BOSTON — U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. on Friday, Sept. 11, 2026, stayed the Office of Personnel Management’s so-called “Question Three” essay on federal civil-service job applications — the prompt that asked applicants how they would advance the President’s executive orders and policy priorities — finding the unions challenging it are likely to win on Administrative Procedure Act and First Amendment grounds.

In American Federation of Government Employees et al. v. Kupor, No. 1:25-cv-13305-GAO (D. Mass.), O’Toole invoked 5 U.S.C. § 705 to stay the May 2025 Merit Hiring Plan and related Guidance insofar as they require agencies to include the essay. OPM Director Scott Kupor and the agency must notify department and agency heads within seven days and file a compliance status report within 14 days. The stay remains until further court order.

The question text, as quoted in the stay order from the Plan, reads: “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”

Plaintiffs are the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE). Democracy Forward and co-counsel helped bring the suit. Unions and advocates branded the prompt a partisan “loyalty question”; OPM had previously defended it as optional and not an “ideological litmus test,” while saying hiring decisions could not turn on political beliefs. OPM did not immediately comment on Friday’s ruling, Reuters reported.

O’Toole, a Clinton appointee, wrote that plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing “there is no legitimate governmental interest in inquiring into the political beliefs of applicants to federal civil service vacancies,” and — as quoted by The Washington Times — that Question Three is “neither related to an important government interest nor narrowly tailored to promote that interest.” He stressed that the Civil Service Reform Act bars employment decisions based on political affiliation for these career jobs, and that the Plan’s own disclaimer against using the essays as a litmus test does not appear in the question text shown to applicants.

That statutory bar is the cleanest line in the case: the civil service is supposed to hire for competence, not for how eloquently an applicant can pledge fidelity to the sitting President’s executive-order docket. Concentrated executive power using a free-response essay as a political screen — for roles the government itself treats as nonpartisan — is exactly the kind of compelled political speech and affiliation test the Reform Act and the First Amendment were meant to cabin. Labor unions and Democracy Forward are not neutral umpires either; they have their own institutional stakes in federal personnel fights. The court order, not the press release, is what stopped the question.

Per the unions and Reuters, roughly 70,000 federal postings had carried the essay, spanning jobs from air traffic control specialist to crane operator to nuclear materials courier — roles where “favorite EO” essays have no obvious nexus to the work. AFGE National President Everett Kelley welcomed the stay: “Requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service, and we are pleased the judge has put an immediate stop to the administration’s loyalty question. Federal employees should be hired based solely on their ability to perform the job—not their allegiance to any particular administration.”

Question Three flowed from OPM’s May 2025 Merit Hiring Plan implementing a January 2025 Trump executive order directing a hiring plan to bring into the federal workforce “only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests.” O’Toole separately denied a preliminary injunction that would have blocked agencies from considering already-submitted answers, holding that such relief would restrain individual hiring decisions the unions had insisted were not the injury they were pressing. So old essays already in agency files are not wiped; new asks of the loyalty prompt are stayed.

GovExec (Erich Wagner) and Reuters (Nate Raymond, Boston) reported the decision Friday evening and overnight; the primary stay order is on CourtListener / RECAP.

Sources