Project 2025's Civil Service 'Reform' at DOD: Gutting the Appeals Infrastructure That Protects Whistleblowers and Oversight Analysts
Project 2025 proposes consolidating or eliminating the MSPB, EEOC, OSC, and FLRA appeals processes under the banner of managerial efficiency — but inside the DOD and the intelligence community, these are precisely the forums that protect analysts and auditors who report waste, fraud, politicized assessments, and illegal orders. Stripping multi-forum appeal rights removes the structural redundancy that makes whistleblower retaliation costly for agencies and survivable for the individuals who blow the whistle.
Project 2025 frames the federal employee appeals system as bureaucratic obstruction — a thicket of forums (MSPB, EEOC, FLRA, OSC) that rational managers must navigate before removing poor performers. The proposed fix is to fold the EEOC's federal-sector function into the MSPB, return OSC investigatory functions to OPM, and limit FLRA jurisdiction. Presented as administrative tidying, this restructuring would in practice collapse the redundant architecture that Congress deliberately built after the Church Committee (1975–76) revealed that the national security state had systematically retaliated against employees who disclosed abuses — from COINTELPRO to warrantless surveillance. Multiple forums are not an accident of bureaucratic drift; they are a design feature.
Inside the DOD and the intelligence community, the OSC and MSPB are the primary external forums available to employees who allege retaliation for protected disclosures under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act and related statutes. The proposal to 'return many of the OSC's investigatory functions to OPM' is especially telling: OPM reports to the President, meaning the investigatory body for retaliation claims would be housed inside the very executive hierarchy capable of ordering the retaliation. That is not reform — it is conflict of interest institutionalized. The Costs of War Project at Brown University has documented how a decade of post-9/11 contracting fraud and strategic failure persisted in part because internal dissent was suppressed; the intelligence analysts who correctly assessed Iraqi WMD evidence before 2003 were sidelined precisely because no credible retaliation-cost existed for the officials who sidelined them.
The document also targets what it calls 'forum shopping,' treating the ability of an employee to bring the same discrimination or retaliation claim to more than one forum as an abuse. But forum shopping is the functional equivalent of appellate review in a system where each agency has its own institutional culture, leadership, and susceptibility to political pressure. A DOD analyst retaliated against for challenging a classified cost overrun estimate — the kind of classification abuse FAS's Secrecy News has documented repeatedly, including classifying the intelligence community's own security costs — needs the option to escalate if the first forum is captured or backlogged. The MSPB itself lacked quorum from 2017 to 2022, producing a backlog of approximately 3,000 cases by Project 2025's own admission. Consolidating all adverse-action review into that same body, while reducing parallel forums, concentrates risk in a single point of failure.
The accountability-grounded reform is the opposite of what Project 2025 proposes: fully staff and fund all four forums, enact mandatory timelines for OSC whistleblower investigations, extend ICWPA protections to cover the large contractor workforce that performs substantial intelligence and defense work, and prohibit OPM from receiving OSC investigatory functions for any case involving a national security agency. Civilian control of the military depends on civilians inside those institutions being able to report wrongdoing without career destruction. Weakening the appeals infrastructure is not a management efficiency measure — it is a force-multiplier for the kind of intelligence politicization that produces strategic disasters.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 4: Department of Defense (pp 108-109)"— 75 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy Making the Appeals Process Work. The nonmilitary government dismissal rate is well below 1 percent, and no private-sector industry employee enjoys the job security that a federal employee enjoys. Both safety and justice demand that managers learn to act strategically to hire good and fire poor performers legally. The initial paperwork required to separate poor or abusive performers (when they are infrequently identified) is not overwhelming, and managers might be motivated to act if it were not for the appeals and enforcement processes. Formal appeal in the private sector is mostly a rather simple two-step process, but government unions and associations have been able to convince politicians to support a multiple and extensive appeals and enforcement process. As noted, there are multiple administrative appeals bodies. The FLRA, OSC, and EEOC have relatively narrow jurisdictions. Claims that an employee’s removal or disciplinary actions violate the terms of a collective bargaining agreement between an agency and a union are handled by the FLRA, employees who claim their removal was the result of discriminatio…"