• The Trump administration told agencies to ignore collective bargaining agreements that interfere with the ability to conduct reductions in force, or RIFs. A new memo from the Office of Personnel Management argues that contracts with federal unions cannot supersede an agency’s ability to lay off its employees. The OPM memo says agency management has the right to determine its number of employees, and make headcount adjustments as needed. The guidance comes just ahead of agencies’ expected RIF plans, which are due to the White House by this Friday.
  (Guidance on collective bargaining in connection with RIFs - Office of Personnel Management)
• A union tells Federal Aviation Administration employees there’s lead contamination in the water at headquarters. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1653 told employees not to drink the water or use it to wash anything they’ll eat or drink from. The union said the FAA recently shared summary test results showing lead contamination. The General Services Administration, which oversees the building, said the water is “safe for all uses.”
  (Union tells FAA employees there's lead in the water at headquarters. GSA says it's ‘safe for all uses' - Federal News Network)
• Another 1,500 employee cases have surged into the Merit Systems Protection Board. The MSPB has seen a flood of adverse action cases from federal employees over the last three weeks. In total, it’s amounted to nearly 5,500 incoming cases. Typically, MSPB receives somewhere between 80 and 100 new cases a week. The major surge comes as thousands of probationary federal employees are turning to the MSPB to appeal their recent terminations. MSPB has also recently granted two stays and temporarily reinstated federal employees at the Department of Agriculture. The board’s decisions give the Office of Special Counsel more time to pursue its investigations of the firings.
  (MSPB Weekly new case report - Merit Systems Protection Board)
• A new memo directs Defense Department contracting officers not to include Equal Employment Opportunity provisions and clauses in new contracts and solicitations. DoD solicitations and contracts will no longer include EEO provisions and clauses, including the prohibition of segregated facilities clause, the affirmative action compliance clause, and the previous contracts and compliance reports clause. Contracting officers are not required to modify contracts that will expire in the next six months and that have no option for extension.
  (DoD drops equal employment opportunity clauses from contracts - Federal News Network)

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• President Donald Trump taps Rich Anderson to be the next assistant secretary of the Air Force. Anderson, who served in the Air Force for three decades, entered politics in 2009. He served in the Virginia House of Delegates for eight years prior to taking the helm of the Virginia Republican Party in 2020. If he is confirmed by the Senate, he will step down from his role as the Virginia GOP chairman that he has held for over four years. The White House announced Anderson’s nomination in an email that included a list of other candidates submitted to the Senate.
  (Trump taps Virginia GOP chair to serve as Air Force assistant secretary - Congress.gov)
• Federal wildland firefighters would see a permanent pay increase, if the House’s stopgap spending bill clears Congress. Federal firefighters received a temporary pay raise a few years ago as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Since then, wildland firefighters have continued to avoid a “pay cliff” through several short-term extensions. The continuing resolution from House Republicans includes a provision to permanently increase the first responders’ pay rates. The National Federation of Federal Employees said a permanent pay fix for federal firefighters is “long overdue.” But the possibility of a government spending agreement is still unclear in the Senate. Lawmakers face a deadline of midnight Friday before a possible government shutdown.
  (Provision on Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act - House Continuing Resolution)
• The Energy Department has another new CIO. Ross Graber, a former executive at Twitter, Google and several other companies, is the new Energy Department chief information officer. Federal News Network has learned Graber took over for Ryan Riedel, who left last week after less than six weeks on the job. This is Graber's first experience in government, having worked in industry for his entire career. Most recently he was the senior director of security engineering at Procore Technologies, a construction management software firm. Graber inherits a $4.2 billion IT budget at Energy with $3.4 billion being spent on operations and maintenance of systems.
  (Energy names another new CIO after quick exit of first appointee - LinkedIn)
• Agencies and vendors have until Saturday to submit comments on what the Office of Science and Technology Policy's new artificial intelligence action plan should address. OSTP is asking for concrete policy actions the Trump administration can take across a number of different areas, including hardware and chips, data centers, energy consumption and efficiency, model development, explainability and assurance of AI model outputs, and much more. The request for information follows President Donald Trump's executive order calling for a new policy for sustaining and enhancing America's AI dominance to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security.
  (AI action plan deadline fast approaching - Federal Register)
• Democrats are pushing a bill that would give Transportation Security Administration employees the right to join a union. The Rights for the TSA Workforce Act would give TSA employees the same rights as other federal employees under Title V of the U.S. code. House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson reintroduced the bill this week after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem cancelled collective bargaining for TSA's airport screening workforce. More than 40,000 transportation security officers were represented by the American Federation of Government Employees. They had just struck an expanded collective bargaining agreement with TSA last May.
  (Rights for the TSA Workforce Act fact sheet - Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.))
• The Department of Homeland Security is ditching multiple federal advisory committees. In a public notice, DHS said it is terminating the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board, the Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council and the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council, along with several other bodies. The notice only said that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem determined that abolishing the committees is in DHS’s best interest. DHS has yet to announce the fate of the Cyber Safety Review Board, which was investigating major hacks into U.S. telecom providers.
  (Notice of termination of discretionary federal advisory committees - Federal Register)
• The Education Department is taking stock of what’s left after laying off nearly half its workforce. The department’s Office for Civil Rights lost nearly half its staff under the mass layoffs. Sheria Smith is the president of AFGE Local 252. She said that means civil rights offices across the country have been eliminated. “The impact that it will have on students with disabilities is that they have eliminated any oversight for those students. They have eliminated services for those students, and not just those students — every other student.” Smith said. The department nearly eliminated its research and statistics office and scrapped an office that supports students learning English as a second language.
  (Education Dept 'dissolved' entire units in mass layoffs. Employees take stock of what's left - Federal News Network)

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