OPM's Four Firing Rules Published Today. The 99 Percent Opposition Figure Belongs to One of Them.

The Office of Personnel Management's four final rules published in today's Federal Register, and all four take effect September 2, 2026 [1][2][3][4]. Three of them move federal employee appeals out of the independent Merit Systems Protection Board and into OPM. The fourth rewrites who gets cut in the layoff those appeals would contest.

Correcting our August 1 report. That piece ran under the headline "OPM Just Made Itself the Judge of Its Own Firings. 99% of 1,252 Comments Objected," over a deck describing all four rules. The comment figure in it belongs to one rule. The preamble to Reduction in Force Appeals, 2026-15666, states that "OPM received 1,252 comments during the 30-day public comment period," that "99 percent opposed the proposed regulation," and that "Less than 1 percent of the overall comments were supportive, neutral, or mixed" [1]. Those numbers describe docket OPM-2025-0239 and nothing else. The other three rules ran separate dockets, drew different totals, and disclose no opposition percentage anywhere in the text we pulled today. Our August 2 piece on the same package attributed the figure correctly, to the appeals rule alone. The August 1 headline did not, and a headline is the part that travels.

Here is the count, rule by rule, in each preamble's own words.

Reduction in Force Appeals, 2026-15666, printed at 91 FR 49230 to 49267: "OPM received 1,252 comments during the 30-day public comment period," of which "99 percent opposed the proposed regulation" [1].

Reduction in Force, 2026-15665, at 91 FR 49178: "OPM received 721 unique comments." The preamble records that "Some commenters supported" the change and that "many other commenters objected" [4]. It gives no percentage.

Streamlining Probationary and Trial Period Appeals, 2026-15654, at 91 FR 49072 to 49115: "OPM received 632 comments during the 30-day public comment period" [2]. The preamble describes them as ranging "from ardent support...to categorical rejection" and says many opposed [2]. It gives no percentage.

Suitability Action Appeals, 2026-15650, at 91 FR 49034 to 49069: "OPM received 343 comments during the 30-day public comment period from multiple individuals and multiple labor organizations," characterized as "mixed, with some expressing support, others expressing opposition, and many...outside the scope" [3]. It gives no percentage.

The four dockets total 2,948 comments. OPM published an opposition percentage for 1,252 of them, roughly 42 percent of the volume, and for none of the other 1,696.

A tally that does not close. The probationary rule reports 632 comments received, then accounts for them: "618 were posted, and 2 were not posted because they contained threats to the President and members of the Administration or contained sensitive personally identifiable information from commenters" [2]. 618 plus 2 is 620. Twelve comments are missing from that reconciliation, and the preamble text we pulled offers no explanation for where they went. Duplicate and withdrawn submissions are the ordinary reasons a received count runs ahead of a posted count; OPM does not say that is what happened here. We are printing the gap rather than closing it. Our August 2 examination of the appeals rule found that its posting tally reconciles exactly, 1,251 posted plus one withheld against 1,252 received, which is the same arithmetic the probationary rule leaves open.

Thirty days for the appeals, sixty for the layoff. Three of the four rules ran 30-day comment periods, each preamble using that phrase [1][2][3]. The exception is 2026-15665, the rule that rewrites retention itself, which collected its 721 comments over 60 days [4]. The three rules deciding who hears a fired federal worker's appeal got half the public comment window of the one rule deciding whether the worker is cut at all.

What the rules do is close to how we described it. The suitability rule states that "OPM will replace the [MSPB] as the adjudicative agency for such appeals," and builds separation of functions and administrative law judge review into the OPM process [3]. The probationary rule implements an executive order that, in the preamble's account, "rendered the prior procedures for appealing such actions to the [MSPB] inoperative," and replaces them with an OPM appeal confined to claims of "discrimination based on partisan political reasons, marital status, or an agency's failure to follow procedures for terminations based upon pre-appointment reasons" [2]. Discrimination claims of the kind the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission handles can no longer be attached to that appeal [2]. The reduction-in-force appeals rule sends furloughs of more than 30 days, separations and RIF-based demotions to OPM's Merit System Accountability and Compliance office in a record-based process requiring "production of the complete agency record," with EEOC and Office of Special Counsel remedies preserved on separate tracks [1].

The fourth rule supplies the scoring that decides who is cut. Employees are ranked on performance credit rather than tenure alone, on separate retention registers for the competitive and excepted services, augmented by veterans' preference, with the preamble's own example assigning "7 for Level 5, 5 for Level 4, 3 for Level 3" [4]. The definition of a competing employee narrows: probationary and trial-period employees, temporary employees of a year or less, and Schedule C and Schedule G appointees are outside it [4]. Reemployment priority lists and the two transition assistance programs, CTAP and ICTAP, are updated [4].

Who is caught. All four rules run forward only. The probationary rule states that "Covered actions...effected before the effective date of this rule are not governed by this final rule" [2]. The suitability rule "does not apply to appeals filed with the MSPB before the effective date" [3]. The appeals rule reaches reduction-in-force actions for which an agency issues notice on or after September 2, 2026 [1]. Agencies that issued a RIF notice before the effective date process it under the prior retention rules [4]. A federal employee whose notice is dated September 1 keeps the Merit Systems Protection Board. A colleague down the hall whose notice is dated September 2 does not.

One provision we looked for and did not locate in any of the four texts is a severability clause, the language that tells a court whether the rest of a rule stands if part of it falls. Two of these documents run 36 and 44 pages, and our pass through the preambles was tool-assisted rather than line by line. Not found is not the same as not there, and we are publishing it as the first word on the question rather than the last.

On September 2 the appeal a federal employee files against a layoff goes to OPM, the agency that wrote the rule the layoff runs on. The 1,252 people who put an objection in writing did so on one rule out of the four.