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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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FMLA for Federal Employee Burnout
A federal employee recently asked the question many workers quietly carry: “If I take FMLA for burnout, will it end my career?” The honest legal answer is no—not by itself. Needing...
USDA Relocations and Federal Employee Rights
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...
Voluntary OPM Skills Survey: Know Your Rights
OPM’s Federal Workforce Competency Initiative survey has understandably unsettled many federal employees. According to the transcript, the survey was sent to roughly 550,000 employ...
OPM Health Data and Federal Employee Privacy
Federal employees have reason to feel uneasy right now. The identity-theft protection offered after the 2015 OPM breach is beginning to expire, ten years after enrollment, even tho...
FEMA Restructuring and Federal Employee Rights
The FEMA Review Council’s final report uses unusually stark language: it recommends that the government “close the chapter” on FEMA as federal employees know it. For career civil s...
NIH Word-Scanning and Federal Employee Rights
Recent reporting from Government Executive says NIH employees are being required to run grant applications and progress reports through a text analysis tool that flags terms associ...
Federal Employee DOGE Email Responses Show Dignity and Professionalism
Many federal employees remember the February 2025 “what did you do last week” email not as a routine workplace request, but as a moment of shock. According to the transcript, feder...
RIF Separation and Federal Hiring Rights
Federal employees who have been separated through a reduction in force often carry more than a job loss. They carry the fear that future agencies will quietly treat the RIF as a ma...
State Department RIFs: Appeal Rights for Feds
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...
Federal Employees and Off-Duty Free Speech
Federal employees do not stop being citizens when they leave the workplace. That principle matters when an employee attends a public vigil, speaks on a matter of public concern, an...
When Security Duties Become Career-Risk Moments
Alexis Goldstein’s reported firing from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau raises a hard question for federal employees: what happens when the duty to safeguard government in...
FEMA’s CORE Rehiring Is More Than a Staffing Story
FEMA’s reported effort to bring back disaster-response workers whose CORE appointments were not renewed is not just an agency-management headline. It is a reminder that federal emp...
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