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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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DHS Employee Data Breach: What ICE, CBP, and USCIS Employees Should Do Now
A reported data breach at the Department of Homeland Security has put the names and assignments of more than 41,000 employees and contractors into a searchable database online. If ...
Two Marines Sue the Pentagon Over the DMDC Data Breach: How Privacy Act Damages Work
Two Marines have filed a Privacy Act lawsuit against the Pentagon over the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) data breach, which exposed the personal information of more than thre...
OPM Broke the Privacy Act With DOGE Access. Will Federal Employees Get Paid?
A federal judge has ruled that OPM violated the Privacy Act when it gave DOGE agents access to the personnel records of millions of current, former, and prospective federal employe...
Federal Judge Rules OPM Violated the Privacy Act by Giving DOGE Access to Employee Records
A federal court has ruled that OPM violated the Privacy Act when it gave DOGE agents broad access to the personal information of tens of millions of past, current, and aspiring fed...
GAO's DOGE Report: Did DOGE Have Access to Your Federal Personnel File?
Did DOGE have access to your federal personnel file? A new GAO report on DOGE, released September 29, 2026, suggests the honest answer is that we may never fully know, and that for...
OPM Wants Your Medical Records: What the Health Claims Data Warehouse Means for Federal Employees
OPM wants claims-level health data on up to 8 million federal employees, retirees, and family members, and six senators want it to stop and explain itself first. The Office of Pers...
Searched by Diagnosis Code: What the Pentagon's Medical Record Reviews Mean for Every Federal Employee's Confidential File
Federal employee medical privacy is suddenly a live question. Federal News Network reported this week that service members are being identified for separation through their electro...
OPM Wants Your FEHB Medical Claims: What the New CRS Report Says
OPM’s request for FEHB medical claims data would place health information for more than eight million federal employees, retirees, and family members in the hands of the agency tha...
Federal RTO Monitoring and Employee Rights
Federal employees should pay close attention when an agency describes a monitoring tool as an office-space solution while the contract language points to “continuous compliance mon...
OPM Health Data and Federal Employee Privacy
Federal employees have reason to feel uneasy right now. The identity-theft protection offered after the 2015 OPM breach is beginning to expire, ten years after enrollment, even tho...
DOGE Data Access Case Raises Privacy Act Risks
A recent federal court ruling in Maryland has moved a high-stakes data privacy case into discovery—a phase that often determines what truly happened behind closed doors. For federa...
Privacy Act Lawsuit Offers Hope After HHS RIF Errors
A federal judge has allowed a significant Privacy Act lawsuit to move forward, and for former HHS employees impacted by last year’s Reduction in Force (RIF), that decision matters....
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