Trump Floats Rule to Shorten Federal Worker Layoff Appeals (2)

The Trump administration says it aims to streamline the appeals process for federal workers contesting layoff decisions, under a proposal to move those cases from the Merit Systems Protection Board to the Office of Personnel Management.

The proposed rule (RIN 3206–AO99), released Monday by the OPM, follows through on a portion of the administration’s plans for overhauling the federal government’s reductions-in-force procedures. The regulation seeks to make it easier for federal agencies to downsize their workforces, without an “unnecessarily lengthy and expensive appeals process” that the OPM says Congress never intended to exist.

“We want a one-stop shop appeal with OPM, without any further appeals which honestly can take years and years,” said an OPM official, speaking on condition of anonymity after Monday’s rule release.

The current process allows laid-off employees or groups of employees to have the decision reviewed by an MSPB administrative judge, then appeal to the full MSPB, and then appeal to a federal circuit court. In some cases, employees simultaneously sue directly in a federal district court and “play the two processes off against each other,” using discovery from the MSPB appeal to aid their district court case, the official said.

The OPM previously gave notice of plans for the rule in the executive branch’s spring regulatory agenda.

The proposal fits with the Trump administration’s broader effort to shrink the government and “dismantle the nonpartisan civil service,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees.

“Eliminating independent review of federal RIF actions would not only make it harder for employees to challenge their proposed terminations, but would essentially give the administration free rein to terminate huge swaths of the federal workforce without meaningful independent oversight,” Kelley said in a statement.

Process Updates

Unlike for adverse-action terminations, which can be appealed to the MSPB, Congress didn’t explicitly provide for appeals of federal reductions-in-force in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the proposal said. The OPM issued regulations to create a RIF appeals process, building off variations of the protocol that existed before the CSRA. A subsequent 1987 court decision empowered the MSPB to establish its own procedures for hearing those appeals, according to the proposed rule text.

The appeals initially were designed as “an administrative review of the written record,” with hearings to be held by an administrative judge only if there was a material dispute of the facts, the OPM rule text said. But the proposal said the process evolved to be more time-consuming and complex under the MSPB procedures.

In the proposed new process, the OPM’s staff would review contested layoff decisions for errors, such as failing to correctly calculate an employee’s years of service, the OPM official said. The agency has experience with adjudicating other kinds of federal employee claims such as wage-and-hour disputes, they said.

The administration reduced the federal workforce by 219,000 employees since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, many of them through voluntary resignations under the president’s “fork in the road” offer championed by then-advisor Elon Musk.

Trump and his appointees also have pushed through layoffs at many agencies, but they’ve faced legal challenges from federal worker unions and opposition from some members of Congress.

Congress included a moratorium on federal layoffs in a November funding deal that ended a lengthy government shutdown and then extended it through Feb. 13 as part of a short-term bill funding the Department of Homeland Security.

The moratorium was left out of longer-term spending bills that Congress recently passed, although some included requirements for agencies to maintain adequate staffing and notify Congress before conducting layoffs.