What does the One Big Beautiful Bill Act mean for casework?
It’s definitely the theme for this year that part of casework is knowing how to sort through the news to figure out what will happen, might happen, and probably won’t happen — and this is especially true for coverage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. To make life a little bit easier, our fabulous summer grad student intern, Sirena Harrop, worked to comb through the bill itself and endless news coverage to come up with a quick guide to figuring out how this bill might impact casework. The TL;DR for a lot of it is “we’ll see,” but we hope this is a helpful tool for your peace of mind.
This is also our last newsletter until after Labor Day! We’re going to be hunkering down on some casework-related projects, including looking at agency liaison teams and how Congress can work to strengthen them (have ideas or tips? Hit me up!). But we won’t entirely abandon you: stay tuned for some guest posts from my brilliant colleagues at POPVOX Foundation, including a look inside constituent services in other countries, and some approachable resources on AI tools to support your work.
If you have questions about our work or suggestions for how we can be helpful, please feel free to reply to this email, or reach out to me at anne@popvox.org. In the meantime, wishing you time to enjoy long summer evenings, ice cream breaks, and conflict-free constituent meetings for August. ✌
Anne Meeker
Deputy Director
POPVOX Foundation
Casework Notes on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
The sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacts major changes, many of which may impact Congressional caseworkers’ caseloads in the months and years ahead.
Casework News
More than 50 House Democrats sent letters to the IRS and Social Security asking about how RIFs and other workforce reductions are impacting constituent services.
Lots of coverage of individual Members’ work on casework on behalf of immigrants in their states and districts.
Coverage of Rep. Norcross’ [D, NJ] constituent services fair, Rep. Guest’s [R, MS] constituent service day, and Sen. Paul’s [R, KY] Veterans constituent services day.
Smart mobile office hour program from Rep. Pfluger [R, TX] focusing on replacing lost or damaged documents after the TX floods.
Congratulations to Rep. LaLota [R, NY] on announcing $11.3 million returned through casework, Rep. Frost [D, FL] on announcing $10 million, and Rep. Bresnahan [R, PA] (of Bresna-van fame) on announcing over $2 million in just six months! (Your humble casework correspondent notes that these totals were much lower in my day, kids).
Exciting updates on the House side: the Committee on House Administration announced a new project focused on innovation for House CMS/CRM tech, and rolled out the first online staff directory for the House.
Political scientist Michaelangelo Landgrave has an interesting look at racial and ethnic diversity among staffers deployed to casework vs. policy positions in the CA legislature. Would LOVE to see this replicated for Congress.
The Guardian covers rising threats directed at Members, state legislators, and staff.
I had a lovely chat with Lee Drutman on Politics in Question about all things casework and our paper on how casework could work under electoral reform.
Agency News
Immigration
A new ICE memo issues instructions to officers to hold undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings — meaning that they must instead be held in detention for the duration of their removal proceedings.
USCIS released an implementation plan to carry out President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship. This order is still currently blocked by the court.
USCIS also signaled that it intended to change the H1B program to favor higher-wage earners, and to increase the difficulty of the agency’s citizenship test to focus less on rote memorization.
Several House Democratic Members are suing DHS over problems with a NYC detention facility, asserting that they have been inappropriately blocked from conducting oversight visits.
The State Department laid off the office in charge of planning for passport operations.
IRS
TIGTA issued a relatively short report on the current state of the IRS’ workforce after several voluntary and involuntary staff reductions.
Related, the White House is pushing to increase IRS customer service staffing, which is so far not reflected in Congressional spending bills for FY 2026.
The IRS is also considering eliminating multi-language customer services to comply with DOJ guidance on Executive Orders declaring English the official language of the United States.
SSA
SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano has agreed to have the agency’s Inspector General audit SSA’s performance data and release additional public metrics on issues including call wait times, callback wait times, and number of people waiting on hold.
Social Security announced new identity verification processes for phone services, including going into a field office for a one-time code, for certain transactions like changing an address, getting tax statements, or benefit verification letters — and then rolled back the policy after stakeholders raised concerns over field offices’ ability to cope with the extra three million visits per year that this practice would have generated.
Education
The Department of Education suspended Income-Based Repayment Plans while the Department updates its systems to figure out how court injunctions should be factored into remaining balances.
OMB announced that it had completed its review of grants to local school districts for afterschool, language learners, and other programs, and would release frozen funding.
The Cut keeps putting out excellent, plain-language explainers on what’s happening with student loans and options for borrowers. (By the way: if you ever hit a paywall on articles, try talking to your comms team about whether they have a workaround through a clips service — or ping me and I can send a PDF).
FEMA
FEMA Acting Administrator David Richardson faced some pointed questions at a recent hearing on FEMA’s response to recent natural disasters, including delayed disaster declarations.
And congratulations to the House T&I Committee on introducing the FEMA Act, a bipartisan bill to address administrative FEMA challenges. If you missed our event last week with some of the staff behind the bill on the process of writing legislation for implementation, and how committees can work with caseworkers to get questions answered, it’s worth a watch!
VA
This is a really nice introduction to VA services for LGBTQ veterans and recent changes to VA policy on gender-affirming care, tailored specifically for caseworkers.
Good news for teams struggling with VA-OCLA’s backlog: we heard that VA-OCLA has negotiated an internal detail with the Veterans Experience Office to temporarily bring over a handful of staff to help address the delay in Congressional casework inquiries.
VA is launching a department-wide review of the agency’s mission and structure that will likely involve changes to VA’s org charts on both the VBA and VHA side.
Cool coverage of VA’s use of AI tools to identify and reach out to veterans at high risk of suicide.
This is a tough one: a VA OIG inspection found minimal improvements to claims processing around Military Sexual Trauma (MST), including ongoing challenges with accuracy in MST claims, and struggles to recruit and retain qualified claims examiners for MST cases.
Federal Employees
It was a matter of time: FEMA’s former COO is suing the Trump Administration over the fact that MSPB is unable to hear cases involving contested firings.
OPM is officially no longer accepting paper retirement applications, but notes that common delays in retirement processing include divorce or court-ordered settlements, workers compensation history, part-time or intermittent service, multi-agency work history, incorrect documentation, and address changes.
10% of OPM’s staff have been laid off or left through an incentive program so far this year.
GAO raises questions about whether this smaller workforce is able to tackle FEHB fraud issues.
Return-to-office mandates continue to be confusing: OPM announced it would allow telework for employees who request a religious accommodation, but VA noted that it would review work-from-home agreements for employees with disabilities.
GAO flags critical need for modernization of legacy IT systems at 10 federal agencies
A GAO report flags eleven legacy IT systems most in need of modernization — systems essential to health care, tax processing, and national security. These legacy systems struggle to mitigate known cybersecurity risks, and risk falling into further disrepair as the last IT staff fluent in outdated programming languages age toward retirement.
Medical debt included on credit reports again
A federal judge blocked a CFPB rule that would have removed medical debt from Americans’ credit reports.
DOT says review of backlogged grants to happen by late summer/early fall
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told members of the House T&I committee that 1,300 transportation grants to state and local governments are still under review, but should be paid out by late summer or early fall.
Ooh we hate this: fraudulent SNAP apps
For offices handling SNAP casework, this Substack post from Jake Solomon looking at fraudulent EBT management apps is frustrating (and might be a good PSA).
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