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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has won an important victory in its continuing fight to prevent federal agencies from undercutting the merit-based hiring process by misusing a program originally created as a limited, special focus hiring program, known as the Federal Career Intern Program (FCIP).

The decision of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia allows NTEU’s direct challenge to the FCIP to go forward. NTEU’s lawsuit, filed in January 2007, alleges that Office of Personnel Management (OPM) regulations governing the FCIP are illegal. The court this week dismissed OPM’s jurisdictional and other procedural objections to NTEU’s complaint.

“The way agencies are misusing FCIP,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, “amounts to a frontal assault on the competitive examination process as the primary method of hiring for competitive service positions.”

The FCIP was created in 2000 as a special-focus hiring program; its intent was to provide formally structured two-year training and development internships for agencies to use as a strategic recruitment tool.

Instead—because OPM placed few restrictions on the program—the FCIP has been used by many agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to fill a wide range of positions which, after a two-year ‘internship,’ are converted without competition to permanent competitive service status.

For example, the IRS has been using it to bring onto its rolls such key enforcement employees as revenue offices and revenue agents; CBP, meanwhile, has been using it for some time as its sole means of hiring new CBP Officers—those charged with frontline national security duties. In fiscal year 2008, 62 percent of new hires at SSA were made under the FCIP. Other agencies use the program in a similar manner.

One of its most serious impacts is to reduce promotional opportunities for present federal workers. “By their day-to-day work and their commitment to duty, these employees have proven themselves ready for promotion,” President Kelley said, “but all too often, their advancement is blocked because of the way agencies use the FCIP.”

In addition, the FCIP can be seriously unfair to new hires as well, since it effectively doubles the standard one-year probationary period for new federal employees in competitive service positions.

The merit principles which have served the nation well for a very long time require “fair and open competition” for jobs as a way to ensure equal opportunity. While civil service laws do allow exceptions from competitive examination and selection rules, they do so only when such exceptions are “necessary” and “justified by conditions of good administration.”

“Our view is that OPM cannot make the showing required by law that such a broadly applicable and loophole-filled program as the FCIP is necessary or warranted by conditions of good administration,” President Kelley said.

This lawsuit (No. 1:07-CV-00168) is not the only challenge by NTEU to the FCIP. The union has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a case pending before the Merit Systems Protection Board, in which a disabled veteran is alleging that use of the FCIP by the Social Security Administration violated veterans preference rights.

Further, in its transition recommendations, the union called on the Obama administration to rescind the executive order creating the FCIP.

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