What civil servants need to know in week two

The newest attacks on the civil service — and how to plan for what happens next

Dear civil servant,

The past week was likely exhausting and demoralizing for you. You signed up to serve the public good. Everything from trying to keep our national parks clean to helping care for sick veterans, to keeping airplanes flying safely, to being part of the effort to cure cancer. And now your government — which also happens to be your employer — is calling you a creature of the swamp and suggesting you don’t love your country.

More concretely, you are no doubt wondering what all of the news means for you, the work you’ve been doing, and your ability to pay next month’s bills when they come due or pick up your kid in the exurbs when daycare closes at 5:30. You may be hearing conflicting takes — some supervisors are offering reassuring words, while some supervisors are sending emails alerting their staff that they have been suddenly reassigned. New memos and actions seem to be coming every minute — some in the middle of the night — and it can be hard to understand every move, let alone understand what they mean together.

Last week, we wrote to you about a spate of new executive orders and memoranda — but there were many unknowns, as we waited to see how those policies were implemented. This week, we are focusing on how the new administration’s policies have been used to affect actual government offices and civil servants’ lives — through reassignments, new rules, threats of discipline, and firings. Though some questions remain, seeing these policies in action so quickly does help us understand what they mean, and what might be coming.

What happened?

Among other things, the administration has:

• Initiated layoffs (called reductions in force, or “RIFs”) of employees in offices that do work related to strengthening accessibility, advancing equity, building diversity, promoting inclusion, or ensuring environmental justice.

• Instituted a hiring freeze and reportedly rescinded job offers and internship offers.

• Directed agencies to prepare lists of probationary employees and “promptly determine whether those employees should be retained at the agency.”

• Asserted complete control over the Senior Executive Service, which it then demonstrated by firing and transferring members of the Senior Executive Service — the latter of which was “widely seen in the building as punishments likely to result in resignations.”

• Expanded hiring authorities that make it easier to bring in employees who are loyal to the administration.

• Issued new guidance that would pull a vast swath of the civil service into the new schedule P/C (formerly known as Schedule F) and purports to justify the president's attempted rescission of parts of OPM's 2024 regulations.

• Purged inspectors general — many of whom were appointed during the first Trump Administration — in an action that the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) has identified as legally insufficient.

• Cancelled the bulk of telework and remote work arrangements, which may undermine workforce efficacy.

• Disrupted critical scientific research by freezing or cancelling certain travel, trainings, and meetings at the National Institutes of Health.

• Dismantled and frozen funding for programs to strengthen the federal workforce, improve federal services, protect the safety of our troops, and support disabled veterans because they were designed to secure a more equitable society.

• Undermined military readiness by directing the military to take steps toward implementing a service ban on transgender individuals, while disparaging those of you who risk your lives for our country.

• Directed civil servants to report on each other, threatening adverse consequences for those who don’t.

What does it all mean?

Collectively, these actions show that it is not (just) the civil service that is under attack — it is the rule of law, which a nonpartisan professional civil service is critical in upholding.

Some of the actions seem to be plainly illegal; some are attempts to remove employees’ ability to call out unlawful acts and to exploit their sense of vulnerability so they will turn on each other; and others seem to be aimed at asserting and expanding the president’s control over much wider swaths of the civil service than Congress envisioned when it passed the Civil Service Reform Act. The president knows he needs a compliant civil service in order to fulfill his many campaign promises, and he is trying to remake the civil service so that he can plow forward without checks.

Thus civil servants are both targets of these many attacks, and casualties in a bigger war.

Another way to see these actions together is as an effort to transform the federal government from one governed by rules and laws to one governed by power. (For the political theory buffs among you, this is what academics call the transition from a “normative state” to a “prerogative state.”) It remains to be seen whether this effort will succeed.

For you, this means that you should know your rights, but unfortunately you should not expect that your employer will respect them. For example, the law says that inspectors general may not be fired without 30 days notice to Congress, but they were summarily dismissed absent such notice. Do not assume your legally-inscribed rights will protect you before a personnel action is taken.

But you can still fight to enforce your rights. Even if your rights aren’t respected before a personnel action is taken, you can often still challenge that action, for example at the MSPB. There often are short deadlines for filings, such as the 30-day deadline for adverse action appeals to the MSPB and the 45-day deadline for contacting an EEO counselor. Civil Service Strong is building out resources for helping civil servants enforce their rights, should they choose to do so. If you are a member of a union or federal employee membership association, you may have access to legal counseling as part of your membership.

What can you do?

Prepare as if you could be let go. It is absolutely hard to think about, but unexpected things have already happened to some civil servants. In our last letter, we suggested you prepare as if you might leave. Now, we know that departure has been sudden and involuntary for some civil servants.

Additional steps you might take include:

• Download documents from your eOPF folder, which can be much harder to access after you leave. Some employees are getting locked out of their phones and computers as soon as they are given notice of a personnel action.

• Save any notices you receive if you are subject to a personnel action, your position description, and material available on any federal website that you want to rely on in the future (perhaps the job posting for your position, if you were recently hired). In a pinch, you may be able to find a backup at the Internet Archive.

• If there are professional contacts you want to be able to reach if you’re no longer employed, such as colleagues you want to ask to be references, save their non-work contact information in a non-work system.

• As you consider whether to stay or leave, pay attention to how you show up. There are some who want you to feel vulnerable because people who feel vulnerable are more easily bullied and co-opted. By demonstrating that you maintain your commitment to rule-of-law norms, you help preserve that commitment in the workplace. .

• Check out our letter to civil servants from last week.

Educate yourself on your employee status and rights. There are resources that provide an overview of your basic status and rights as a federal employee:

• Many employee rights differ based on your role. Review the guidance on “reading your SF-50 to determine your service and appointment type” to better understand your role.

• If you are unsure of your status — for example, whether or not you are a probationary employee — you can review documents in your eOPF and ask your HR professional to confirm your status.

• Once you know your status, there are resources that provide overviews of your substantive and procedural employee protections, and of the process for challenging violations of those protections:

  • Merit Systems Protections Board trainings page and list of prohibited personnel practices

  • Office of Special Counsel, “Know Your Rights When Reporting Wrongs” pamphlet.

  • Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “Overview of Federal Sector EEO Complaint Process.”

• Finally, once you understand your rights and how to spot when they may have been violated, consider what you would hope to achieve by challenging an adverse employment action. Do you want to stay in the federal civil service? Publicly call out illegality to help push back on future actions? Understanding your goals and preferences up front can help you make hard decisions in the moment.

Stay engaged and up-to-date. The instinct to put your head in the sand is absolutely understandable, given how these actions affect you as an individual and as someone who cares about our country’s future. But information can be powerful: You’ll know your rights, be able to spot when rules are violated, and have considered how to respond.

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Relevant reading:

• Thor Benson, When Your Neighbor Turns You In, Wired (Nov 2022).

• Don Moynihan’s Substack, Can we still Govern?

• Our colleague Chris Crawford on How democracy survives through standing together.

And thank you, again, for your perseverance in the face of adversity. We remain grateful for your expertise, professionalism, and commitment to the American people.