The Solidarity Docket
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July 10, 2026
Last week turned on the Supreme Court's removal decisions. This week the courts tested how far agencies can go in removing workers and rewriting bargaining, and as OPM advanced a set of rules that reshape how federal employees are hired, surveyed, and removed. Here is what federal workers and their advocates need to know.
Fourth Circuit Affirms That Agencies Must Follow Their Own Termination Rules
On July 2, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction requiring the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to follow their own termination regulations.
The employees are career officers who had been assigned to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility work and were terminated to carry out the administration's DEIA executive orders and the related OPM reduction-in-force directives.
The panel held that because the agencies adopted regulations giving employees the right to seek reassignment and to appeal a termination internally, they must honor those rights as a matter of Fifth Amendment due process, even though the National Security Act gives the directors broad discretion to terminate at will. The court emphasized that the officers claim no right to continued employment, only the procedural rights the regulations create. The panel split two to one, and the dissent would have held that the regulations impose no limit on the directors' statutory discretion. The practical effect is that an agency that writes procedures into its own rules cannot discard them when it carries out a RIF.
A Union Older Than the Statute Challenges Exclusion
On July 7, Carpenters Local 3073, which represents roughly 120 civilian shipwrights and plastic fabricators at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, sued to challenge Executive Order 14251, which stripped collective bargaining from thousands of federal workers. The suit rests on a rare, but not completely new, argument. These are skilled trades workers whose pay is tied to local wage rates, and union bargaining at the shipyard pre-dates 1972. When Congress rewrote federal labor law in 1978, it deliberately kept older protections in place for exactly this kind of long-standing trades bargaining. The union says those protections mean the 1978 law the executive order relies on never covered these workers in the first place, so the order cannot cancel their bargaining.
The complaint also says the order skipped the national security findings the law requires, that the Secretary exempted only four small Defense Department units for no stated reason, and that the real motive was retaliation for the union's political activity.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)filed a similar suit back in October. It is currently stayed pending the outcome of the consolidated DC Circuit decision in the cases involving NTEU, AFSA and FEA.
In short, these cases ask what happens when the union is older than the law now being used to shut it out. These unions have advanced theories which may prove to distinguish them from bargaining units that were formed after the Civil Service Reform Act was enacted. We will be watching these cases closely on our Litigation Tracker.
AFGE and NFFE Affiliates Sue the Defense Department
On July 2, more than twenty affiliates of the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees sued the Department of Defense and Secretary Hegseth in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, challenging the termination of union contracts covering tens of thousands of civilian defense employees.
The suit alleges that the Department's actions violate the Administrative Procedure Act. It is the broader companion to the Portsmouth case covered above, and together the two filings reflect widening challenges to the Department's use of Executive Order 14251.
Unions Move to Halt the USDA Reorganization as a Disguised RIF
On July 1, AFGE, AFSCME, SEIU, local governments, and nonprofit organizations moved for a preliminary injunction and a stay in the Northern District of California to stop the Department of Agriculture from carrying out its reorganization plan.
The plaintiffs argue that the plan is a large-scale reduction in force (RIF) in disguise. They point to the agency's internal plan, which sets a workforce reduction target of at least 23 percent and relies on forced relocations to distant hubs to drive employees to quit.
The motion argues that the reorganization exceeds the Department's statutory authority, defies the fiscal year 2026 appropriations riders that bar USDA and the Forest Service from reorganizing or relocating offices without congressional approval, and is arbitrary and capricious because the Department's public rationale of moving closer to the communities it serves contradicts its own attrition goals.
Management-directed reassignment letters have begun to issue, with reporting deadlines in September and October. The court has set a hearing for August 21.
A Final Suitability Rule, and a Comment Window Now Open on Douglas Factors
OPM finalized its Suitability and Fitness ruleon June 30, and it takes effect July 30. The bottom line for federal employees is that OPM can now remove people who already hold their jobs through the suitability process, a route that sidesteps the usual appeal rights. Suitability used to be mostly a pre-hire screen, now this rule extends it to conduct that happens after a person is hired. An agency refers the matter to OPM, OPM rather than the agency makes the final call, and if OPM orders removal the agency has five business days to carry it out. A suitability finding can also bar someone from federal employment governmentwide, not just from the current job.
The rule adds new grounds that can trigger a case, including failure to file tax returns on time, misuse or negligent loss of government property, and refusal to sign or comply with a nondisclosure agreement.
What matters most is what this path avoids: The standard removal process under Chapter 75 and the right to appeal to the MSPB. The suitability route runs alongside that process, so an agency can use it to deny a worker those appeal rights.
We covered the joint OPM and MSPB proposal to repeal the Douglas factors last week. The new development is procedural and worth acting on. The proposal was published in the Federal Register on July 2, which opens a thirty-day comment period. Those who want to weigh in on the changes including denial of union official time for representation matters and and a prohibition on clean-record settlements can file at regulations.gov.
Also at OPM: A Survey Overhaul and Political Hiring Committees
A separate OPM proposed rule, also published July 2, would rewrite how agencies plan their workforces and survey their employees. It replaces the Human Capital Operating Plan with an Annual Staffing Plan updated each quarter, and it establishes strategic hiring committees, composed of senior agency leaders, that review and approve the creation of positions and the selection of new hires. The same rule cuts the required annual employee survey from sixteen questions to ten and lets agencies run their own surveys rather than the governmentwide Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which OPM did not administer at all in 2025. Good-government groups warn that decentralizing the survey and paring its questions will make it far harder to compare workforce engagement across agencies or to track it over time. Comments are due August 3.
Disabled Veterans Say the VA Is Rolling Back Telework Accommodations
Last week we reported NTEU's suit against the IRS, Treasury, and HHS over stalled telework accommodation requests. The pattern now extends to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Disabled employees at the VA, including veterans, say the Department has denied and rescinded long-standing telework arrangements that had been approved as reasonable accommodations, even though the administration's return-to-office directive exempted qualifying employees with disabilities. One Navy veteran was terminated after he could not report in person and was later reinstated through a settlement before the MSPB. The Department disputes the claims and says it may replace a prior telework accommodation with an effective alternative. The Rehabilitation Act requires an individualized, interactive process, and EEOC guidance states that agencies may not take a blanket approach to rescinding recurring or full-time telework accommodations. These disputes are the subject of active litigation, including the disability class action pending against the Department of Justice that appears in our Litigation Tracker.
Schedule Policy/Career Anxiety Abounds
The Schedule Policy/Career rule took effect earlier this year, and agencies are now identifying career positions to move into the new excepted, at-will category. Workers in affected roles are being asked to sign acknowledgment forms, and many areanxious about what signing means. Our guidance is unchanged. Signing an acknowledgment confirms only that the employee received the notice. It does not signal agreement with the reclassification, annotating the form provides no legal protection, and refusing to sign creates a needless risk of an adverse action. The legality of Schedule Policy/Career remains contested, with four challenges pending in federal court that we are tracking. Workers who want to protect their position should keep meeting deadlines and keep records of what they receive.
The “State of the MSPB”
Our friend and contributor Raymond Limon, a former Vice Chairman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, joined our Volunteer Lawyer Corps call on Tuesday, July 8, for an update on how the Board is functioning and where litigants should be taking their cases. The session was candid and detailed, and the Corps brought strong questions about jurisdiction, timing, and where the Board's protections still hold. Ray recently published areflection on LinkedInthat steps back from the week-to-week churn of nondisclosure agreements, suitability, Schedule Policy/Career, and MSPB jurisdiction to make a single point: these are not separate waves but one storm reshaping the civil service. He writes that government is not software, that public trust cannot be rewritten the way code can, and that the merit system and independent bodies like the Board are guardrails that keep accountability lawful rather than obstacles to it. He argues for steering by a fixed point, the Constitution, the rule of law, and the public trust, and he previews a framework for renewing that trust while strengthening accountability and merit.
Looking Ahead
Two comment windows are open, on the Douglas Factors proposal through early August and on the staffing and survey rule through August 3. We are also watching the government's July 6 motions to stay and reconsider the summary judgment we reported last week in the FLRA representation-case litigation. The most consequential ruling we await remains the D.C. Circuit's opinion in the consolidated collective bargaining cases brought by NTEU, AFSA, and FEA.
In Solidarity,
Suzanne Summerlin
General Counsel,
Rise Up: Federal Workers Legal Defense Network
