r/fednews

"When Kenni Miller started as a shift manager in his local Sheetz convenience store in Altoona, Pa., he felt something that he rarely had as a Black man in the workplace.

He felt trusted. He felt appreciated.

When he was fired a few weeks later, in the summer of 2020 after a background check, Mr. Miller, then 27, was devastated. A nonviolent, felony drug conviction from his teenage years had never caused him to be denied a job before. And he already proved he could do the work.

“I was well spoken,” Mr. Miller told The New York Times in an interview. “They had me running the cash register, talking to people, all the customers. I’m doing these things, learning the whole store, so I’m equipped for the job. That’s not the issue here, right?”

In 2024, Mr. Miller was part of a class-action lawsuit against Sheetz filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that the company’s criminal background checks disproportionately screened out applicants of color.

But soon after President Trump took office, the E.E.O.C. abruptly dropped the case.

The agency cited an executive order by Mr. Trump that directed federal agencies to “deprioritize” cases like Mr. Miller’s, in which companies are scrutinized not for intentional discrimination, but for having policies that have an unintentional, “disparate impact” on minority applicants.

The result has been an abandonment of civil rights cases across the federal government, in departments including education, housing, trade, justice and the E.E.O.C. There is no public accounting of exactly how many cases have been closed, but legal advocates describe a generational void in civil rights enforcement.

“It is absolutely widespread, and it is absolutely devastating,” said Dariely Rodriguez, chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We know a lot of time with discrimination, there’s rarely a smoking gun. A lot of people don’t know that they’re being subjected to discrimination. We need our federal agencies to look into that hidden discrimination.”

For Mr. Trump, the directive against disparate impact litigation is part of a broader push to eradicate “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — from every part of American life"

☀️ Good afternoon Fam!! July 5, 2026. 87 days until end of fiscal year.

While the fireworks were going off yesterday, something else happened quietly: DOGE officially ceased to exist. The executive order that created it set July 4, 2026 as its termination date, and that date has now come and gone. Here is the honest accounting.

📍 How it ended. Not with a report, but with a sunset clause. OMB Director Russell Vought confirmed to House appropriators this week that "we have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report." The organization that reshaped the federal workforce is closing its books without a final public accounting of what it cost or what it saved. The $5,000 taxpayer rebate checks floated in early 2025 never materialized either.

📍 The numbers it leaves behind. DOGE's own website claims $215 billion in savings, a figure that has not moved since January 1 and sits at roughly a tenth of the $2 trillion target set at launch. Independent analysts say there is too little reliable information to verify the claims, and a Senate subcommittee minority report estimated the effort generated $21.7 billion in waste in its first six months alone. In fairness, the White House maintains the president made significant progress eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. With no final report, the full ledger may never be public.

📍 What is not in dispute is the human toll. More than 260,000 federal employees left government under DOGE-led efforts. Some agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, later rehired staff after discovering they had cut too deeply and lost essential expertise. This community lived every chapter of that story: the probationary firings, the deferred resignations, the RIFs, the rehiring scrambles.

📍 The quiet ending was itself an ending. Elon Musk left after 130 days, in May 2025. Reporting indicates DOGE had effectively dissolved as a centralized entity by last November, eight months before its formal sunset. Its savings tracker went dark. The initiative that dominated every federal employee's 2025 faded long before its charter did.

📍 What it means going forward. The formal entity is gone, but its legacy is not. The workforce reductions, the reorganizations, the policy changes, and the legal battles it set in motion are all still working their way through agencies and courts. The tools it pioneered have been absorbed into the broader machinery of government. The chapter is closed. The consequences are not.

However you judge the experiment, you are the ones still here, doing the work, carrying what it left behind. That has been true through all of it, and it is true this morning.

A friend of mine is seeking an attorney who has successful track record in bringing a civil rights/ EEO claim against a federal agency. (ADA falls under civil rights/ EEO.) My friend received management approval for critically necessary medical treatment, but nevertheless was suspended and threatened with termination for violating FEMA travel policy. My friend resigned rather than be terminated, which I wish they had not done, as being illegally terminated would have made for a stronger case. My friend was a high-performing member of the team and really needs a financial win here. Has anyone who has run afoul of this administration had luck fighting back with an attorney or firm? I know the courts are horribly backed up....

We started 2 weeks apart. (ME on 12/525, him on 12/29/25) we work as MSA at our local VA outpatient facility. I have over 30 yrs experience as a medical technician in another field so I was able to catch on quick as to the what was expected of me... this guy....has zero medical office experience . He has been pulled from the front desk due to numerous complaints about his attitude, loses his temper easily, and has a difficult time multitasking and loud voices. On top of making huge mistakes which would be easily avoided if he just read what the order/paid attn. Just the tip of the iceberg. Hes basically been relegated to a back office making phone calls and scheduling appts due to his inability to be able to handle day to day duties. He is a veteran (6 yrs Navy then 4 or 6 yrs army) from what I understand he was a welder. Anyway....bottom line is he not qualified for the job. We work in a very small area and alot of our vets are hard of hearing....he told me that "my loud voice" triggers his PTSD. Now I do admit I can get loud. I worked 30 yrs in a clinical job with a majority of our practice being older so i understand that I am loud.

Now..I absolutely understand that veterans have PTSD. My uncle did 2 tours in vietnam and still has nightmares to this very day....im not insensitive to that...however this idiot who fancies himself a comedian, calls off work and has constant appts through the week its surprising when he works 40 hrs. The dude is weird and says awkward shit that makes me uncomfortable. The supervisor who hired him has even admitted to me she made a mistake. But they are rather insistent on not moving him to another area. He uses his PTSD as an excuse for everything he does wrong. He cried the last time he got in trouble for mistakes that he keeps making over and over. Thats just a little of what this douchebag does...I do like my job and absolutely love providing care to our veterans. I just cant work alongside this dude any longer...anyone have advice on how to approach management in this situation?

Just saw my direct deposit hit my bank account and noticed it was quite a bit more than usual. At first I thought it was our annual performance awards (it's that time for my agency) but when I checked my paystub it turns out they didn't take out any federal taxes. All other deductions were the usual amount.

Any ideas why?? Obviously I'll let payroll know on monday but maybe there was a federal payroll tax holiday I wasn't aware of (the hopium is as strong as the beer today)

I recall a year ago there was all this chatter of us losing the FERS annuity supplement and converting the High-3 to a High-5 and all that. Did any of that come to pass? If so, what was it?

Since the 250th anniversary of signing the Declaration of Independence is tomorrow, it's worthwhile to shine light on how people's freedoms have been squashed by greed. The current administration ran on the platform of being the "patriot party" but everything they have done has only helped the upper class. They won votes by saying "government got too big and those evil democrats and deep state are trying to take away all your freedoms". Though, the founding fathers likely wouldn't be on board with having corporate overlords be in charge of everything and calling all the shots either.

This back to office 100% of the time push is only being shoved down everyone's throats to help those with big investments in office buildings and the surrounding areas. They don't want to spend their own money to make the buildings anything else, but they certainly are on board with screwing over working parents and everyone else who has benefitted so much from telework and hybrid work settings just to keep their fortunes in tact. Telework saves space, time and money across the board. Receiving higher productivity out of a happier workforce allowed to telework all while saving money on operating costs is literally the definition of efficiency. Maybe that's why GSA took out the words "effective and efficient" from it's mission statement a little over a month ago.

The American people don't see a dime from all the recent federal building sales nor do they benefit from expensive office renovations. The people can't use these office buildings and they don't benefit from their values rising, so, why would they be excited to hear that hundreds of millions of taxdollars is being spent by agencies to do all this office renovation work? This is all being expedited to ensure utilization rates are met, thereby, ensuring surrounding property values don't keep declining. The people working in the agencies actually prefer smaller offices and hybrid settings that don't require permanent full time cubes of confinement for every single person but this admin doesn't care about that!

The Administrator from the government's largest landlord, GSA, is really hyping up all these costly building renovations just to remain federal office space. He says how invigorated the American people will be once they see all these office renovations. Sir, this isn't what the people want, it's not even what the people who work at that agency want. Let's call this song and dance for what it really is...these projects aren't for the American people as you say they are, they're projects to help a small percentage of the American people who have hefty real estate portfolios and cannot fathom the possibility of losing some of their fortune because office buildings became a good investment of the past.

At a Senate hearing in May, Administrator Forst asked that the project threshold that needs to be approved by Congress before moving forward be increased from just under $4M to $75M. The article linked to this post states that federal buildings directly impact values of properties around them. Could this be the use of taxpayer dollars to increase the value of surrounding properties and boost confidence in commercial office buildings without needing to dip into private accounts? This guy in charge of GSA is a former executive from a fortune 500 real estate company and has just created a crap ton of deputy assistant positions that are being filled by a bunch of people from real estate giants to work at GSA. Hm, I wonder what the angle is?

This is just another case of using public money to bail out "too big to fail" private investment companies. These people will just continue to tell us all how we work best. They're just going to keep telling the working people "you get what you get, and you don't throw a fit" so they can keep on doing whatever the hell they please lavishly. In the spirit of this weekend, what would our founding fathers want us to do?

Have anything you want to talk about that doesn't quite warrant its own thread or currently being discussed in a megathread? Post it here!

In an effort to effectively manage the amount of information being posted, please keep anything speculative or considered repetitive within this discussion thread.

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I think of cube farms as a 50s thing or even a pre-covid thing where folk had conference calls over phone but generally met in dedicated spaces and therefore the potential to disturb coworkers was low. There were also kitchens and water coolers in these spaces. In these days of RTO and Teams calls, why do the newer facilities still have cube farms? Even senior leaders get very small offices. Why??

I am an indef employee under title 32, can I be fired at any moment for any reason? How does this process work? Thank you.