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.
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...
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 “Senate Democrats.” T...
As October 2025 unfolds, the federal shutdown shows no signs of quick resolution. Beneath the headlines, this is less a funding glitch and more a contest of leverage. Congress has failed four times to...
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 shutdown. Your name, your ...
On September 30, 2025, federal employees won an important reprieve. Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for D.C. issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s effort t...
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