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

How Congress’s 2026 Minibus Quietly Protects Federal Jobs

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Federal employees often hear big promises about protecting the civil service. Much less attention is paid to the quiet, technical work that actually does it. This week’s bipartisan...

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OPM’s Telework Shift: Why Monitoring Now Matters Legally

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Federal employees who rely on telework should pause and read the fine print of OPM’s revised guidance. The most consequential change is not about where work happens—it is about how...

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Federal Shutdown Risk: Why the Odds Just Improved—and How to Prepare

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Federal employees are right to feel uneasy as the end-of-month shutdown deadline approaches. Funding gaps are not abstract events—they land directly on household budgets, stress le...

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January 6 Narratives and Federal Employee Risk

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Federal employees woke up on January 7, 2026, to something deeply unsettling: an official government webpage describing January 6, 2021, in ways that conflict with the established ...

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When Courts Call Out Agency “Starvation” Tactics

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Federal employees often sense when something at work feels off—when “budget issues” start looking less like routine management and more like a strategy to make an office fail. A re...

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NIH Gender Health Grants: When Politics Overrides Science

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For months, a quiet but consequential shift rippled through the National Institutes of Health. Grants touching on gender-related health issues—cancer outcomes, maternal health, men...

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Telework, SF-50s, and Locality Pay: What Feds Must Check

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For many GS-9 and above federal employees, telework has quietly shifted from a flexibility issue into a pay and compliance issue. OPM’s December 2025 Guide to Telework and Remote W...

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President’s Management Agenda: What 2026 Means for Feds

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Federal offices rarely shrink quietly. When headcount drops but the workload stays the same, phrases like “efficiency” or “modernization” can land with a thud. The President’s Mana...

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OPM’s New Telework Rules: What Federal Employees Must Know

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Federal employees are hearing a familiar rumor again: telework is ending. That framing is misleading—and dangerously incomplete. What actually changed is how the Office of Personne...

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OPM’s Proposed Rule Could Strip Probationary Employees of MSPB Rights

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Federal employees often hear that probation is “temporary vulnerability.” What is now on the table would turn that vulnerability into something far more permanent—and far more dang...

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FEMA CORE Non-Renewals: When Disaster Response Shrinks Quietly

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For many FEMA CORE employees with January NTE dates, this week has landed with a familiar, sinking feeling. It is not just fear of job loss—it is the deeper sting of being treated ...

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How OPM’s 2026 FEHB Change Affects Federal Families

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Federal employees are not imagining the shift. As of January 1, 2026, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has directed Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) and Postal Serv...

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The Mindful Federal Employee is part of a broader public-education ecosystem from Shaun Southworth, Lydia Taylor, and Southworth PC. Use the resource that fits the question and the moment.

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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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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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