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Civil Rights for Civil Servants
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Shutdown RIF Threats Ease—for Now
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...
OMB Memo Challenges Federal Back Pay Guarantees
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 afte...
Federal Shutdown: Furloughs Set to Expand as Carryover Funds Run Out
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 ...
Understanding Telework as Reasonable Accommodation
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 ...
Hatch Act Complaints Surge After Shutdown: Why Reporting Still Matters
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...
AFGE Lawsuit Over Partisan Out-of-Office Messages: A First Amendment Test
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 “...
Shutdown Update: What’s Really Happening — and When It Could End
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 ...
Partisan Out-of-Office Messages: Coerced Speech or Government Control?
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 shutdo...
Government Shutdown Nears an End: What Federal Employees Should Watch
After weeks of uncertainty, there’s a cautious sense of hope. The latest political signals suggest that the government shutdown—now one of the most disruptive in recent memory—coul...
Watchdog Websites Go Dark: What Federal Employees Should Know
This week, at least fifteen federal watchdog websites—including Oversight.gov, home to more than 34,000 inspector general reports—went dark. These sites weren’t casualties of the g...
Partisan Auto-Replies and the Hatch Act
On day one of the recent government shutdown, employees at the Department of Education set standard out-of-office replies: neutral messages explaining that, due to a funding lapse,...
Supreme Court Case on Fed Independence and Your Wallet
Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging whether President Trump can remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. For now, the Court ruled that Cook remains in ...
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