Wednesday’s Federal Register carried a cluster of civil-service actions from the Office of Personnel Management, the most notable of which was a second correction in six weeks to the same reduction-in-force rule the agency finalized this summer.
- Office of Personnel Management — Reduction in Force; Correction (document 2026-18800): OPM corrected its own reduction-in-force and Career Transition Assistance Plan regulations for the second time since the underlying rule took effect on September 2, after finding that an earlier amendatory instruction had accidentally deleted two paragraphs from the definition of a “displaced” employee. Two corrections to the same rule within six weeks is worth a second look, because “displaced” status is what determines which employees keep recall and reassignment rights when a reduction in force hits, so an error there is not merely typographical. Read the correction.
- Office of Personnel Management — Promoting Employee Accountability (document 2026-18943): OPM reopened, for two weeks, the comment period on a proposed rule that would loosen the standards agencies must meet to discipline or remove employees for poor performance or misconduct, a window that had already closed in early August. The reopening is specifically to gather views on new OPM data and on a report from an outside advocacy group called We the Doers, which is an unusual reason to reopen a closed docket and raises the question of why that particular report, rather than the agency’s own review, prompted a fresh round of public input. Read the notice.
- Office of Personnel Management — Shared Certificates and Pooled Hiring Actions (document 2026-18828): OPM issued an interim final rule, effective October 15, letting federal agencies share hiring certificates and applicant pools with each other for jobs common across government. The rule cites a specific 2015 statute that authorizes OPM to skip the normal notice-and-comment process, so the change takes legal effect before the public comment period even closes on November 16, which is the exception rather than the rule for how federal regulations are ordinarily made. Read the rule.
- Office of Personnel Management — Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Optimizing FEHB Plan Offerings (document 2026-18944): OPM asked for public input on whether to lift the regulatory cap limiting FEHB carriers to three plan options, or two options plus a high-deductible plan, a limit currently set out in agency regulation. It is only a request for information rather than a proposed change, but it signals OPM may be building a record to expand its authority over health-plan choices for the federal workforce, the kind of structural question worth flagging well before any formal rule follows. Read the request for information.
- Federal Energy Regulatory Commission / North American Electric Reliability Corporation — Order Approving Reliability Standard CIP-014-4 (document 2026-18868): FERC approved an updated mandatory standard requiring electric transmission owners to reassess, more rigorously and more often, which substations are critical enough that physical damage to them could destabilize the broader grid. The order followed FERC’s standard approval process with no sign of an expedited timeline or dissent, but it is a real tightening of physical-security obligations for the utilities that operate the country’s most sensitive transmission infrastructure. Read the order.
This edition reflects a full screen of all 121 documents published in today’s Federal Register. Excluded as routine: state-by-state SNAP demonstration project notices, antidumping and countervailing duty determinations, self-regulatory organization exchange-rule filings, OMB/PRA information-collection requests, airworthiness directives and airspace amendments, safety zones, advisory-committee and Sunshine Act meeting notices, and foreign-trade zone actions.
Bureaucracy Times 