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

Why Federal Employees Should Still Trust the Legal Process

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For federal employees, the pace of workplace disruption since January 2025 can feel overwhelming. Reclassifications, removals, DOGE-related agency actions, and attacks on collectiv...

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OPM RIF Rules: What Federal Employees Should Do Now

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Much of the current advice to federal employees about OPM’s proposed reduction-in-force changes begins and ends with one point: download your performance appraisals. That is import...

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Russell Vought and Federal Employee Rights

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ProPublica’s recent video on Russell Vought is not ordinary political commentary. For federal employees, it is a warning about how ideas discussed in private strategy rooms can bec...

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HHS Schedule Policy/Career Reclassification

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Federal employees at HHS are reportedly facing the first major rollout of Schedule Policy/Career, the revived version of what was formerly known as Schedule F. According to Governm...

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DoD Buyouts and Forced Reassignments

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The Department of Defense’s deferred resignation program was sold as a path toward government efficiency. But according to the facts described in the transcript, DoD lost 61,600 ci...

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Political Pressure on Federal Case Settlements

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Federal employees depend on legal systems that are supposed to be neutral: the Merit Systems Protection Board, the EEO process, whistleblower protections, and related settlement me...

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Federal EEO and MSPB Settlements Under Scrutiny

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House Oversight Chairman James Comer has opened an inquiry into why the federal government pays to resolve so many federal employee grievances, pointing to federal-sector EEO and M...

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USDA Relocations and Federal Employee Rights

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When a federal agency pushes out a researcher with 37 years of institutional knowledge, the loss is not abstract. It shows up in weakened programs, broken mentoring pipelines, dela...

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State Department RIFs: Appeal Rights for Feds

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For many federal employees, reduction-in-force notices have felt suspended in uncertainty: issued, delayed, litigated, and left unresolved. At the Department of State, that uncerta...

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The Washington Post's Coverage on DOGE Wins Pulitzer Prize

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A Pulitzer Prize may sound like a media story, but this one belongs in every federal workplace conversation. On May 4, 2026, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public S...

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USDA Relocation Risks for Federal Employees

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The Department of Agriculture’s plan to relocate much of the Food and Nutrition Service workforce outside the Washington area raises a question every federal employee should take s...

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DHS Shutdown Ended: What Federal Workers Should Do Next

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The record-setting Department of Homeland Security shutdown ended on Thursday, April 30, 2026, when President Trump signed bipartisan legislation funding much of DHS, though not im...

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About the people behind the work

Shaun Southworth & Lydia Taylor

Meet the federal employment attorneys behind this public-education work and the podcast Civil Rights for Civil Servants.

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