The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and three other unions are asking a California federal court to strike down two Office of Personnel Management (OPM) regulations that expand the agency's power to fire federal workers and reshape how their performance is evaluated.

In August, four unions — AFGE, along with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) — filed suit against OPM in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint challenges two final rules OPM issued in 2026 and asks the court to vacate them under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), arguing the rules are arbitrary, capricious, contrary to law, and exceed the authority Congress delegated to OPM under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA).

The Suitability Rule extends OPM's "suitability and fitness" review — a standard historically applied to screen job applicants before they are hired — to conduct by employees already on the federal payroll. Under the new rule, OPM can independently determine that a current employee is "unsuitable" based on post-appointment conduct and order removal, rather than requiring agencies to use the standard disciplinary process under Chapter 75 of Title 5, which affords employees a right to respond and an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Instead, suitability decisions are appealable only to OPM itself. OPM has projected that roughly half of all employee removals government-wide could shift from the standard disciplinary process to this suitability track.

The performance-ratings rule ends the long-standing practice of rating employees against fixed, objective performance standards. That rule applies to the current appraisal cycle and is addressed in depth in another article in this edition of the Washington Report. In short, the rule caps the share of employees who can receive 5’s and 4’s (such as limits of 10 percent at the highest level and 20 percent at the next). It also removes employees' ability to challenge their ratings through the grievance and arbitration process.

The unions contend the two rules, taken together, make it easier for agencies and OPM to fire employees while narrowing employees' ability to challenge removals or downgraded ratings. AFGE National President Everett Kelley said the rules would let OPM "fire people itself and then review its own decision," calling that outcome inconsistent with the accountability structure Congress built into civil service law. NFFE National President Randy Erwin and AFSCME President Patrick Moran issued similar statements arguing the rules go beyond OPM's legal authority and would make it easier to remove employees without adequate cause.

OPM has defended the suitability expansion as closing what it called an "irrational gap" — the fact that conduct standards long used to screen job applicants had not applied to people once they were hired. The agency has said the ratings overhaul is intended to curb "ratings inflation" and increase accountability across the workforce.

The Northern District of California case is in its early stages, and no hearing date on the unions' request for relief had been reported as of the publication of this article.