On September 11, 2026, U.S. District Judge George O'Toole in Boston blocked the Trump administration from asking applicants for nonpartisan federal civil service jobs to write essays explaining how they would help advance the president's policies and executive orders.
The question came from an executive order Trump signed in January 2025 directing the Office of Personnel Management to develop a hiring plan that brought in “only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests.” An OPM memo in May 2025 told the heads of executive agencies to require it. According to the unions' lawyers at Democracy Forward, more than 70,000 federal job postings included it. O'Toole noted it was asked of applicants for jobs ranging from air traffic control specialist to crane operator to nuclear materials courier.
Three unions sued: the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the National Association of Government Employees. They argued the question politicized hiring for career positions by attempting to assess applicants' support for the president. The Civil Service Reform Act bars employment decisions for those jobs based on political affiliation. O'Toole found the unions' members reasonably read the question as an attempt to learn applicants' political views, and that it likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by infringing First Amendment rights. “The plaintiffs are thus likely to succeed in showing that there is no legitimate governmental interest in inquiring into the political beliefs of applicants to federal civil service vacancies,” he wrote.
The administration's defense deserves a fair hearing. OPM has said the question was optional and that it made clear hiring decisions could not be based on political beliefs. The court's answer was that applicants could reasonably understand it otherwise, and that the government has no legitimate interest in asking. “Requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said.
Update (September 29, 2026): the government's compliance report shows the question going away slowly and a new one taking its place. On September 18 the Office of Personnel Management told agencies they “cannot consider candidate responses to the prior Question [Three],” but left about 6,000 job postings that were open on September 11 unchanged, saying removing the question would mean manually deleting and re-releasing each one: “OPM determined that the lower-risk course was to expressly and unequivocably direct agencies not to consider responses to Question Three but to leave the then-open job postings unchanged.” About 2,400 postings have been re-released with a replacement question, which asks applicants for an example of implementing “leadership direction on a strategy or policy decision that differed from your own recommendation.” OPM is also adding a new question asking how an applicant would help the agency “advance those priorities,” with each agency filling in one to three of its own. Jenny Mattingley of the Partnership for Public Service: “Asking vague questions of every candidate goes against OPM's stated goal of promoting skills-based hiring.”