professional organizations

Over 70,000 federal job postings have included the loyalty question, compelling applicants to speak about political issues and chilling other applicants’ speech, undermining the merit-based hiring system.

“Requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service, and we are pleased the judge has put an immediate stop to the administration’s loyalty questions. Federal employees should be hired based solely on their ability to perform the job – not their allegiance to any particular administration,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said.

On Thursday, August 27th, an unprecedented coalition of 600+ public, private, and nonprofit-sector organizations representing 5 million Americans, sent an open letter to call on Congress to reject efforts underway through regulation, legislation, and executive action to dismantle one of America’s most successful bipartisan conservation and good-government laws. We asked specifically that Congress:

• Reject the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s proposed regulatory gutting of Section 106.
• Record your opposition during the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ review and the public comment period, now underway.
• Reject statutory changes that weaken Section 106, whether advanced independently or as part of a
  broader permitting package.
• Defend Congress’s constitutional authority against executive efforts to narrow, circumvent, or evade the preservation laws Congress enacted.
• Seek genuine improvements to Section 106 based on facts and data to make review more valuable and efficient without trading away the rights, voices, and protections that make the process meaningful.

Today that coalition has surpassed 700 organizations. Read the full letter here.

SpaceX has requested unusually swift entry into several leading stock market indexes as a condition of its historic stock market debut. But the S&P 500 stock market index representing many of the largest profitable US companies has surprised market analysts by refusing to bend the rules for Elon Musk’s space and AI company.

The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. Modifying the rules in response to SpaceX’s request could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.