Monday, September 21, 2026
The Government Accountability Office estimates the deferred resignation programme cost $6.7bn in 2025, about 70 percent of the $9.5bn the federal government spent on paid administrative leave that year. Roughly 144,000 employees drew salaries while on leave before separating. GAO also says nobody can verify the savings, because the payroll data is not tracked that way.
A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully in directing FEMA to cut its workforce roughly in half. The record contained no reasoning for the cut, the officials who discussed it used Signal and deleted the messages, and the judge will now presume those messages would have shown unlawful conduct.
From this week, 95 percent of the National Wildlife Refuge System — about 92 million acres — is open to hunting or fishing, through 1,488 new opportunities across 32 states and more than a thousand changes to federal regulations. Fish and Wildlife Service staffing fell 18 percent between April 2024 and May 2025.
USDA says 64 percent of the 725 staff who have received relocation orders accepted them. Accepting is the only route to requesting a hardship or medical exemption, and refusing means losing the post. The department separately expects to keep no more than 2,000 of 4,600 employees in the capital region.
The Tech Force programme is screening applicants with AI agents that run structured interviews and hand hiring managers a transcript. OPM has issued guidance nudging agencies toward AI in hiring, with human oversight. The interview is not where federal hiring loses its months.
The former FEMA leader who worked to abolish it says the administration has dropped that goal. Meanwhile the agency has shed more than a thousand career staff since 2024, and the mitigation grants that reduce the cost of the next disaster have gone unauthorised for almost every major declaration since February 2025.
Most federal civilian pay is frozen at 2026 levels next year. Law enforcement gets 3.8 percent and the military gets five to seven. The exceptions are an admission that pay decides who shows up.
Air traffic control is short-staffed at precisely the facilities that carry the most traffic, and the binding constraint is not recruitment. It is a certification pipeline whose length cannot be compressed without changing what certification means.