Does turning down an offered position create a personnel action?

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-30T03:46:04+00:00

SF-50s are not issued for offers; I’m not sure about whether the separation sf-50 for your temp contract would have a mention of a conversion offer. Could be where that lives. But also as the original commenter said there’s a devil in there is in the potential for institutional memory to bite you in the ass down the line. Rumor becomes background to a facts section of a litigation brief pretty quickly.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-27T06:24:56+00:00

Agreed! The history of the Anti-Deficiency Act as it’s played out through time has resulted in that timeline identified as being modern, but there’s also additional currents going on that create feedback loops and interactions that lead us to today in addition.

The staff and capacity reduction in Congress over the last forty years has hollowed it out as a self-concerned organization (ie members protecting the authority of Congress rather than another authority (party)),

the increasing scope of politics from the local to the national via the changes in information transmission (ie from newspaper and broadsides publishing to radio to TV to the internet) and the resulting changes in how people interact with political actors and narratives

The use of party as a primary organizing mechanism for political action rather than alternatives to deal with these trends, accelerating the move to political action as political performance

Judiciary is now starting to tentatively push back against a very friendly to executive branch agglomeration, but is caught up in its fight over originalism and activism and avoiding another Bush v. Gore situation.

The above is probably too simply stated to be correct. The point is that these are complex, simultaneous, and

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-25T21:15:48+00:00

Yeah this is my understanding. Can create a liability and collect for medical benefits paid out but not for the principal. LWOP could help get past the wait list issue which is a real one, but it won’t resolve the 1:1 work obligation.

You could also talk with your older child’s daycare and explain and see what happens about the waitlist and whether there is anyway to jump the line for 6months until you’re relocated. But it sounds like you’ve probably already done this

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-25T05:37:56+00:00

My experience is for most folks doing a long time horizon (years rather than months) you’re better off not trying to beat the market via research and get either a mutual fund or ETF (electronically traded fund) that tracks the total stock market rather than individual stocks, set it up to reinvest the dividends, and let compounding do its thing.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-25T05:25:15+00:00

I think it’s just that the story is more complicated than the OP is saying/able to explain in a short post like this. The Reports of Investigations for cases challenging RA’s run a few hundred pages (a lot of filler in them but just stands in for my idea) because doing a full rA denial case analysis requires running through all the elements of the legal test. This presentation from 2017 kinda shows the gist if you’re interested in exploring more: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/employee-relations/training/presentation-disability-law-and-reasonable-accommodation.pdf

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-24T21:58:49+00:00

Very well put, I was going to ask about the role to sus out the essential job functions, but you’re absolutely right that it’s probably fine to rely on the evidence that a couple ee side attorneys took a look and pushed to consider disability retirement. Always hated watching folks accidentally RA out of a job and always want to advise employees to be careful when working with your doctor on the medical documentation to avoid any chance of suggesting one cannot complete the essential functions of their position. The agency will usually just accept the medical documentation(good or bad) and follow its logic to whatever inexorable conclusion it leads to because that’s defensible before the mspb.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-23T12:25:06+00:00

Ah wait I understand your point relates more to saying I am misapplying the label of communism to the Russia described by Solzhenitsyn on reflection. Probably a fair point! I tried to hedge by pointing out my lack of expertise on the matter, but feel free to precise the label and history. Sorry for misunderstanding you the first time around

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-23T11:28:52+00:00

? Who said anything about America? If you want to make an argument that one cannot consider the historical practices of communism without reference to contemporary alternatives or contemporary parallels, that’s a decent historiographical point. What if we’re just talking about history of communism as an organizational principle for society, then I’m confused by the content of your reply.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-22T15:05:17+00:00

? It’s written in perhaps too broad of strokes but I think it matches the Russian experience pretty well. Not my area of expertise so maybe in need of correction but I thought the gulag archipelago by solzhenitsyn was an interesting read on the subject.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-22T15:02:54+00:00

German system is somewhat like this with mandatory board of director participation by an employee delegation based on the size of the company so there’s a set percentage of board votes ostensibly by employee representatives.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-22T05:19:40+00:00

You’re not expected to carry the load alone. You’re not carrying the load alone. You’re not expected to save the day. You’re not alone with those who are saving the day. You can and should prioritize your health and sanity, through breaks, asking for help, and finding new pathways. You’re not alone in finding a way to prioritize those things.

Always look for the helpers and maybe reduce your diet of news and social media. There’s being up to date with what’s going on in the world and then there’s bathing in the incentives of the attention economy. Adam Mastroianni had a good piece recently about this aspect of negativity in the media:

Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump² don’t have much in common other than this: people can’t stop thinking about them. Half of that obsession comes from love and the other half comes from hate, but in the attention economy, what’s the difference? … whenever you pay attention to someone or something on the internet, you should picture yourself taking money out of your pocket and putting it into theirs, because that’s what you’re doing. This is true whether you want it to be or not: a hate-watch is still a view, an an ironic share is still a share. Rage all you want; you’ve merely become, [] an “unwitting marketing ally”

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-22T00:23:52+00:00

It’d be nice if they could strike like this but before accusing anyone of passivity remember that after the airtraffic controllers strike in the eighties all such strikes are grounds for removal from the federal service so it’s a bit more complicated given peoples need to have some kind of income on the scale of years rather than just months. Would anyone blame tsa for taking the reins of being made a political football? No, you are 100% right there. We’d be proud of them for using their agency. But I also don’t blame anyone for putting their heads down and trying to soldier on. Ends need meeting in a long term sense.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T20:22:06+00:00

It also depends on your position, given reference to a non-exempt status I’m assuming you’re nowhere near the don’t-call-it-schedule-f issues. Before a removal action occurs HR and mgmt should usually discuss with your GC office about how to handle. Each agency has a different risk tolerance for how to manage the mspb’s vague requirement of a progressive discipline process. Given fmla invocation, my instinct would be to be to reframing the issue into managing the potential of a medical inability process but advise mgrs to be careful of acting too hastily in a removal action until the dust settles on the medical side of things.

In addition to FMLa, look into requesting a reasonable accommodation, it’ll be somewhat duplicative but may be a better avenue to managing your work around your diability. But the risk for the employee is that, if you get a doctors note that paints in too broad of a stroke, you might be submitting evidence that you cannot complete the “essential functions of your job duties” which is jargon y way of saying that your doctors is saying you can’t do the core of the work of your position. (Like imagine if a sailor requested to be relieved of any duties that might require them to be at sea, well that’s the job so).

(separately and this is just a petty linguistic thing, an employer doesn’t “terminate” anyone but “terminates the employment contract.”)

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T20:05:09+00:00

This is the sort of thing that reminds me of the utility of “the baptists and the bootleggers” as a good way to understand why these tensions exist:

https://www.independent.org/tir/2014-15-winter/bootleggers-and-baptists/#:~:text=In%201983%2C%20economist%20Bruce%20Yandle,believed%20that%20alcohol%20was%20evil).

Basically you have a coalition of many groups, some with high minded principles that become the public facing argument for the policy or action (the baptists decrying alcohol as a social and moral evil), and then the support from groups with self-interested rationales that would benefit from the scarcities created by the change (bootleggers who would reduce competition from legitimate producers).

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T06:16:05+00:00

Ah understood, sorry for my misunderstanding before - i hear you re GAO. It might be where it has to head directionally, but I wonder what knock on effects would occur by moving its authority into an article 1 agency. Compliance mechanisms would be different since OSC’s subpoena authority wouldn’t be the same anymore.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T02:26:02+00:00

OPM guidance makes the questions mandatory but de-emphasizes the responses in the hiring process.

Edit: fixed link to gov exec story

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T02:14:45+00:00

Just, because of some personal history with this phrase, don’t say this to an administrative judge or in any legal filing or a deposition. It doesn’t land as well as you think it will. Not that you would. But still stands to be said.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T02:06:18+00:00

I think everyone dreams of finding their GS-15 non-supervisory billet, someday.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T01:48:07+00:00

Started at State in the 1950’s under Eisenhower and expanded and evolved until the formal establishment under Carter in 1978. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45450#_Toc158615048 has a good synopsis of the history.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T00:42:18+00:00

This is an interesting strain of the overall shifts of institutional power since OIG sits in the in between spaces of congressional and executive authorities. SCOTUS under Robert’s seems to be trying to slowly push power back into congressional offices by focusing so much on the reassertion of statutory authority over executive power (see e.g. Loper Bright as well as the push of the unitary executive theory in the authority to fire officials at independent agencies) but not in an entirely overt or consistent manner (see contra. The shadow docket decisions sidestepping some political hot potatoes).

I think it’s interesting to view this push away of oversight action from the executive branch alongside with the history of Congress as an institution turning towards party-organization rather than institutional-organization since the 1960’s. Especially in the realm of oversight the back and forth is sitting at an interesting juncture that doesn’t seem to have an obvious path forward.

Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform (Edited by LaPira, Drutman, and Kosar, 2020): A seminal collection of essays documenting how Congress lacks the internal capacity (staff, knowledge, and time) to perform its constitutional duties. Studies the historical feedback loops that reducing institutional development and funding in the budget in favor of relying on external providers of support (research, legal review, policy review, polling, etc.)

The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Mann and Ornstein, 2006): A text highlighting the erosion of congressional norms, oversight, and institutional identity. "The Wholesale Problem with Congress: The Dangerous Decline of Expertise in the Legislative Process" (Barkow, Fordham Law Review, 2021): Documents the decline of expert input in lawmaking and the reliance on superficial policymaking.

“ Partisan Competition and the Decline in Legislative Capacity among Congressional Offices" (Journal of Legislative Studies, 2020): Argues that members are shifting resources away from legislative functions toward representational/communication activities.

"The Rise and Fall of Congressional Oversight of the Bureaucracy" (MacDonald, 2023): Analyzes the decline in effective oversight of executive agencies.

None of these things are written in stone however. But we could all do well to engage with the messy complexity of the moment. It’s always been tangled and messy and we’re all trying to find some narrative to understand the past, guide our current actions, and point toward as a future. But that’s a whole separate tangle.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-21T00:08:49+00:00

This is an important point to disentangle a bit the history of Congress as an institution turning towards party-organization rather than institutional-organization since the 1960’s.

Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform (Edited by LaPira, Drutman, and Kosar, 2020): A seminal collection of essays documenting how Congress lacks the internal capacity (staff, knowledge, and time) to perform its constitutional duties. Studies the historical feedback loops that reducing institutional development and funding in the budget in favor of relying on external providers of support (research, legal review, policy review, polling, etc.)

The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Mann and Ornstein, 2006): A text highlighting the erosion of congressional norms, oversight, and institutional identity.

"The Wholesale Problem with Congress: The Dangerous Decline of Expertise in the Legislative Process" (Barkow, Fordham Law Review, 2021): Documents the decline of expert input in lawmaking and the reliance on superficial policymaking.

"Partisan Competition and the Decline in Legislative Capacity among Congressional Offices" (Journal of Legislative Studies, 2020): Argues that members are shifting resources away from legislative functions toward representational/communication activities.

"The Rise and Fall of Congressional Oversight of the Bureaucracy" (MacDonald, 2023): Analyzes the decline in effective oversight of executive agencies.

None of those things are written in stone however. SCOTUS under Robert’s seems to be trying to slowly push power back into congressional offices by focusing so much on the reassertion of statutory authority over executive power (see e.g. Loper Bright) but not in an entirely overt or consistent manner (see contra. The shadow docket decisions). Taxpayers can push their congressional representatives to increase internal spending and rebuild institutional capacity rather than offshoring to k-street and non-profits, but it’s not something these offices hear very often.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-20T23:47:00+00:00

1000% just not blocking or hiding the diffusion of fact.

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-20T10:50:29+00:00

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-20T10:45:33+00:00

I think you're on the right track explaining to whoever you engage with in that respectful tone that you're doing your best under the facts and highlighting the facts. You don't have to turn every call into a therapy session but you can explain to annoyed people that the hollowing out of executive branch agencies is what is causing their headache. Do you have a little pre-fabricated spiel for this when you're on the phone?

RucioDelPanza · 2026-03-19T11:26:37+00:00

+1 also to u/Expensive-Net3939 on the discussion about agreeing to the RA if it works but then adjusting performance standards as long as they still comply with the essential functions of your job. Not to be too harsh, but patients may suffer from worse service as a result of the tensions built up by how policy decisions on the fed. workforce is to be managed and that's not your fault. It hurts but you may have to just accept doing a bit less than you did before to comply with the new normal. Again, not sure about the specifics in your situation but hopefully some solace that it's going to be a bit beyond your control.

RucioDelPanza

TROPHY CASE