Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, LABOR NEWS—AFGE says new OPM performance management rules are illegal, violate contracts, (Jun 25, 2025)

By Jason Albright, J.D.

“Not treating employees with similar violations similarly,” said the union, “opens the door for illegal employment discrimination.”

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) alleged this week that new federal service performance management rules, outlined in a June 17 memorandum to department and agency heads issued by Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Acting Director Charles Ezell, are unlawful and violate the union’s labor contracts with the federal government.

Discipline changes and forced rankings. According to AFGE, the changes, for example, would eliminate the requirement to use progressive discipline to address an employee’s workplace misconduct and ban agencies from using a table of penalties to determine disciplinary actions. They would also allegedly “require agencies to unfairly limit the number of employees rated at the highest performance levels and implement a forced distribution system to align individual performance ratings with overall agency performance.”

“[M]ajor departure.” “These changes are a major departure from how agencies currently assess the performance of their employees and are a violation of our negotiated contracts that stipulate how workers are evaluated and disciplined,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley.

Attempt to “eviscerate” civil service. “This is yet another illegal attempt by this administration,” Kelley continued, “to eviscerate our nation’s civil service and make working conditions so untenable that federal employees will quit – opening the door for them to be replaced with workers subservient to Trump or outsourced entirely.”

According to Kelley, “AFGE is currently evaluating the memorandum and will take all appropriate actions to protect the rights of our members and all federal employees.”

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