Van Hollen pushes back on OPM appeal rules

Democrat Senators are pressing the Office of Personnel Management to reverse course on implementing two rules that would impact federal employees.

• Democrat Senators are pressing the Office of Personnel Management to reverse course on implementing two rules that would impact federal employees. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen is spearheading an effort to get OPM to reject two proposals that would move oversight of certain employee actions from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) to OPM.
  
  In a letter to OPM, Van Hollen and his Senate colleagues say moving the jurisdiction over suitability action appeals and the appeals of reductions in force to OPM would shift the adjudication of appeals from the independent MSPB to an internal OPM process overseen by a political appointee. The lawmakers say this would be a clear conflict of interest in which OPM is the policymaker, the enforcer and the final arbiter of these appeals.
• Agencies report that staff shortages last year led to big increases in Freedom of Information Act backlogs. The Defense Department’s chief FOIA officer says the loss of staff was the “primary” driver in DoD’s FOIA backlog increasing last year. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s lead FOIA office lost 40% of its staff in 2025. And the State Department’s FOIA backlog spiked by 6,000 requests after staff attrition and contract downsizing left several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant. Several other agencies reported staffing issues in their annual FOIA reports. Some are turning to AI to help fill the gap.
• An upper-chamber lawmaker is seeking to put guardrails around the Pentagon’s use of artificial intelligence in military operations. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) introduced a bill that would prohibit the Defense Department from using autonomous weapons to kill a target without human authorization. The bill would also ban the department from using AI for mass surveillance and launching nuclear weapons. The AI Guardrails Act follows the Pentagon’s high-profile dispute with Anthropic over how the military can use the company’s AI models.
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is no longer requiring faxes from medical providers when submitting health care claim attachments. CMS now says doctors offices and hospitals can send claims via standardized electronic claims attachments with secure electronic signatures. CMS believes that this change from the 1980s technology will save health care providers more than $780 million a year, as well as less time spent on administrative hassle and more time caring for patients. Health care providers have two years from May to comply with the new rule.
• The changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulations aren’t final yet, but they are already having an impact. The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service paid 43% less than the government estimate for a new digital analytics platform. They did this by conducting a focused comparative evaluation of three vendors. The Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office used oral presentations to award a new IT services contract four weeks sooner than expected. These are just two examples of how agencies are using acquisition strategies emphasized in the recent FAR overhaul. GSA said in a new blog post that these and other initial changes to the FAR are already enabling acquisition workers to spend less time navigating rules and procedures and more time delivering outcomes for agencies.
• The Energy Department’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response wants to develop “world-class security technology.” That’s one of the main goals in CESER’s new five-year strategic plan, released last week. It comes in response to rising cyber and physical threats to the energy sector and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence. CESER’s strategic plan also lays out goals to harden U.S. energy infrastructure from threats and boost the sector’s ability to respond and recover from incidents, including cyber attacks.
• A consortium of nine defense companies is building the command and control layer for the department’s Golden Dome missile defense system. Early demonstrations have shown that the new capability is already “comparable” to existing Missile Defense Agency capabilities, proving it is on track to deliver a full operational capability by 2028. Officials say there is no single sensor that can provide all the necessary data to respond to threats from the boost phase through the terminal phase. “The layered approach is essential, and perhaps the biggest challenge is how do we tie all this into a single command and control system that takes probably a dozen or more disparate command and control systems and ties it into one screen?” said Gen. Gregory Guillot, head of U.S. Northern Command.
  

Copyright
© 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.