The Solidarity Docket
July 1, 2026
The week of America’s birthday was defined, legally, by presidential removal power. The Supreme Court overruled a 91 year old precedent and expanded the President's authority over independent agencies, and a cluster of rulings and filings reshaped the landscape for representation cases, disability accommodations, and civil service protections. Here is what federal workers and their advocates need to know.
Supreme Court Expands the President's Removal Power but Shields the Federal Reserve
On June 29, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Slaughter and held that the statutory protection shielding Federal Trade Commission commissioners from removal except for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance violates the separation of powers. By a vote of 6 to 3, the Court overruled Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the 1935 decision that had allowed Congress to insulate the heads of certain agencies from removal at will.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts reasoned that the Constitution vests the executive power in the President, that officers who exercise that power on his behalf must remain accountable to him, and that the President must therefore be able to remove them at will. Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, and wrote that Congress has for well over a century created independent, bipartisan, multimember agencies with for cause removal protections, and that the decision concentrates far greater power in the President than before.
The same day, in Trump v. Cook, the Court went the other way and kept Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in office while her removal case proceeds in the lower courts. By a vote of 5 to 4, again in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court treated the Federal Reserve as a special case with a long historical tradition of independence, and it held that a Governor is entitled by statute to notice and an opportunity to respond before removal for cause.
Read together, the two decisions expand the President's power over independent agencies while carving out a narrow exception for the central bank that the Court did not extend to other agencies.
The holdings address the FTC and the Federal Reserve, but their reach is broader. The same removal protections govern the members of the agencies that decide federal labor and employment disputes, including the FLRA, the MSPB, and the EEOC.
A President who can remove those members at will gains substantial leverage over the bodies meant to serve as neutral arbiters between agencies and the workers who challenge agency action. The Court did not decide the status of these adjudicatory bodies. It said the question of removal protections for non-Article III adjudicators was not before it, and Slaughter leaves open how bodies like the MSPB, which are mostly adjudicatory, will be treated.
What These Rulings Mean for Federal Workers?: A Quick Q&A
Questions have poured in from workers and advocates since the decisions came down, so here are short answers to the most common ones:
Does Slaughter mean I can be fired more easily from my job? Probably not. The decision addresses the removal of the commissioners and board members who lead agencies. It does not by its terms change the civil service protections that rank and file employees hold under Title 5 and the Civil Service Reform Act, and it does not eliminate your right to appeal an adverse action.
What does it mean for the MSPB, the FLRA, and the EEOC? The members who lead these agencies have long been protected from removal except for cause, the same protection the Court rejected for the FTC. The concern is that a President who can remove those members at will gains leverage over bodies meant to be neutral. The Court did not decide the status of these adjudicatory agencies, so their independence is unsettled rather than resolved.
I have a case pending before one of these agencies. Does anything change right now? No. These decisions do not halt, dismiss, or reset pending cases. The agencies continue to operate, and every filing and appeal deadline still applies. Treat your matter as active and keep meeting your deadlines.
We are working on a fuller plain language resource that walks through what Slaughter and Cook decided, what they change for federal employees' rights, and what they mean for matters now pending before the MSPB, the FLRA, and the EEOC. You will find it on our resources page.
OPM and MSPB Propose to Retire the Douglas Factors
OPM and the MSPB have jointly proposed regulations, set for Federal Register publication on July 2, that would streamline adverse action and performance based removal procedures. The most significant change would retire the twelve Douglas factors the Board has used since 1981 to assess penalty reasonableness, replacing them with a totality of the circumstances standard tied to the efficiency of the service. That matters because Douglas is the primary framework employees use to argue a penalty is too severe (and is frequently compared to the Seven Tests of Just Cause in the private sector).
The proposal would also restrict clean record settlement agreements, give employees less time to respond to a proposal, and bar the use of official time for representatives under 5 U.S.C. 7131(d).
New York Times Reveals White House Pressure Behind the MSPB's Article II Ruling
On June 28, the New York Times reported that a recent consequential MSPB ruling was the result of a private pressure campaign on the Board, including a November meeting at which administration officials told the acting chair that the Board was bound to follow an Office of Legal Counsel opinion on jurisdiction related to terminations of federal employees purportedly done via Article II authority.
The article quotes former MSPB member Raymond Limon, who described the decision as a reversal of years of Board law on who receives Board protections. Ray joins Rise Up on July 8 to speak more about the current status of the MSPB - registration details are below.
Court Sets Aside the FLRA Rule Centralizing Representation Cases
This week the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted summary judgment to the eight unions that brought the challenge and vacated the FLRA's interim final rule on representation proceedings.
The plaintiffs were the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE-SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE-IAM), the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), the National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU).
The rule, effective April 23, had revoked the authority that regional directors held since 1983 to decide representation matters under 5 U.S.C. 7105(e)(1) and moved those decisions to the three-member Authority, while eliminating the appeals process under 7105(f).
The court held both the substance of the rule and its thirty-day effective date arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. The FLRA reversed a forty-three-year position without explaining why, disregarded its own data showing that regional directors resolved roughly 98 percent of representation cases without appeal, and failed to weigh the reliance interests of the unions and workers who depend on prompt processing.
The practical effect is that the prior system is restored. Regional directors again decide representation matters, which protects the faster process unions rely on to secure exclusive representative status and to move elections forward. We will report on an appeal filed, if any, by the Authority.
NTEU Sues the IRS, Treasury, and HHS Over Stalled Telework Accommodation Requests
Also this week, NTEU filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the IRS, Treasury, and HHS, alleging that the agencies have failed to process reasonable accommodation requests for telework. The complaint does not challenge any individual denial or the agencies' return-to-office policies. It challenges the agencies' failure to perform the threshold steps that the Rehabilitation Act, EEOC regulations, and the agencies' own internal procedures require, including acknowledging requests, routing them to a coordinator, communicating with employees, considering interim accommodations, and issuing written decisions.
The agencies' own records describe the scale of the backlog. A Treasury memo reported more than 6,500 pending requests, with the IRS share exceeding 5,800, and public reporting placed the HHS backlog above 9,000 by April 2026. The complaint describes members who exhausted leave, were marked absent without leave, lost computer access while a request remained pending, and were pressed to disclose medical information to supervisors. NTEU brings claims under the APA and for mandamus, and it asks the court to order systemic relief across all pending telework requests rather than decisions case by case.
Both pulled. Here is the roundup section, formatted like the ABA piece with each item as its own short entry.
Other News This Week
The June issue of the American Bar Association's Human Rights Magazine, themed “Fragility of Rights,” includes two articles of note. Our partners at Democracy Forward, Rob Shriver and Elena Goldstein, wrote The Return of the Spoils System: A Threat to Workers' Rights and Public Services, which traces how the dismantling of civil service protections and the politicization of federal employment revive the patronage system the country abandoned more than a century ago, and what restoring a merit-based service would require. Rise Up also contributed Villainizing the Federal Workforce: The Assault on Civil Servants and the Americans They Serve, which examines Schedule P/C, the loss of MSPB appeal rights and Office of Special Counsel review, and the human cost of treating career public servants as adversaries.
The IRS has agreed to stop confiscating union materials from employees' workstations and communal bulletin boards, afterNTEU suedover a directive instructing facilities staff to remove NTEU-related items from agency spaces. Under a stipulation filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the agency agreed to pause the directive, allow employees to redisplay union materials, and return confiscated items that were not already discarded. The agency must give NTEU five days' notice before resuming the practice, and the union's suit remains open in abeyance.
OPM's proposal to require nondisclosure agreements for all federal employees is drawing broad pushback. The agency's one-month comment period closed over the weekend with more than 30,000 comments filed, most in opposition. NARFE, AFGE, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers argue the NDA would chill whistleblower activity and raise First Amendment problems, including that it functions as a prior restraint on speech and could restrict union communications with members. AFGE also warned it could infringe on labor officials' rights and duties under federal sector labor law.
Looking Ahead
On Wednesday, July 8 at 12:00 p.m. ET, our friend Raymond Limon returns to meet with our Volunteer Lawyer Corps for an update on the latest developments at the MSPB, how the Board is functioning, and where litigants should be taking their cases. You can register here. His session lands at the right moment, given this week's removal decision and the Federal Circuit's review of the Article II ruling.
We are also watching the Federal Circuit's handling of the en banc Article II case, and the still-pending D.C. Circuit opinion in the consolidated collective bargaining cases brought by NTEU, AFSA, and FEA, which remains the most consequential ruling we are awaiting. Filings and developments in these matters appear in our litigation tracker.
In the meantime, enjoy some family, friends, and BBQ this holiday weekend.
In Solidarity,
Suzanne Summerlin
General Counsel,
Rise Up: Federal Workers Legal Defense Network
