Seven federal employee unions are challenging new rules they say allow the Office of Personnel Management to fire career employees and review its own termination decisions while weakening longstanding civil service protections.
(CN) — Roughly a million federal workers could soon be fired by a Washington office they’ve never worked for — one that can also decide whether its own firing decisions are fair.
Seven federal employee unions sued the Office of Personnel Management Monday, asking the Northern District of California to strike down new rules they say give the office power, unbestowed to it by Congress, to fire federal employees.
The new “Suitability Rule” allows the office to use a tool historically reserved for screening prospective federal employees to take negative actions against people already on the federal payroll.
Since Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act in 1978, federal law has generally required agencies to discipline their own employees through a process that includes a right to respond and an appeal to the independent Merit Systems Protection Board. The new rule instead allows the Office of Personnel Management to take suitability actions based on post-appointment conduct, without a right to respond orally, and replaces the Merit Systems Protection Board and Federal Circuit review with an appeal to the office itself.
“Before this amendment, when a federal employee engaged in serious misconduct on the job, agencies generally had to use a different authority such as a Chapter 75 action to address the conduct,” the Office of Personnel Management wrote in its July 30, 2026, Suitability and Fitness Manual, according to the unions’ complaint.
The unions say the office’s own estimate shows how sweeping the shift is: The agency projects half of all employee removals across the federal government, previously handled through a standard disciplinary process, will now be reclassified as suitability actions.
“OPM’s new process will be applicable to a substantial portion of the approximately two million federal employees,” the union’s said in their complaint.
The unions are also challenging another rule, issued July 7, that allows the office to require agencies to use standardized distributions of performance ratings, potentially forcing employees into performance categories based partly on how they rank against their colleagues rather than solely on objective performance criteria required by federal law.
The unions say the office had barred such forced distributions for decades.
The plaintiffs include the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal union, along with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, two smaller national unions and four Bay Area AFGE locals representing Social Security claims workers, Environmental Protection Agency attorneys, and doctors and nurses in the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto health system.
The unions are not the first to challenge the Trump administration’s reshaping of the federal workforce this year. They cite earlier rulings against mass firings and the cancellation of collective bargaining agreements, along with separate Office of Personnel Management rules reclassifying thousands of positions to make employees easier to remove.
“The current Donald J. Trump administration, however, seeks to weaken the longstanding legal framework that has helped ensure that talented civil servants seek federal employment and remain in that employment insulated from politically-driven decision-making,” the unions write in their complaint.
Representatives for the unions and Office of Personnel Management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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