Over the last several months, the administration has sought to shrink the federal government by slashing the federal workforce and by dismantling entire agencies. Those efforts have repeatedly run aground in the courts before judges appointed by presidents of both parties (including by President Trump himself).

With the adults long since dismissed and Congress missing in action, resistance to this Trump power grab could come from an unlikely source: federal judges.

Federal employees seeking to challenge the Trump Administration’s unprecedented efforts to dismantle federal agencies and decimate the civil service have faced a dilemma. The federal Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) generally permits employees to contest serious adverse personnel actions only before an

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

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,”