The Office of Personnel Management published four final rules in the Federal Register on Monday, in a single issue, all of them effective on 2 September. Together they rewrite how federal employees contest being laid off, being fired in a probationary period, and being found unsuitable for a job.

Two of them move the forum. Reduction in Force Appeals and Suitability Action Appeals each contain the same sentence: "OPM will replace the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) as the adjudicative agency." The board is the independent quasi-judicial body created after the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 to hear federal employees’ appeals; under these rules those cases will be decided by OPM instead.

The proposals behind them were open for public comment from 10 February to 12 March and from 6 February to 9 March — 30 and 31 days. The fourth rule, Reduction in Force, which rewrites retention standing and layoff procedure but says of itself that it "concerns retention standing and related RIF procedures, not the full scope of RIF appeal rights", was open from 5 March to 4 May: 60 days.

The third rule sits between them. Streamlining Probationary and Trial Period Appeals had a 30-day window, but it does not take an appeal away. Executive Order 14284 had already rendered the probationary appeal regulations "inoperative and without effect" and OPM rescinded them in June 2025, so, as the rule’s own preamble puts it, "since that rescission, no administrative appeals process has existed for terminations during probationary or trial periods." This rule creates a limited one, adjudicated by OPM.

Commenters raised the disparity while the rules were still proposals, and OPM answered them on the record. The Reduction in Force Appeals rule carries a section headed "Adequacy of the Comment Period" which opens: "Commenters such as 0372, 1045, 0501, 1043, and others asserted the comment period for this rule, which ran from February 10, 2026, to March 12, 2026, was unlawfully short under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Many commenters requested an extension of this period."

OPM rejects the argument in two moves. On the statute, it says the APA requires only a meaningful opportunity to comment and that "numerous courts have upheld a 30-day comment period as sufficient", citing decisions from the Fifth, Ninth and D.C. Circuits. On the executive orders, it concedes the standard and then declines it: the orders "only mandate that comment periods should ``generally'' be at least 60 days", the rule says, and that rationale "was fully satisfied here." It points to the volume of comment as proof, arguing that "the breadth and specificity of the comments demonstrate that interested parties were able to engage meaningfully with the proposal."

That volume is itself the largest of the four. The Reduction in Force Appeals docket drew 1,252 comments, of which OPM describes 1,251 as substantive; Streamlining Probationary Appeals drew 632 and Suitability Action Appeals 343. The 60-day rule reports 721, but that figure is not comparable with the others: OPM de-duplicated it, noting that one submission arrived as 100 separate entries and "in fact represented the views of one commenter." Its raw docket count is 823.

The comparison should be kept to these four. Across OPM’s proposed rules since January 2025 the 30-day and 60-day windows do not sort neatly by subject: a technical prevailing-rate rule that drew no comments at all got 30 days, and another got 61. The most-commented OPM rulemaking of the period by a wide margin, the Schedule Policy/Career rule, drew 40,500 comments on a window that was extended to 45 days.

All four rules record that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs found them not to be major rules under the Congressional Review Act, which removes the 60-day delay that status would have required and leaves the Administrative Procedure Act’s 30-day minimum. That is why the gap between publication on 3 August and effect on 2 September is exactly thirty days.