Government Executive
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Appeals board itself had conceded its judge made mistakes on the case.
Senior Correspondent
A federal court has overruled an administrative judge on a case with significant implications for federal employee protections, saying the judge's errors in his initial ruling were so severe he should be removed from the case entirely.
The case,
Tao v. Merit Systems Protection Board, positioned the Office of Special Counsel—the agency tasked with enforcing federal whistleblower protection laws—against the MSPB ruling, and eventually led the board to argue its own judge had erred. OSC had filed a brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit saying the judge’s ruling risked leaving federal workers uncertain about their rights and “vulnerable to retaliation explicitly prohibited by the statute.”