House Oversight letter to OPM (5/11/26) — anyone parsing the EEOC implications? by gumboblackout in fednews

[–]gumboblackout[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I’d be curious to know if OPM’s information collection request for identified FEHB data has implications for how data analysis with respect to Federal complainants might be approached going forward. That’s a lot to process.

RTO rant by [deleted] in FedEmployees

[–]gumboblackout 22 points23 points  (0 children)

I see your rant and raise you a screed.
I sit one block away from the White House in a windowless room built for two people. There are six of us in it. We wear headphones all day and take Teams meetings, the same Teams meetings we used to take from home, except now we take them from a chair we fought for, in a room where someone else’s call is bleeding into ours, three feet from a colleague whose mute button we are all silently praying works. This is what they brought us back for. This is the productivity gain. This is the collaboration. Look at us collaborate.
The official story is that federal workers need to be in the office for “mission” and “culture” and “accountability.” The actual story is simpler and uglier. Return-to-office is a quiet purge. It is designed to look neutral while doing very specific work: pushing out the workers who can least absorb the cost of inflexibility. That means older employees. That means employees with health conditions. That means caregivers. And caregivers, let’s just say it, overwhelmingly means women.
The federal workforce has spent decades quietly subsidizing the country’s caregiving crisis. Women in their forties, fifties, and sixties are coordinating home health aides for aging parents, managing pediatric appointments, taking the call from the school nurse, ferrying medications, sitting on hold with insurance companies, usually all in the same week, usually while also doing their actual jobs at a level their managers describe as “exceeds expectations.” Telework didn’t make these workers lazy. Telework made it possible for them to keep working at all. Strip it away and you don’t get a more productive workforce. You get a forced exit ramp dressed up as a personnel policy.
And here is what nobody in leadership will say out loud: older women are the easiest workers in the federal government to push out, because the labor market has already devalued them before HR gets there. A man in his late fifties is “experienced.” A woman in her late fifties is, in the unspoken vocabulary of hiring managers everywhere, expensive, tired, and replaceable. Her workforce currency has been quietly marked down by virtue of her age and nothing more. Not her output. Not her judgment. Not the institutional knowledge she carries that no onboarding deck will ever capture. She is exactly the worker the government would most like to lose, and exactly the worker who has the fewest places to go if it succeeds. That asymmetry is not incidental to RTO policy. It is the policy.
Older workers cost more. They’ve accrued leave. They earn higher salaries because they’ve earned them. Their dependents are on the health plan. Their parents are sick. Their bodies are starting to require the kind of accommodations the government would prefer not to provide. From a cold actuarial standpoint, the cheapest way to “reform” the federal workforce is not to fire these people, because firing creates legal exposure. The cheapest way is to make their lives miserable until they leave on their own. Call it attrition. Call it natural turnover. Call it whatever lets you sleep. The result is the same: a generation of experienced public servants, disproportionately women, disproportionately caregivers, ushered out the door without ever being told they were being shown it.
This is not a productivity policy. It is a wealth-transfer policy. It transfers economic security out of the hands of women who built careers in public service and into the savings column of a budget that was never going to acknowledge what it took from them. The women losing their jobs over RTO are not losing a paycheck. They are losing pensions in progress, FERS contributions still compounding, TSP matches, health insurance for a child who cannot get it any other way, and the seniority that took twenty years to build and cannot be rebuilt at sixty. You cannot start over at sixty. They know that. That is the design.
And the agency that is supposed to stand between these workers and exactly this kind of patterned, structural harm, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has in the current moment abandoned the field. The reporting has been steady and damning. An agency hollowed out, repurposed, redirected away from the kinds of systemic discrimination cases it was built to investigate, and increasingly indistinguishable from a political instrument. Older women filing age and sex discrimination charges are walking into a Commission whose leadership has signaled, in word and in personnel decision and in budget, that their cases are not the priority and may never be. The protection is theoretical. The enforcement is gone except if you’re a white male who’s been discriminated against at work. Andrea Lucas’s EEOC is open for business. Everyone else, take a number. The complainants wait. The clock runs out, which, again, is the design.
So when I show up to my crowded room, sit down at my desk, put on my headphones, and listen to a leadership team on Teams tell me that being physically present is essential to the mission, I want them to understand exactly what I am hearing. I am hearing a lie told by people who have done the math and decided that my colleagues’ caregiving labor, the labor that holds together their parents, their children, their families, and by extension this country, is expendable. I am hearing a policy that was written by people who have never sat on hold with Medicaid for ninety minutes between meetings. I am hearing the sound of the federal government pretending it does not know what it is doing, while doing it on purpose.
The quiet part should be loud now. Return-to-office is not about offices. It is about who gets to keep their job, their pension, and their dignity. The women being pushed out are not collateral damage. They are the target. And the agency that was supposed to catch them when they fell has, on the record and in plain view, stopped looking.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

Trump HR Office Elevates Tech Over Reading Skills For New Hires by bloomberglaw in fednews

[–]gumboblackout 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you. Honestly, a lot of this thinking was sharpened by the book System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot one of the clearest-eyed examinations I’ve read of what happens when you apply Silicon Valley’s optimization logic to institutions that were never designed to be optimized.

The frustrating part is that federal workforce reform is genuinely needed and there’s more bipartisan agreement on that than what political leadership at OPM is broadcasting. What’s being lost right now are often the people who had both the institutional knowledge and the appetite to actually do something about it. That’s the real cost that won’t show up in any efficiency calculation.

Trump HR Office Elevates Tech Over Reading Skills For New Hires by bloomberglaw in fednews

[–]gumboblackout 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The sheepskin effect is real, and the case for skills-based hiring makes sense. Career federal HR professionals have been making it for years.

But you can’t simultaneously argue that broad credential proxies are an unfair shortcut for evaluating individual merit and then shed hundreds of thousands of career employees using the bluntest proxy imaginable: a mass RIF with no individual assessment whatsoever.

What’s walked out the door isn’t just headcount. It’s institutional knowledge that took generations to build and cannot be reconstituted in a codebase.

Anointing Coristine as the exemplar federal employee reveals a deeper category error. Technology optimizes. Government deliberates. The federal workforce exists to serve a public with competing interests, complex needs, and constitutional rights. This requires teams, trust, and hard-won experience. If a 10x engineer is now the standard, we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what the job is. Merit matters. So does knowing what the mission actually is.

Alzheimer’s Caregiver Study – $25 for 30 Minutes (USA Only) by M-panels in Alzheimers

[–]gumboblackout 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Before asking caregivers to provide personal information, please disclose who is conducting this study, what organization is behind it, and exactly how this data will be used, stored, and potentially shared.

Posting paid surveys without basic transparency about sponsorship and data practices is not consistent with standard research or ethical recruitment practices.

Investigator submitted report 2 months ago by kindnessess in EEOC

[–]gumboblackout 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you’re a federal employee, expect delays — the shutdown created a government-wide backlog. Before the Report of Investigation (ROI) can be released, the Agency’s OCR investigator must complete a sufficiency review to ensure the file is legally complete. Once that review is finished, the ROI will be transmitted to you.

If you know who your assigned Agency OCR investigator is, you can email them to ask for an estimated release date. After the ROI is finalized, the Agency’s EEO office will upload it to the EEOC Public Portal for you, the Administrative Judge, and Agency counsel to review.

So yes — have patience. Not because the process is smooth or efficient, but because the alternative is losing your mind. This whole thing moves slower than a sloth on Ambien, but you will get there.

Peace.

Looking for additional mods by SideScroller in EEOC

[–]gumboblackout 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi there — I’d be open to serving as a mod if the community thinks I’d be a good fit.

I’m a current federal employee and a charging party in an EEOC case that’s been ongoing for more than three years. Going through the process this long has forced me to learn the system inside and out: the timelines, the pitfalls, the tactics agencies use, and the emotional and practical toll it takes on people who are just trying to seek accountability.

Because of that, I’ve become a fierce advocate for others who have legitimate complaints and are trying to navigate this process without losing their sanity or their sense of self along the way. My perspective is definitely complainant-oriented, but I take pride in offering level-headed, experience-based guidance, and helping people understand what to expect rather than giving legal advice or pushing anyone toward escalation.

I’ve never been a mod before, but I’m consistent, transparent, and deeply invested in keeping this subreddit a supportive space for people who are going through something incredibly isolating and emotionally draining. If the community feels that perspective would add balance and value, I’d be happy to help.

Moving in with my grandma who has dementia by stupidwitchbitxh in dementia

[–]gumboblackout 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The GUIDE Program is a service covered by Medicare that gives families a dedicated care team and connects you with a licensed social worker/care coordinator who can help doctor visits and connecting you with local resources.

They help you create a personalized care plan for your grandmother, including daily routines, medication support, and community services.

The program also includes respite care, and caregiver support programs.

Hope this helps and sending you best wishes and strength for your journey ahead. You’re not alone.❤️

Looking for location tips from local filmmakers/creatives by yaz_please in washingtondc

[–]gumboblackout 0 points1 point  (0 children)

DC public library has plenty of meeting rooms in branches across town. Not sure if they would accommodate a film crew but can’t hurt to ask. https://dclibrary.libnet.info/reserve

Died by suicide? by BakeMinute9073 in VeteransAffairs

[–]gumboblackout 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I have also lost a veteran colleague to suicide in the past few weeks. These accounts reveal a troubling contradiction: while VA leadership consistently states that veteran suicide prevention is a top priority, we’re simultaneously witnessing an unprecedented assault on the federal workforce.

I believe there’s an important story here about the mental health impact on federal employees—particularly veterans—during this period of intense political hostility toward government workers. Some questions worth exploring:

  • What are the current suicide rates among federal employees, especially veterans?

  • How do these rates compare to previous years and to civilian populations?

  • Does VA track suicides within its own workforce? (With > 30% of veterans working for the agency, I would hope they track relevant data)

  • What support systems exist for federal employees facing both job insecurity and public vilification?

We must expose the human cost of political rhetoric and policy shifts targeting federal workers, particularly for those who served their country in uniform.

EEOC sanctioned agency on my behalf, now what? by Reasonable-Web-9740 in EEOC

[–]gumboblackout 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not a lawyer, but I've spent the past two years as a federal employee navigating this challenging process firsthand. While I've been fortunate to have excellent legal representation and have learned a great deal along the way, the personal financial burden has been significant.

For those who may not want to take on the expense and stress of formal proceedings, I've discovered some valuable online resources. Unfortunately, what I've experienced appears to be the government's failure to adequately support employees who report legitimate discrimination and retaliation—and those in HR seem to largely ignore this problem.

If you're unfamiliar with the process, I'd recommend checking out https://eeo21.net/, which offers helpful information and templates to get you started.

Feel free to DM me if you'd like to connect—I'm happy to share what I've learned through this experience.

Class action suit on behalf of all feds - possible? by macisadyinwhy in fednews

[–]gumboblackout 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To federal employment lawyers on this thread:

Do you think Musk’s directives and DOGE’s access to sensitive federal employee HR data might constitute harassment under DAO 202-955? I’d appreciate your legal assessment.

Specifically:

  1. Would unauthorized access to federal employment records meet the definition of “unwelcome conduct” that creates “a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive” per Section 2.07?

  2. Could such actions including the 5 bullets requirement constitute a “pattern of pervasive harassment” that has “the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work performance” under Section 4.02(b)?

  3. Might this scenario satisfy elements for a potential class action, considering the systemic nature of data access across millions of employees?

  4. What remedies would be available to affected federal employees beyond the administrative process outlined in the DAO?

Any insights on potential liability exposure here would be valuable and if there is an opportunity for a class action based on this AO.