OPM published five corrections in one Federal Register issue, four of them to civil service rules that take effect on 2 September, and one replaces a citation to a statute repealed in 1991

Five corrections is a lot for one morning.

The Office of Personnel Management filed five of them at 8:45 on Monday morning, and all five ran in Tuesday's Federal Register. Four correct the rules on layoffs, layoff appeals, probationary appeals and suitability appeals that OPM published on 3 August. Those rules take effect on 2 September, and so do the corrections, which is to say the text was fixed with eight days to spare. The fifth reaches further back and is effective on publication.

Every one of them was reviewed and approved by the Director, Scott Kupor, and signed out by the same Federal Register liaison.

What was wrong with the layoff rule

The correction to the layoff rule itself runs across three pages of the Federal Register.

Some of it is what a correction usually is. A paragraph in the retention rules read "30 percent of more" where it meant "30 percent or more". A cross-reference pointed at the section instead of the paragraph. A sentence ended on a full stop where it needed a semicolon.

Three of the errors are of a different kind, because they are instructions the Code of Federal Regulations could not carry out. Instruction 15 directed the addition of a paragraph at section 330.707(w) that already exists and is marked reserved. Instruction 36 directed the revision of introductory text at section 351.802(a), which has no introductory text. Instruction 39 quoted text for removal from section 353.110(a)(1) that does not match what the Code actually says.

Then there is the veterans citation. Section 316.403(b)(2) rested the authority for temporary appointments of nurses at the Department of Veterans Affairs on section 4114 of title 38 of the United States Code. That section was repealed by Public Law 102-40 on 7 May 1991 and replaced by section 7405, which is where the authority has sat for the thirty-five years since. The paragraph above it cited the wrong subsection as well: it pointed at the provision covering former employees of the General Accounting Office rather than the one covering veterans with a compensable service connected disability of 30 percent or more.

One more is worth reading twice. Two rules published on 3 August each rewrote the authority citation for part 351, and they rewrote it differently. Tuesday's correction picks the version from the appeals rule, which includes the two statutory provisions that support the appeals function the same package created.

A term that exists in one part and is used in another

Three of the corrections fix the same drafting habit.

The layoff appeals rule, the probationary appeals rule and the suitability appeals rule all use the phrase "responsible agency". It is defined once, in section 731.503(b)(2), and only for the purposes of one subpart of part 731. Used in part 351 and in part 751 it is a term with no definition attached, and the corrections replace it with "the agency whose action is under appeal".

The suitability rule also went to print with its spaces missing. The published text of section 731.504(c) reads "an employee ofthe responsibleagency or OPMand", which is what a word processor does to a phrase and not what a rule is meant to say. Six subparagraphs in the section above it were published in lower case where the Code requires capitals. And the authority citation for part 731 omitted the statutory provision that the rule's own preamble relies on.

Section 731.506 gets a structural fix. A sentence requiring that any sanction be proportionate, causally related to the violation and no broader than necessary was published as the fourth item in the list of sanctions rather than as the limit on all of them. It is now its own paragraph, headed "Scope of sanctions".

The sentence about the Merit Systems Protection Board

The probationary appeals correction carries a technical amendment as well, and OPM made it without notice and comment.

Section 315.909(b) governs supervisory and managerial probation. Its last sentence told an employee who believed an action was based on improper discrimination or other prohibited personnel practices that they could appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board or to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. OPM says that sentence is inconsistent with the rule it published on 3 August, which makes part 751 the sole route for appealing a covered action.

The replacement sentence is narrower. It says the section does not preclude an employee from filing a complaint, appeal or other matter within the independent jurisdiction of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board or the Office of Special Counsel.

OPM invoked the good cause exception in the Administrative Procedure Act to skip notice and comment, on the ground that the change is non-substantive and merely conforms one paragraph to a rule already made. It invoked the same exception again to have the amendment take effect on 2 September with the rule it conforms to.

The one that has been sitting in the Code since March

The fifth correction is not part of the August package at all.

It corrects two older rules: an incentive waivers rule published on 15 December 2025 and effective on 13 February 2026, and the Schedule Policy/Career rule published on 6 February 2026 and effective on 9 March. OPM says each of the errors below has been carried into the Code of Federal Regulations.

The incentive waivers rule removed the requirement that a recruitment incentive service period run at least six months. It did not change the definition of "Service agreement" one section earlier, which has gone on describing a specified period of employment of not less than 6 months or more than 4 years ever since.

The Schedule Policy/Career rule restructured three parallel sections and left each one's internal cross-reference pointing at paragraphs that the restructuring had removed. It also revised the authority citation for part 575 back to the form it took before the incentive waivers rule, which OPM says superseded that rule's version without discussion three weeks after it took effect.

And section 575.109(a) joins a phrase to a paragraph with a hyphen where an em dash belongs. OPM notes that this one predates both rules and appears in the official annual edition of the Code.

OPM describes every correction across all five documents as non-substantive.