The Federal Employee Survival Blog
Cut through the jargon and get the clarity you need to stay a step ahead of agency politics. Each article unpacks new policy shifts, court rulings, and workplace trends, then turns them into actionable tactics—so you can head off discipline, invoke EEO or whistleblower protections with confidence, and keep your documentation airtight. We also archive our most popular social-media explainer threads here, giving you the same insights followed by more than 150,000 people online even if you never scroll on those sites. Read, prepare, and keep your federal career firmly in your control.
On October 10, 2025, the administration began issuing Reduction-in-Force (RIF) notices to roughly 4,200 federal employees—even as the government remained shut down. That move, unprecedented in prior s...
Hundreds of DHS employees were just told to accept rapid reassignments to border and immigration posts—or risk removal. That includes CISA cyber defenders, FEMA staff in storm season, and TSA and Coas...
A New York Times story this week described how Black community leaders are holding their ground in a political climate that often treats their leadership as a threat. Reading it, I couldn’t help but t...
This week has been a rollercoaster for federal employees. On Wednesday, the IRS assured furloughed staff they were guaranteed back pay once the shutdown ends. By Thursday, that message vanished—litera...
Senate leaders are floating a plan to pass full-year funding one agency at a time, with Defense likely first. In plain terms: some components could return to work and receive back pay sooner, while ot...
Good news for federal employees: the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has its quorum back. On October 7, the Senate confirmed James Woodruff, restoring at least two sitting members—the minimum ne...
For many federal employees, this shutdown feels different. Early this week, the administration floated a new legal argument claiming that furloughed workers might not be automatically entitled to back...
Federal employees, take a breath. As of today, the White House appears to be stepping back from immediate plans for large-scale Reductions in Force (RIFs). That’s not a promise the idea is gone—it’s s...
A draft legal opinion from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly testing the foundation federal employees have relied on for years: that you’ll receive back pay after a government shutd...
If you haven’t gotten a furlough notice yet, you might soon. Agencies that relied on leftover funding are exhausting it, and new rounds of furloughs are unfolding daily. More than 620,000 federal empl...
For federal employees with medical conditions, few questions come up more often than this: Can telework be a reasonable accommodation? The answer is sometimes yes—but only when it allows you to perfor...
Within three days of the shutdown, nine separate Hatch Act complaints landed at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). The allegations are stunning: agency websites and official messages carrying p...
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