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Civil Rights for Civil Servants
Hear Shaun Southworth and Lydia Taylor explain federal employee rights, public service, workplace systems, and the people navigating them.
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Five Hatch Act Cases, One Ended a Career: What OSC's Settlements Mean Before the Midterms
The Office of Special Counsel announced on September 30 that five federal employees settled Hatch Act cases, with suspensions of three to ten days and one career-ending outcome. Wi...
Over 1,000 Hatch Act Complaints, Zero Discipline: What OSC's Shutdown Messaging Report Means for Feds
The Hatch Act watchdog has decided that no one will be disciplined over last fall's partisan shutdown messaging, even though it received more than 1,000 complaints about messages f...
Supreme Court Keeps USPS Mail-Ballot Rules Blocked: Why Federal Employees Should Still Vote Early
The Supreme Court's decision on the Postal Service's mail-ballot rules is good news for anyone planning to vote by mail this fall, but the headlines leave out the part that matters...
Hatch Act Complaint Filed Against the Attorney General: What It Means for Career Federal Employees
The Hatch Act is the law most federal employees know by reputation and few know by text — and it is now at the center of a complaint against the nation’s top law enforcement office...
White House App Order: Legal Risks for Feds
For federal employees, a government-issued phone is not personal space. It is federal property, controlled by agency IT rules, security policies, and ethics obligations. That is wh...
Political Vetting in Federal Employment
Federal employees are often told to stay neutral, keep records, and follow the chain of command. But neutrality must run both ways. According to the transcript, a federal lawsuit f...
General Strikes and Federal Employee Discipline Risks
Minnesota is seeing something rare in modern American life: a general strike. Unlike a single-union walkout or a permitted march, a general strike asks ordinary people to pause dai...
Social Security Data Misuse and Federal Accountability
Recent court filings by the Department of Justice revealed a deeply unsettling concession: individuals associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may ha...
AFGE Lawsuit Over Partisan Out-of-Office Messages: A First Amendment Test
Federal employees at the Department of Education recently discovered something shocking: their out-of-office messages—intended to explain the shutdown—had been rewritten to blame “...
Partisan Out-of-Office Messages: Coerced Speech or Government Control?
Imagine discovering that your out-of-office email—sent from your official government account—was changed without your consent to blame one political party for the government shutdo...
Partisan Auto-Replies and the Hatch Act
On day one of the recent government shutdown, employees at the Department of Education set standard out-of-office replies: neutral messages explaining that, due to a funding lapse,...
Partisan Pop-Up on HUD.gov Raises Legal Red Flags
Recently, visitors to HUD.gov—the official website of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—were met with a startling pop-up: “The Radical Left are going to shut down the...
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