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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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White House App Order: Legal Risks for Feds
For federal employees, a government-issued phone is not personal space. It is federal property, controlled by agency IT rules, security policies, and ethics obligations. That is wh...
Political Vetting in Federal Employment
Federal employees are often told to stay neutral, keep records, and follow the chain of command. But neutrality must run both ways. According to the transcript, a federal lawsuit f...
General Strikes and Federal Employee Discipline Risks
Minnesota is seeing something rare in modern American life: a general strike. Unlike a single-union walkout or a permitted march, a general strike asks ordinary people to pause dai...
Social Security Data Misuse and Federal Accountability
Recent court filings by the Department of Justice revealed a deeply unsettling concession: individuals associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may ha...
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 “...
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...
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,...
Partisan Pop-Up on HUD.gov Raises Legal Red Flags
Recently, visitors to HUD.gov—the official website of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—were met with a startling pop-up: “The Radical Left are going to shut down the...
Free Speech Limits for Federal Employees
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s viral statement that DOJ would “go after” hate speech sparked confusion. Let’s be clear: in the United States, there is no blanket crime called “hate s...
Understanding the Latest Hatch Act Guidance
If you've been keeping up with recent developments, you know the Hatch Act landscape can shift quickly. On April 25, 2025, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) issued new guida...
Federal Employees: Know Your Rights Amid Office Chaos
If you've been paying attention to recent news, you know that federal employees are being forced back into office spaces that are barely functional—some without desks, working Wi-F...
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