Government Accountability Project v. United States Office of Personnel Management

On June 24, 2026, Protect Democracy and Selendy Gay PLLC filed an Amended Complaint in their lawsuit on behalf of the Government Accountability Project and the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE) challenging the creation and implementation of Schedule Policy/Career (Schedule P/C) in the federal civil service.

Schedule P/C strips career civil servants of the job protections that Congress established to ensure that America has a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service hired and retained based on the ability to best serve the American people. Schedule P/C would make it easier to gut the nonpartisan, merit-based career federal civil service and replace it with partisans.

Schedule P/C would allow the administration to politicize the career federal workforce by enabling the firing of employees who the administration believes don’t sufficiently support President Trump and replacing them with political supporters. This scheme harms both federal employees and the public they serve by depriving Americans of a workforce with the expertise to deliver essential goods and services.

Background

Background

The lawsuit was originally filed on February 6, 2025, challenging the creation of Schedule P/C. The Amended Complaint updates the allegations in the lawsuit to challenge subsequent actions the administration has taken to implement Schedule P/C, including the issuance of a regulation by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and an Executive Order moving approximately 8,000 civil service positions to Schedule P/C.

The lawsuit asks a federal court to require the Trump Administration to follow the law and to find that the executive branch cannot simply ignore Congress’s duly-passed laws to convert the meritocratic civil service into a spoils system for political supporters. The lawsuit argues that the creation of Schedule P/C violates the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978, which provides job protections to career federal employees and limits at-will employment to political appointees. The President and OPM are thereby violating the power of Congress to establish and regulate the civil service system to protect the public interest in ensuring Americans have a federal workforce grounded in merit and free from corruption, political bias, and improper influences.

The lawsuit also argues that stripping current federal employees of their employment protections violates due process, and that the regulation that OPM issued to implement Schedule P/C is arbitrary and capricious.

Plaintiffs

Plaintiffs

• Government Accountability Project
  • The Government Accountability Project was founded in 1977, in the wake of Daniel Ellsberg’s landmark release of the Pentagon Papers. After Ellsberg experienced fierce retaliation from the Nixon administration, it was clear something needed to be done to not only protect brave truth-tellers from government and corporate smear campaigns, but to combat rampant disinformation being foisted on the public by special interests. Since then, the Government Accountability Project has been instrumental in holding institutions accountable and defending the public good.
• National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association
  • Since its founding in 1921, NARFE has been the only organization solely dedicated to the general welfare of all federal workers and retirees. For more than a century, NARFE has been a trusted source of knowledge, working to defend the nation’s civil servants so that they can focus on providing goods and services for the American people.

Defendants

Defendants

• United States Office of Personnel Management
• Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management
• Donald J. Trump, President of the United States
• United States of America

Case Documents

Case Documents