FedFam

☀️ Good morning Fam!! June 19, 2026. 103 days until end of fiscal year.

Sorry for being late this morning, we slept in. 😴
Well, amid all the harder news, a more hopeful conversation about AI and the federal workforce, and the message is one worth hearing: the employees come first.

📍 Federal leaders on a recent panel made a point that cuts against the fear. The question is no longer whether employees should use AI, but how to train and trust them to use it well. As the State Department's acting chief data and AI officer Amy Ritualo put it, employees understand better than leadership ever can what will actually help in their daily work.

📍 A concrete example. The State Department built an internal tool called "State Chat" to help staff manage the roughly 5,000 daily communications between Washington and more than 200 missions worldwide. It started with a small group of specialists. It now has more than 60,000 users across 97% of the department's posts. The key, Ritualo said, was constant feedback from the people actually using it. Her line is the whole story: "AI is not a technology problem; it's a people problem and it's a confidence problem."

📍 GAO's Jennifer Franks reframed the rollout entirely. Too often, she said, agencies just drop a new tool on people and say "embrace it." The better approach is a community of practice, peer-to-peer learning, starting with low-risk uses and scaling up, with continuous education from entry-level staff all the way to executives.

📍 And the reassurance this community needs to hear. Workday Government's Matthew Cornelius said plainly that AI is not replacing employees, it is reshaping workforce planning. After 18 months of upheaval, the smarter question agencies are asking is how to use technology to bridge capability gaps rather than hire armies of contractors. He argued younger public servants who learn to work alongside these tools will actually accelerate their own growth into future leaders.

📍 Why we are sharing this. So much of the AI conversation lands on federal employees as a threat. This panel flips it: the agencies getting it right are the ones listening to their people, training them, and trusting them. That is the model worth pushing for, wherever you work.

You are not obstacles to the technology. You are the reason it works. Demand a seat at the table when these tools come to your shop.

🌙 Good evening Fam. June 18, 2026.

A new analysis puts a price tag on the deferred resignation program, and the number reframes the whole "efficiency" argument.

📍 The advocacy group Public Citizen estimates that federal agencies paid between $11.1 billion and $15.1 billion to employees who took the "fork in the road" buyout but were no longer working, through March 2026. Nearly 140,000 federal employees have voluntarily left since the start of the term by accepting these incentives.

📍 The mechanics are worth remembering. The original January 2025 offer let employees resign but keep collecting full pay through September 30, 2025, with some retirement-eligible workers paid through the end of the year. In other words, billions in salary for people sitting at home, not doing the jobs taxpayers were funding.

📍 The irony Public Citizen highlights: the program was sold as cutting waste and making government more efficient. The group argues the buyouts became "the epitome of inefficiency," especially since multiple agencies, including the Labor Department, ended up bringing back staff in the second half of 2025 after realizing the cuts left them unable to perform key functions.

📍 In fairness, OPM pushes back hard on the framing. The agency says the short-term costs overlook the long-term savings, estimating the reduced headcount will save about $20 billion a year going forward. So the real debate is whether the upfront billions are a wasteful giveaway or a one-time cost that pays for itself over time. Reasonable people will read that tradeoff differently.

📍 The throughline for this community. Whichever way you score the math, the human reality is the one we keep coming back to. Tens of thousands of experienced people walked out the door, some agencies scrambled to rehire them, and the institutional knowledge lost along the way does not show up cleanly on either side of the ledger.

We will keep tracking the real costs, in dollars and in capacity.

☀️ Good morning Fam!! June 18, 2026. 104 days until end of fiscal year.

A notable split between the House and Senate on military pay, with implications for how the whole tiered-pay idea plays out.

📍 The Senate Armed Services Committee released its 2027 defense policy bill this week proposing a flat 3.6% across-the-board pay raise for all service members. That sets up a direct clash with the House, which backed the White House's tiered approach of 5% to 7% depending on rank, with the largest 7% bump going to junior enlisted troops at E-5 and below.

📍 The disagreement is about more than the number. The Senate's flat raise is a rejection of the tiered model the administration has been pushing. The Defense Department's own Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation warned that pay compression, where junior and senior pay scales bunch together, can weaken the incentive to seek promotion and to perform above the minimum. The House and White House say targeting junior enlisted raises addresses real hardship at the bottom of the pay scale. Reasonable arguments on both sides, and now they have to be reconciled.

📍 The Senate bill also boosts a range of bonuses and special pays: aviator bonuses up to $60,000 from $50,000, senior ROTC cadet and midshipman bonuses up to $15,000 from $5,000, hostile fire pay up to $600 a month from $450, and imminent danger pay up to $400 from $275.

📍 Why this matters for the broader federal community. The military pay fight is unfolding while civilian federal employees face a proposed pay freeze for 2027. The contrast is stark: Congress is debating whether troops get 3.6% or up to 7%, while the civilian workforce is fighting just to avoid zero. Both groups serve. Only one is in the conversation for a raise right now.

📍 The bill authorizes $1.15 trillion in spending and now heads to the Senate floor, where it still has to be negotiated against the House version before anything is final.

We will track how the House-Senate difference gets resolved and what the final numbers look like.

🌙 Good evening Fam. June 17, 2026.

A development on security clearances that could mean real relief from one of the most frustrating waits in federal service.

📍 The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, the Pentagon agency that runs background investigations and clearances for the entire government, says it is using AI to cut parts of the vetting process from “months to hours.” DCSA analytics chief Mark Nehmer described the approach at a Defense One tech summit this week.

📍 The why behind it. A recent acquisition overhaul that pushes the government toward commercial products means DCSA expects to process roughly 43,000 clearance requests a year. That is a heavy load for a system already known for long delays, and AI is being positioned to absorb it.

📍 How they say it will work. Nehmer framed it as AI handling the small, discrete decisions and then assembling a “package of evidence” for a human analyst to review and make the final call. In his words, the goal is for the system to reach the same conclusion a senior analyst would, then hand it up for a person to sign off. The agency did not specify which AI systems it is using.

📍 Worth knowing for context. This builds on the years-long Trusted Workforce 2.0 effort, which enrolled millions of clearance holders in continuous vetting. That modernization has faced repeated delays, cost overruns, and congressional scrutiny, so the “months to hours” promise is worth watching against the track record.

📍 One related thread for the AI angle. Over the weekend, the government invoked an export control mechanism to restrict two major Anthropic AI models, a move that has drawn wide criticism. It is a reminder that the rules around which AI tools the government can even use are shifting quickly underneath efforts like this one.

The honest takeaway: if it works as described and keeps a human in the final decision, faster clearances would be a genuine win for the workforce and for everyone stuck waiting to start a job. The open questions are accuracy, transparency, and what happens when an algorithm flags something in your record. We will keep watching.

☀️ Good morning Fam!! June 17, 2026. 105 days until end of fiscal year.

The agency that processes the nation’s taxes is losing the people who keep its technology running. The numbers are stark.

📍 According to the latest Treasury Inspector General snapshot, the IRS lost 30% of its workforce, 31,273 employees, between January 2025 and January 2026. After backfilling roughly 2,000 positions, that is a net decrease of 28%.

📍 The IT department got hit hardest. 42% of the IRS’s IT staff are gone. That breaks down to 29% (about 2,497 people) who left through separations or workforce reductions, plus another 13% (1,143 employees) who were reassigned to the chief operating officer’s staff under a restructuring.

📍 Frontline tax functions were not spared either. About 33% of revenue agents and 32% of tax examiners separated from the agency. The HR office and small business and self-employed taxpayer services divisions were among the hardest hit on a per capita basis.

📍 The IRS says the IT restructuring was meant to simplify and align technical work with the agency’s core mission. But former IRS leaders and GAO have repeatedly warned that cuts this deep will undercut IT modernization and slow the agency’s ability to maintain the systems millions of taxpayers depend on. The National Taxpayer Advocate has flagged the IT and taxpayer service losses as a serious risk heading into the next filing season.

📍 The throughline worth holding onto. The IRS is simultaneously expanding its use of AI, with many of those use cases dependent on the very IT workforce that just shrank by 42%. You cannot run modern systems, or modernize old ones, without the people who understand them.

The work does not get smaller when the workforce does. It just lands harder on whoever is left.

🌙 Good evening Fam. June 16, 2026.

A major VA bill dropped this week, and both what it contains and how it is being paid for are drawing scrutiny. Here is the breakdown.

📍 Republicans introduced the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, a package of more than 60 bills. Its centerpiece is the Major Richard Star Act, which would grant full military retirement pay to veterans forced to retire early due to a combat injury, along with increased benefits for severely disabled veterans and families of service members who died in the line of duty. The Star Act is genuinely bipartisan, and a discharge petition to force a standalone vote on it sits just five signatures short of the 218 needed.

📍 The controversy is over the offsets. Democrats and veterans groups say the new benefits are paid for by roughly $60 billion in cuts elsewhere, particularly changes to how the VA rates tinnitus and obstructive sleep apnea, conditions common among combat veterans. Rep. Mark Takano called it “a distraction that veterans would pay for,” and the VFW said it opposes the bill as drafted because it asks future disabled veterans to bear the cost of expanding benefits for others.

📍 For the workforce, AFGE flagged two provisions. One would reclassify thousands of VA psychologists from their current hybrid Title 5 / Title 38 status to Title 38 only, which would sharply limit their collective bargaining rights, since Title 38 employees cannot bargain over anything related to “direct patient care.” The other would expand the Veterans Community Care Program, which sends veterans to private-sector providers. Unions have long called community care a vehicle for privatizing VA functions.

📍 AFGE President Everett Kelley, himself a veteran, argued the workforce changes would backfire: “Eliminating these workplace rights and protections will do nothing to improve the delivery of health care services to our nation’s veterans. In fact, it will have the opposite effect because it will directly impair the VA’s ability to recruit and retain quality health care professionals.”

📍 Worth noting fairly: supporters, including House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost, frame the bill as cutting red tape in the disability system and putting veterans “back at the center of VA’s mission.” Reasonable people will weigh the tradeoffs differently. The bill also pushes the VA to bring back telework in some form.

The throughline for this community: a popular bipartisan benefit is now wrapped inside a larger package with benefit cuts and workforce changes attached. Worth watching closely as it moves.

☀️ Good morning Fam!! June 16, 2026. 106 days until end of fiscal year.

The people fighting one of the worst Ebola outbreaks on record are doing it short-staffed and running on empty. This is what that looks like inside the CDC.

📍 The CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, the center responsible for diseases like anthrax and Ebola, is leading the US response to an outbreak that recent CDC analyses suggest could become the worst on record. There are already more than 800 confirmed cases and 180 deaths, concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Domestically, CDC staff are screening for Ebola at several airports.

📍 They are doing it while depleted. The CDC has cut roughly 27% of its staff since fiscal 2024. In an internal all-staff survey of 340 NCEZID employees, half rated their personal workplace morale as “somewhat low” or “very low.” Staffing and budget were the dominant concerns, named in nearly 40% of responses, with fear of further RIFs a close second.

📍 Leadership at the top of the CDC is largely absent. The agency has no permanent director, with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya overseeing it on an interim basis past the legal limit for an acting role. A former center director said more than 80% of CDC center directors are currently acting officials, calling it “a patchwork of absences” that leaves gaps in the disease-detective work the agency exists to do.

📍 And here is the line that captures this whole community. Despite everything, about 90% of surveyed employees said they are proud of the work NCEZID does. One wrote it plainly: “High morale for the nature of the work; low morale for the difficult organizational constraints for doing it.”

📍 Officials expect the response to last another 6 to 12 months. As one division director told staff, it will be “a marathon.” A former CDC leader put the deeper risk bluntly: a public health workforce cannot be rebuilt overnight. “Preparedness depends on people. You can have plans on paper, but without experienced epidemiologists, data teams, field staff, it collapses when it’s most needed.”

That pride in the mission, even under impossible constraints, is the whole story of the federal workforce right now. To the people doing this work: we see you, and we are grateful.

🌙 Good evening Fam. June 15, 2026.

A bill worth knowing about, aimed at a real gap in federal benefits.

📍 A bipartisan bill introduced today, the Comprehensive Paid Leave for Federal Employees Act, would give federal employees 12 weeks of paid leave to deal with a serious illness, either their own or an immediate family member’s. The sponsors are Reps. Don Beyer of Virginia, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania.

📍 Here is the gap it addresses. Back in 2019, Congress gave federal employees paid parental leave, for the birth, adoption, or fostering of a child. But family and medical leave, for your own serious illness or to care for a sick family member, has remained unpaid. You can take the time under FMLA, but you take it without a paycheck.

📍 The sponsors frame it as a recruitment and retention issue. In a labor market where many private employers offer paid medical leave, the absence of it in federal service makes government a harder sell, especially for the early-career talent the government says it wants to attract.

📍 Real talk on the odds. This is a renewed effort, meaning similar bills have been introduced before without becoming law, and it faces an uphill climb in the current budget environment with a pay freeze already on the table. But bipartisan sponsorship is meaningful, and these things often take several Congresses of groundwork before they move.

If paid family and medical leave matters to you, this is a bill to track and one to mention to your representatives.

☀️ Good morning Fam!! June 15, 2026. 107 days until end of fiscal year.

New GAO data puts numbers to something many of you watched happen in real time last year. Probationary employees bore the heaviest losses.

📍 Across the agencies GAO analyzed, probationary employees separated at a 19% rate in 2025, compared to about 15% for federal employees overall. These are the newest hires and the recently promoted, the people with the least protection and often the freshest energy for the mission.

📍 At some agencies the gap was stark. Nearly 42% of USDA’s probationary employees separated, versus 30% of others. At the Energy Department, 34% of probationary employees left compared to 19% overall. Roughly 50,000 early-career individuals were separated leading up to this.

📍 The contradiction is hard to miss. As GAO’s Dawn Locke put it, just three months ago OPM launched an initiative to strengthen the early-career talent pipeline, but the executive orders and guidance leading up to that had already pushed out more than 50,000 early-career people. “It’s a bit difficult to understand the reasoning behind these actions,” she said.

📍 Worth knowing: a federal judge later ruled that OPM had unlawfully directed agencies to fire probationary employees en masse. And the rules have since changed. Probationary employees can now only appeal a termination if they believe it was due to partisan political reasons, marital status, or a failure to follow proper procedures.

📍 The bigger question GAO raises is mission capacity. Federal skills gaps have been on GAO’s High Risk List since 2001. Locke was direct: “It’s hard to imagine that these reductions have not exacerbated the skills gap problem.” Without the required RIF and reorganization plans, even GAO cannot fully measure the damage yet.

The takeaway: the people hit hardest were the future of the workforce. Rebuilding that pipeline will take far longer than it took to dismantle it.

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🔗 federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/06/federal-workforce-losses-had-steeper-impact-on-probationary-employees/

That feeling you get when you forgot it’s a 4 day work week and someone just reminded you.