The Trump administration has finalized a major overhaul to federal employees’ avenues for disputing adverse actions, while also revising how agencies prioritize which employees to retain — or remove — during reductions in force.
Taken together, a host of final rules that the Office of Personnel Management issued on Friday mean that federal employees will now, in many cases, have to appeal their case to OPM if they believe their agency wrongfully terminated them — transitioning the deciding authority away from the Merit Systems Protection Board, where it has been for decades.
Going forward, OPM will retain the “sole and exclusive” authority to decide the outcomes of employee appeals for adverse actions taken during RIFs or while serving a probationary period, as well as employee removals due to suitability standards.
At the same time, agencies will now be required to create RIF retention registers based most heavily on performance, after OPM finalized a separate rule that reduces the importance of seniority and tenure in RIF decisions.
The four final rules will all take effect 30 days after OPM’s regulations are published to the Federal Register on Monday.
The changes to federal employee appeals are meant to make the process faster, more consistent and less expensive, OPM said.
But many organizations have harshly criticized the Trump administration’s planned changes. Notably, 99% of commenters opposed OPM’s plan to transition the RIF appeals process, according to the final rule.
Many critics raised concerns that moving the appeals processes into OPM, rather than leaving them at MSPB, means federal employees will no longer see a fair, independent or complete process when challenging their agencies over adverse actions.
OPM Director Scott Kupor emphasized that the changes are not meant to erode the independence of the process.
“Our proposed internal appeal processes are designed to be faster, more efficient, and, critically, structurally independent, with separate staff handling determinations and appeals,” Kupor said Friday in a blog post. “If our internal process does not deliver genuine independence and a fair opportunity to be heard, it will fail — and deservedly so. We are committed to building something that works, not just something that is faster.”
OPM attempted to address some commenters’ concerns by adding clarifications and safeguards in its final rules — for instance, by adding stricter record requirements for agencies and, in some limited cases, allowing employees to raise additional allegations if new material arises from an agency’s filings.
According to the final rules, appeals for probationary and RIF actions will be handled by OPM’s Merit System Accountability and Compliance (MSAC) office, while appeals related to suitability actions will go to OPM’s suitability office.
OPM pointed to what it said was limited capacity at MSPB to handle the various employee appeals processes, leading to backlogs and delays in issuing decisions.
But commenters questioned OPM’s own capacity to handle employee appeals — especially considering that the agency has lost more than one-third of its internal staffing, and that the OPM office designated to handle appeals has not historically been equipped for that kind of work.
“MSPB has an entire roster of administrative judges. It’s got a board that oversees it. It’s got a lot of support staff. It would require a lot of resources for OPM to offer the same quality and independent services,” Jenny Mattingley, vice president of public policy and stakeholder engagement at the Partnership for Public Service, said in an interview.
In the final rule, OPM said it may adjust internal staffing levels “as necessary” to handle the added work from the appeals processes.
“At this time, we believe we have sufficient staffing and resources in place to effectively manage all three categories of appeals,” OPM spokesperson Kiki Nyoh said in an email to Federal News Network.
The sweeping regulatory changes come after significant reductions to the federal workforce throughout 2025, and alongside many other personnel overhauls the Trump administration has made in recent months.
The Trump administration has been broadly reshaping firing and removal rules for federal employees — including by changing the factors agencies have to consider when taking an adverse action and implementing the Schedule Policy/Career classification.
There have also been major changes made to the operations of the federal probationary period. Last year, OPM finalized a rule giving agencies more leeway to fire probationary employees, and rescinding MSPB’s framework for handling the probationary appeals process.
In June, OPM finalized a separate rule that makes current federal employees fireable based on suitability and fitness standards, although those standards were traditionally meant only for federal job applicants. OPM also expanded the reasons employees can be found “unsuitable,” including a refusal to comply with “any applicable nondisclosure obligations.”
OPM has also implemented major changes to the government’s performance management system, allowing for a forced distribution system that will limit the number of employees agencies can rate as high performers.
Slated to publish to the Federal Register on Monday, OPM is finalizing a rule to reorder the factors agencies consider when determining which employees to retain or remove during a RIF.
For years, federal regulations told agencies to first look at employees’ tenure and length of service, before considering performance ratings. But OPM’s final rule makes employee performance the top priority, followed by veterans’ preference. Tenure and seniority will be used only as tiebreakers between employees.
OPM’s final rule also ends the longstanding “bump and retreat” process in a RIF. Instead, employees designated for a reassignment during a RIF “will receive assignment rights to a qualifying position held by another employee with lower retention standing in the same tenure group,” the final rule states.
Many commenters argued that the Trump administration’s overhauls to the RIF process will undermine the civil service and erode merit system principles.
“Read together, the interlocking set of proposals would make RIFs more subjective, less contestable before independent and neutral adjudicators and easier to use for targeting individuals rather than positions,” Democracy Forward wrote earlier this year in public comments on OPM’s proposed RIF regulations.
In response, OPM clarified in the final rule that agencies are required to abide by “all applicable laws, including the merit system principles,” when conducting a RIF.
But many still expressed concerns that managers would be able to introduce bias or subjectivity into the RIF process when determining who to retain or remove from their jobs.
“If you look at OPM’s performance rules too, agencies can now do forced distribution. Does that mean agencies can just send all those people out the door?” Mattingley said. “Then if people want to question their performance being used as a reason whether to RIF them or not, the appeals process is brought right back into OPM.”
In response to some of the concerns, the final rule states, “OPM has taken concrete steps to ensure the accuracy and fairness of employee ratings systems … Further, OPM has built in safeguards to prevent performance ratings from being manipulated to target individual employees in the RIF context.”
On the whole, Kupor said the four final rules issued Friday are meant to help agencies more effectively manage their workforces, “without a multi-year odyssey through an appeals process that often resolves nothing other than to rack up attorneys’ fees at the expense of the American taxpayer.”
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email drew.friedman@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at drewfriedman.11
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