The government’s HR department, the Office of Personnel Management, has proposed ending the rights given to federal employees to challenge their dismissal in front of the independent Merit Systems Protection Board
The Trump administration is pushing for a legal option that will limit fired federal employees from challenging their dismissals in courts, according to a government plan released on Monday.
The government’s HR department, the Office of Personnel Management, has proposed ending the rights given to federal employees to challenge their dismissal in front of the independent Merit Systems Protection Board. Instead, fired workers would need to appeal to OPM, an office whose director reports to US President Donald Trump.
Trump’s second presidency last year began with mass firings of federal employees. This year, the president is making it almost impossible for the fired workers dispute their dismissals by firing members of government offices that enforce job protections for federal employees.
Grievance redressal body sees spike in cases
Meanwhile, the Merit Systems Protection Board, which mediates disputes between federal workers and their employers, saw a spike in new cases after Trump took office last year. The board’s caseload jumped 266 per cent from October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025, according to government records, compared to the same period the year before.
The new proposal, on the other hand, would “give the administration free rein to terminate huge swaths of the federal workforce without meaningful independent oversight,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union for US federal workers.
“This is all part of a deliberate attempt to dismantle the nonpartisan civil service. On their own, and taken together, these actions unlawfully concentrate removal authority in OPM and directly undermine the statutory framework Congress established to ensure an independent, professional, and nonpartisan civil service,” Kelley added.
OPM defends move
At the same time, OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover has assured that the agency will be impartial and fair. The goal is to give the workers “timely correction when errors occur,” she said, adding that agencies should be able to “restructure responsibly and fairly.”
“Congress gave OPM the authority to set how reduction-in-force appeals are handled, and this rule puts that responsibility to work. It replaces a slow, costly process with a single, streamlined review led by OPM experts. That means agencies can restructure without years of litigation, and employees get faster, fairer resolution if mistakes occur,” Pinover said.
“OPM believes that there is little added value from the review that an Article III court could provide relative to OPM’s adjudicatory venue,” the proposal states.
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