u/DinoAlonso

This one makes me hot under the collar. This loyalty oath is nothing but 1883 calling to say it wants its patronage system back. But it is still worth your time to understand if you’re currently applying for federal jobs.

This is my read of it. OPM’s Merit Hiring Plan added essay questions to federal job applications asking candidates how they’d advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities. OPM said publicly the questions are optional and that leaving them blank won’t get you disqualified.

However, court filings from an active lawsuit show that on a bunch of job postings the question has a red asterisk next to it. You know what a red asterisk means on a form. You can’t submit without filling it in.
Attorneys tried to apply for positions at the Justice Department, OSHA, and the Defense Health Agency and couldn’t get past the loyalty question without answering it. The application just wouldn’t go through.

OPM’s response was basically that agencies are choosing to make it required against OPM guidance and that’s not their problem.

So let me get this straight. OPM says it’s optional. Agencies are marking it required. Applicants can’t submit without answering. And OPM is pointing at the agencies.

The question has shown up on about 33,000 job postings so far. Nearly 100% of Labor Department postings have it. About 75% of Justice and Energy postings.

I’m not going to tell you what to think about the politics. But if you’re applying right now you need to know this is out there and it’s not as optional as OPM says it is.

Source: Federal News Network, April 28 2026

So I was going through OPM’s retirement processing numbers again because- apparently- I can’t help myself. God knows why I bludgeon myself like this😆

Amazingly, the backlog dropped to 49,888 in April (according to my dodgy math). Two straight months of decline. OPM processed more claims than it received which is genuinely good news and I don’t want to take that away from anyone waiting on a check.

But here’s what’s been giving me an itch.
A year ago the April backlog was 16,173. So we’re still three times higher than normal and calling it progress. In the first seven months of this fiscal year OPM received 133,773 new retirement claims. In the same period last year it was 60,573. Less than half.

The previous all time record going back to 2012 was 61,108. February 2026 hit 65,237 and broke it.

Average processing time in April was 78 days. Paper claims averaged 100 days.
I’m genuinely glad the direction changed. But if you retired in late 2025 or early 2026 you’re probably still waiting and the math on when this fully clears isn’t great.

If any body can correct me or my math please speak up. I’m all at once glad for the reduction and terribly sad to see so many retirements. I imagine many of them didn’t want to retire yet under other conditions.

Source: OPM April 2026 Retirement Statistics / FedSmith

Rabbit holes again and I think a lot of people in this community may not realize where this particular rabbit hole actually stands right now.

Most of you know Schedule Policy/Career passed as a final rule back in February and took effect March 9th. That part got coverage. What I don’t think got enough attention is what happens next and honestly I’d like to know if anyone here has more information than I do.

The rule itself doesn’t tell you if your position is affected. It can’t. The way it works is agencies submitted lists of positions to OPM, OPM reviews them and makes recommendations, and then the president has to issue a separate executive order actually designating which positions move into Schedule Policy/Career. That executive order hasn’t dropped yet as far as I can tell.

So right now somewhere around 50,000 positions are potentially affected and nobody outside of OPM and the White House knows which ones. You could be on that list and have no idea.

What that means practically is that if your position gets designated you lose your adverse action protections. No advance notice requirement. No MSPB appeal rights. Effectively at-will 😡. The whistleblower piece moves from the Office of Special Counsel to your own agency’s general counsel, which I’ll be honest makes me a little nervous. General council in my agency was a political hack.

I’m not trying to be alarmist here. Legal challenges are already filed and the courts may well intervene. But I think people deserve to know where this actually stands right now rather than thinking it’s a done deal or still just a proposal.

Has anyone heard anything about when that executive order might come? Or whether your agency has already submitted positions?

Sources:
Partnership for Public Service FedSupport FAQ: https://fedsupport.org/resources/resource-library/faq-schedule-policy-career-formerly-schedule-f/

Federal Register Final Rule Feb 6, 2026: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/06/2026-02375/improving-performance-accountability-and-responsiveness-in-the-civil-service

I spend an inordinate amount of time digesting federal rule changes and reviewing data aggregation sites. But I want to pause on something for a minute because I don’t think it’s getting the attention it deserves. Or perhaps it has but it’s not sinking in.

Between January 20, 2025 and January 2026, 386,826 federal employees separated from service. Quits, retirements, layoffs, deferred resignations. Just gone.

It’s hardly evening news. It’s just a staggering number. Unless, of course, you count yourself, and by extension your family, within that hard figure.

Here’s the part that really threw me. Of those separations, 10,436 were formal reductions in force. Over the prior ten years, RIFs hardly ever exceeded 300 per fiscal year. Not three thousand. Three hundred.

So we went from a rough ceiling of 300 in a bad year to over ten thousand in one year. I’ve been around federal employment for a long time and I genuinely don’t have a frame of reference for that.

136,822 of the total came through the deferred resignation program alone. Which means a lot of people made a decision under pressure with incomplete information about what they were giving up. If I stop to do any accounting, it’s almost heartbreaking.

I’m not going to tell you what to think about the politics of it. But I do think we owe it to ourselves to actually look at the scale of what happened before we move on to the next news cycle.

Source: Partnership for Public Service, The Federal Workforce One Year into the Trump Administration, January 2026.

So I’ve been digging into this proposed OPM rule that’s been making the rounds and I want to break it down in plain English because the takes I’m seeing range from “no big deal” to “the sky is falling” and honestly neither is quite right.

What’s happening

OPM published a proposed rule on March 5th that would fundamentally change how Reductions in Force work. Right now if your agency conducts a RIF, seniority is king. Years of service protect you. Under the new proposal that flips entirely. Your three most recent performance ratings become the primary factor in who stays and who goes.

The scoring system they’re proposing runs like this. Outstanding gets you 7 points. Exceeds Fully Successful gets 5. Fully Successful gets 3. Anything below that gets you zero. Veterans preference points still apply on top of that. Ties go to tenure as a tiebreaker, but tenure is no longer the lead factor.

Why it matters

A 15 year employee with solid Fully Successful ratings could theoretically be separated before a 5 year employee with Outstanding ratings. That’s a complete reversal of how this has worked since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.

Here’s where it gets more complicated. OPM simultaneously proposed a separate rule that caps how many employees can receive top ratings, roughly 30% of employees versus the current 65% who typically receive Level 4 or 5. So the same administration proposing to make performance the primary RIF factor is also making it harder to get the ratings that protect you in a RIF. Critics argue that’s not a coincidence.

Long tenured career employees who’ve built their protection through years of service are the most exposed here. Senior employees with Fully Successful records, which has always been considered solid performance, now sit in a more vulnerable position than they’ve ever been.

Why they say they’re doing it

OPM’s stated rationale is that the current system rewards longevity over merit and that high performers get separated while less effective but more senior employees survive. There’s a legitimate argument in there honestly. I’ve seen it happen. But the combination of this rule with the ratings cap proposal is what raises the most serious questions about whether this is actually about merit or about making it easier to conduct large scale workforce reductions with less procedural friction.

What you can do

The public comment is still open until May 4th. But this is still a proposed rule. It isn’t final yet and it can be challenged legally once finalized. Federal employee unions including AFGE have already signaled they’re reviewing legal options.

If you’re a long tenured employee the practical advice right now is straightforward. Make sure your most recent performance ratings are documented accurately and reflect your actual contributions. If you’ve been coasting on Fully Successful when your work merits more, now is the time to have that conversation with your supervisor. And stay connected to what your union or employee association is doing on this.

This one’s worth watching closely.