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Washington, D.C.—With the filing of a legal brief with the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has taken another step in its continuing fight against agency misuse of the Federal Career Intern Program (FCIP). The issue before the MSPB illustrates how the use of the FCIP can deny a disabled veteran his rights.

“The FCIP was designed as a special-focus hiring authority to provide structured, two-year developmental internships,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. “Instead, we now find agencies using it as the principal, and in some cases only, means of hiring, and that has a host of adverse and inappropriate consequences, including making it much more difficult for present employees to win promotions.”

She pointed out that the FCIP has been eagerly embraced by the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), among other agencies.

In fact, CBP is using it for all of its new hires of CBP Officers. “This, most certainly, is not how the FCIP was intended to be used,” President Kelley said.

In the current case before the MSPB (Weed v. Social Security Administration), in which NTEU supports the plaintiff, a 30-percent disabled veteran alleges the Social Security Administration (SSA) used the FCIP to target a pool of applicants so narrowly that preference-eligible veterans would have almost certainly been prevented from applying for any vacancy.

The factual situation is that SSA, which previously had bypassed the plaintiff in favor of applicants under another federal hiring authority—the Outstanding Scholars Program—later found to be unlawful, used the FCIP to fill four positions at a specific location in Montana.

SSA advertised these positions solely through a posting on the state university career services website, which was accessible only to students and alumni. The plaintiff was neither, so the posting made it impossible for him and similarly-situated veterans to learn of these vacancies. An MSPB administrative judge ruled against the plaintiff, however, and he has taken an appeal to the full Board.

NTEU used its brief to argue once again that the FCIP is not a valid exception to the competitive hiring procedures mandated by law, pointing out that one of the many serious shortcomings of the FCIP is that it is subject to manipulation, whether intentional or not, in ways that hinder veterans and other potential job-seekers from even finding out about job openings.

In the absence of any evidence satisfying the requirement in law that an exception to competitive hiring be ‘necessary’ or warranted by ‘conditions of good administration,’ NTEU asked the Board to rule that Social Security’s use of the FCIP in the Weed matter violates veterans’ preference rights.

NTEU has a pending suit against the Office of Personnel Management challenging the legality of its rules implementing the FCIP; and last year it was granted rare permission to take part in oral argument in a federal appeals court case regarding the FCIP, even though the union, which had filed an amicus brief in that case as well, was not a direct party to the case.

In that legal action, (Gingery v. Dept. of Defense), a three-judge panel of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of a disabled veteran who had been denied his veterans’ preference rights in favor of two FCIP candidates. By a two-to-one vote, however, that panel decided not to address the validity of the FCIP itself, as NTEU has urged both in its written and oral presentations.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.