August 8: What the Master Agreement Actually Says

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The AFGE–VA master agreement reaches its three-year terminal date on August 8, 2026, and whether the contract ends that day comes down to a single paragraph that most coverage has ...

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Congress Required This DoD Office by Law. It Went From 40 People to 9.

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Federal employees have watched a familiar pattern repeat across agencies this year, and a Pentagon office offers one of the clearest examples yet: an office Congress required by st...

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Could Jackler v. DOJ Weaken Civil Service Rights?

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An agricultural commodity grader and a federal immigration judge may seem to have little in common. Yet a new congressional brief in Jackler v. Department of Justice argues that th...

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Veterans’ Preference Is Not a Federal Hiring Flaw

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A FedRAMP hiring controversy has exposed a familiar problem in federal workforce debates: blaming the legal protection instead of examining how the hiring process was designed and ...

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Same Therapy, Opposite Rules: A Federal Court Lesson on Discrimination Evidence

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A federal judge has ordered the government to explain an apparent contradiction in its own policies—and buried inside that dispute is a practical lesson about how discrimination is...

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“Probationers Have No Rights” Is a Myth: Three Doors That Stay Open

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If you are a probationary federal employee, you have probably heard some version of this: “You’re on probation. They can fire you for anything. There’s nothing you can do.” That be...

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Is One Business Day a “Reasonable Time to Answer”? Inside the Proposed OPM–MSPB Rule

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A proposed federal rule could give you as little as one business day to answer a proposed suspension—and if you are a federal employee, that is worth understanding now, while it is...

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TikTok Is Legal on Government Phones Again. Here's Why You Should Still Keep It Off Yours.

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The government just told federal employees they can download TikTok on a work phone again — and a federal employment attorney's advice is still to keep your thumb off that button. ...

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