Next Interior Memos weekly digest, 2025-11-06
The shutdown continues, there was an election, the RIF news evolved, and other news of interest to today and Interior’s future.
This week marked both a day of elections that saw many millions of people step up to take action—by voting and having their say about the direction of government. Hooray! We’ve also passed the previous record duration for a federal government shutdown given the lapse of funding, which is harming people. Boo.
This week’s digest covers RIF news summarized again by Tony Irish, then a focus on one issue each for the resource, science and knowledge, and Tribal issues parts of Interior’s mission, plus a few relevant tidbits you may find interesting.
Responding to your feedback about the weekly digest, we’ve added a table of contents to the newsletter, and are being explicit about the link of news items to Interior’s future. One we haven’t gotten to but will work on is how to solicit and share information on additional engagements for folks, especially outside the DC area. Other suggestions for the digest, which is one type of post we do on Next Interior Memos? Feel free to add them here. Interested in other ways to engage? A few options:
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RIF update (Tony)
Last week in the Shutdown RIF litigation, the court imposed on Interior (and other agencies) a Tuesday (11/4) deadline to file “an accounting of any RIFs that have been issued on or after October 1, or that were in preparation at the time of this Court’s [various court orders that spanned October 15 through October 28].” Rather than file such an accounting, on Tuesday Interior instead filed a declaration by the Chief Human Capital Officer that implicitly (though not directly) attempted to justify the lack of an accounting. A key element of the declaration is the statement that “Independent of the October 28, 2025 PI Order, Interior has no plans to, and therefore will not be, issuing RIF notices to any employees during this lapse in appropriations.” This is undoubtedly good news: Interior will not issue any RIFs while the shutdown continues. Nonetheless, the failure to provide the requested accounting is disappointing, both due to the lack of additional advance information regarding RIFs available to the Interior community, and in my view the inconsistencies in Interior’s actions before the court.
The declaration does not expressly state why no accounting was provided. While it attests that no RIFs are imminent as a seeming explanation, this specific court order makes no mention of imminence. Instead, the scope of the order relies on whether RIFs were in preparation within the specified timeline. On October 17 an Interior declaration stated, “Interior had intended on imminently abolishing positions,” and subsequent declarations on October 17 and 20 also discussed imminent RIFs, sufficiently planned that Interior was able to identify 89 covered areas and 2,050 positions to be abolished. The current declaration itself acknowledges these as “certain RIF plans that were in preparation at the agency” (emphasis added). Yet neither Interior nor DOJ make any argument as to why Interior need not provide any other RIF plans that were in preparation at that time, in accordance with the court’s order.