Trump administration to make it harder for federal workers to appeal firing

The Trump administration on Monday proposed a new rule that would make it harder for fired federal employees to get their jobs back by limiting their opportunities to appeal the termination before an independent review board.

Under the administration proposal, workers fired through a reduction in force (RIF) would not be able to plead their case before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), an independent board that typically reviews layoffs.

Instead, workers would be required to have their firings reviewed by the Office of Personnel Management, an agency that reports directly to the president.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) worked with the Office of Management and Budget last year to initiate layoffs at more than 22 federal agencies. However, some of those jobs were restored by the MSPB, which concluded that some of those agencies had “engaged in prohibited personnel practice” when it came to firing the workers.

“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,” an OPM spokesperson said in a statement.

The 255-page proposal, which was published in the Federal Register on Monday, lists “subverting presidential directives” among the reasons for firing an employee.

Fired federal workers may currently appeal MSPB decisions in federal court. However, the new rule would eliminate the opportunity, saying “there is little added value from the [court] review that an Article III court could provide relative to the OPM’s adjudicatory venue.”

Worker unions representing federal employees slammed the proposal.

“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,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union, said in a statement.

“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,” Mr. Everett continued.

The OPM used to act as the mediator between laid-off federal workers in the government until the MSPB took over that role in 1978. After President Trump took office last year, the MSPB’s caseload surged by 266% between October 2024 and September 2025.

Mr. Trump has been on a mission to reduce the size and scope of the federal workforce as well as limit employees’ ability to fight termination.

The administration forced out about 317,000 federal employees last year.

The move comes amid a separate proposal announced last week that would reclassify high-level career civil servants as “at will” employees.

That change would give the administration broader authority to fire career officials who do not align with the sitting president’s agenda, affecting roughly 50,000 workers at the nation’s largest employer.

Outlined in a more than 250-page document, the directive would allow workers to be fired if they were “intentionally subverting Presidential directives.”

The Trump administration proposal comes roughly a week after the OPM finalized a rule that would make it easier to fire thousands more federal workers.

Before the rule was finalized, only about 4,000 people directly appointed by the president could be fired at will. The new rule expanded that number by about 50,000 by creating a class of workers that has fewer protections.