Month: May 2025

The Trump Administration, using a range of means, has sought to decimate the federal civil service. That has included efforts to fire probationary employees, initiate large-scale reductions in force at multiple agencies, and place large groups of employees on administrative leave. At the same time, the administration has hampered the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the agency responsible for adjudicating federal workers’ employment rights, by depriving it of a working quorum—a step that threatens to impede judicial review of the administration’s personnel policies. Nevertheless, federal workers have options, both for seeking relief from a compromised MSPB and for arguing that they should be entitled to vindicate their rights in federal district court instead.

In defending President Trump’s April 2025 memorandum directing agencies to rescind regulations they deem to be “facially unlawful,” a recent post in this forum misinterprets the scope of the “good cause” exception to the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

On May 1, 2025, the Acting Administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division published a Field Assistance Bulletin stating that, while the Department is reconsidering its 2024 notice-and-comment rule on “Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” the Division “will no longer apply the 2024 Rule’s analysis when determining employee versus independent contractor status in FLSA investigations.” The Bulletin amounts to an effective repeal of the 2024 Rule, issued without reasoned decisionmaking and notice and comment. Litigants therefore might challenge the Bulletin in court.