The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

“A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision.

Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that the provision was intended to cover the presidency.

The court stayed its decision until Jan. 4, or until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the case. Colorado officials say the issue must be settled by Jan. 5, the deadline for the state to print its presidential primary ballots.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” wrote the court’s majority. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

Trump’s attorneys had promised to appeal any disqualification immediately to the nation’s highest court, which has the final say about constitutional matters.

Trump’s legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said in a statement Tuesday night: “This ruling, issued by the Colorado Supreme Court, attacks the very heart of this nation’s democracy. It will not stand, and we trust that the Supreme Court will reverse this unconstitutional order.”

Trump didn’t mention the decision during a rally Tuesday evening in Waterloo, Iowa, but his campaign sent out a fundraising email citing what it called a “tyrannical ruling.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel labeled the decision “Election interference” and said the RNC’s legal team intends to help Trump fight the ruling.

Trump lost Colorado by 13 percentage points in 2020 and doesn’t need the state to win next year’s presidential election. But the danger for the former president is that more courts and election officials will follow Colorado’s lead and exclude Trump from must-win states.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed nationally to disqualify Trump under Section 3, which was designed to keep former Confederates from returning to government after the Civil War. It bars from office anyone who swore an oath to “support” the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, and has been used only a handful of times since the decade after the Civil War.

“I think it may embolden other state courts or secretaries to act now that the bandage has been ripped off,” Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor who has closely followed the Section 3 cases, said after Tuesday’s ruling. “This is a major threat to Trump’s candidacy.”

The Colorado case is the first where the plaintiffs succeeded. After a weeklong hearing in November, District Judge Sarah B. Wallace found that Trump indeed had “engaged in insurrection” by inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and her ruling that kept him on the ballot was a fairly technical one.

Trump’s attorneys convinced Wallace that, because the language in Section 3 refers to “officers of the United States” who take an oath to “support” the Constitution, it must not apply to the president, who is not included as an “officer of the United States” elsewhere in the document and whose oath is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

The provision also says offices covered include senator, representative, electors of the president and vice president, and all others “under the United States,” but doesn’t name the presidency.

The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.

“President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” the court’s majority opinion said. “Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”

The left-leaning group that brought the Colorado case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, hailed the ruling.

“Our Constitution clearly states that those who violate their oath by attacking our democracy are barred from serving in government,” its president, Noah Bookbinder, said in a statement.

Trump’s attorneys also had urged the Colorado high court to reverse Wallace’s ruling that Trump incited the Jan. 6 attack. His lawyers argued the then-president had simply been using his free speech rights and hadn’t called for violence. Trump attorney Scott Gessler also argued the attack was more of a “riot” than an insurrection.

That met skepticism from several of the justices.

“Why isn’t it enough that a violent mob breached the Capitol when Congress was performing a core constitutional function?” Justice William W. Hood III said during the Dec. 6 arguments. “In some ways, that seems like a poster child for insurrection.”

In the ruling issued Tuesday, the court’s majority dismissed the arguments that Trump wasn’t responsible for his supporters’ violent attack, which was intended to halt Congress’ certification of the presidential vote: “President Trump then gave a speech in which he literally exhorted his supporters to fight at the Capitol,” they wrote.

Colorado Supreme Court Justices Richard L. Gabriel, Melissa Hart, Monica Márquez and Hood ruled for the petitioners. Chief Justice Brian D. Boatright dissented, arguing the constitutional questions were too complex to be solved in a state hearing. Justices Maria E. Berkenkotter and Carlos Samour also dissented.

“Our government cannot deprive someone of the right to hold public office without due process of law,” Samour wrote in his dissent. “Even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past — dare I say, engaged in insurrection — there must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office.”

The Colorado ruling stands in contrast with the Minnesota Supreme Court, which last month decided that the state party can put anyone it wants on its primary ballot. It dismissed a Section 3 lawsuit but said the plaintiffs could try again during the general election.

In another 14th Amendment case, a Michigan judge ruled that Congress, not the judiciary, should decide whether Trump can stay on the ballot. That ruling is being appealed. The liberal group behind those cases, Free Speech For People, also filed another lawsuit in Oregon seeking to bounce Trump from the ballot there.

Both groups are financed by liberal donors who also support President Joe Biden. Trump has blamed the president for the lawsuits against him, even though Biden has no role in them, saying his rival is “defacing the constitution” to try to end his campaign.

Trump’s allies rushed to his defense, slamming the decision as “un-American” and “insane” and part of a politically-motivated effort to destroy his candidacy.

“Four partisan Democrat operatives on the Colorado Supreme Court think they get to decide for all Coloradans and Americans the next presidential election,” House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik said in a statement.

The announcement, made one day ahead of Veterans Day commemorations, accompanies a series of moves by the Department of Veterans Affairs to expand health care access for veterans and eligible family members. And it comes just days after administration officials reported record-high benefits processing and health care appointment figures over the last year.

This weekend will mark the start of a new $5 million national advertising campaign dubbed “What You Earned” to raise public awareness of benefits such as VA health care, veterans education support and no-cost burial services for veterans.

Only about half of the roughly 18 million veterans living in America today have regular contact with Veterans Affairs benefits officials. In a statement, VA Secretary Denis McDonough said the goal of the new campaign is to boost that number.

“All too often, veterans don’t know about the full scope of the health care and benefits they’ve earned through their service to our nation,” he said. “We want to show veterans and their families – in the most tangible terms possible – how VA can help them afford to stay healthy, go to school, buy a home, and more.”

Among the newest benefits are free health care and nursing home services for all World War II veterans and reimbursement for veterans’ family members for Parkinson’s disease health care costs linked to water contamination issues at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.

The expanded benefits for World War II veterans were mandated by Congress in December 2022 but are just now being implemented. VA officials said the changes in the Camp LeJeune Family Member program fix a gap in coverage that has caused issues in recent years.

Last year, VA officials processed a record 1.98 million disability claims and paid out $163 billion in various veterans benefits.

In light of that volume and increasing signs of predatory companies targeting some of those benefits, the White House will also launch a new Veteran Scam and Fraud Evasion task force that will bring together staff from numerous federal agencies for “an all-hands effort to safeguard veterans and their families.”

Officials said that work will include partnerships with veterans advocates on the issue of fraud prevention, a series of public service announcements highlighting the problem, and holding listening sessions in coming months to identify vulnerabilities in VA systems meant to root out scams.

President Joe Biden and senior VA leaders are expected to visit Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday as part of national celebrations connected to Veterans Day.

Annuitants are retired federal employees that receive monthly benefits for their previous service. Those retirees can be rehired into the federal government under certain circumstances.

“Data provided to our committee indicates that many rehired employees stayed beyond their allowed 13-month terms. Five out of 11 employees under re-employed annuitant status have served for seven years or more,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

Annuitant hires are only supposed to be for emergency situations at AOC, where the loss of a person’s skills or knowledge could prove detrimental to the agency’s work. But senators said that a seven-year emergency was hard to believe.

According to Christine Merdon, acting architect of the Capitol, the few annuitants that have been hired by the agency long-term remain for two reasons: previous changes to the annuitant hiring system only impacting certain hires and the agency still needing the niche skills of those employees.

Merdon said that the AOC looked at its annuitant hiring practices in 2015 “because we had rehired annuitants on there for many, many years, and that’s when we instituted that temporary employee part of the rehired annuitants.”

Those annuitants that were hired on a permanent basis, prior to the 2015 decision to limit them to 13 months of employment, cannot be moved into temporary employee status, as it would be considered an adverse action against them.

Annuitant employees make up a very small portion of the AOC workforce, just 11 out of the total 2,300 full-time employees, but members of Congress worry that a reliance on annuitants could prevent other employees from getting jobs higher up the chain of command. And some of those annuitants are authorized to receive both their position’s full pay and retirement annuity.

“When you keep bringing people back, it certainly makes it hard for the promotion part of that, as well as you would think it should,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

And AOC is likely to bring on more annuitant employees in the coming weeks.

“We will be potentially bringing on just a few more as the Senate moves, as we typically do to handle the paining, and are here fore a month or two, and then they leave,” said Merdon. “Because they know the buildings, they know the agencies.”

And though the current number of annuitants falls within the 10 to 15 person average for the agency, Merdon said that her office could be better about making sure other employees can fill those jobs.

“I do believe there is opportunity to strengthen that … as well as take a look at our better succession planning for the agency. I’m committed to do that in the interim,” said Merdon.

Succession planning requires that the AOC have younger employees trained in the more obscure skills needed to maintain Capitol buildings and grounds so that when one person retires, the agency isn’t scrambling to find someone with the necessary skills.

Annual leave

Most employees can only carry over 240 hours of annual leave from one leave year to the next. If you have more than 240 hours of “use or lose” leave, there’s a big incentive to retire before those hours are lost. That’s because you’ll receive a lump-sum payment for every hour. More importantly, those hours will be projected forward as if you were still on the job. Because there will be a pay increase in 2018, the closer you retire to the end of the 2018 leave year — January 5, 2019 — the more of those hours will be paid at the higher hourly rate.

There are two other factors to consider before you put in your retirement papers. First, if you are a FERS employee, you’ll have to retire no later than Dec. 31, 2018, to be on the annuity roll in January 2019. If you are a CSRS employee, you’ll have to retire no later than Jan. 3, 2019, to be on the annuity roll in that month. However, for every one of those three days you aren’t on the annuity roll, your annuity for that month will be reduced by one-twelfth.

Second, because you’ll be retiring at the end of the year both your agency’s personnel office and the Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Operations Center will be flooded with applications. As a result, there will be a longer than usual delay before your agency sends your paperwork to OPM, where it will land in their overflowing in-basket. However, as soon as OPM can get to it, they will send you a partial payment each month until they can finalize your application and send you your first full annuity payment. While you’ll eventually receive all the money you are due, it could take a couple of months. So be prepared.

Taxes

If you retire at the end of a calendar year, the amount you pay in taxes for that year will be greater than they will be in the year after you retire, even if you’re paid for a lot of unused annual leave and/or receive a buyout. That’s because you’ll be receiving an annuity that is much less than your salary was. And a portion of that annuity will be tax exempt.

In closing

Consider the financial consequences of your decision, have a clear idea about why you are leaving, and make sure you know what you’ll do after you retire.

The task force, mandated by an April 2018 executive order, issued a report on increasing USPS financial sustainability Dec. 4, which advocated for both pricing and management changes to U.S. mail operations.

“The USPS is on an unsustainable financial path which poses significant financial risk to American taxpayers,” said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin in a news release. “President Trump tasked us with conducting a thorough evaluation of the USPS, and today’s report contains achievable recommendations that fulfill the president’s goal of placing the USPS on a path to sustainability, while protecting taxpayers from undue financial burdens and providing them with necessary mail services.”

Slumps in first-class mail coupled with an increase in package shipments driven by e-commerce have upset the USPS funding model, according to the task force.

In its government reorganization plan, the Trump administration proposed preparing the postal service for privatization, a move which was heavily opposed by both Democrats and Republicans.

The report recommended bringing USPS employee pay more in line with the broader labor market, placing scrutiny on the bargaining power of employee unions in wage and benefit negotiations and recommending that employee compensation bargaining power be eliminated.

“Career postal employees are represented by nine unions and two management associations,” the report said.

“However, unlike other federal workers, the [Postal Reorganization Act] authorizes collective bargaining on compensation, some benefits and conditions of employment, and postal unions are therefore able to negotiate compensation, benefits and working conditions. Given their federal employee status and the role that the USPS plays in the economy, USPS employees maintain a unique collective bargaining position. They can bargain for wages and benefits as private sector unions do, without the same level of risk that their company will go out of business.”

The report also called out the retiree health benefits system, suggesting that the agency re-calculate its required payments to the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund based on the population of employees at or near retirement age.

But the report recommends that USPS keep with its current mandate to prefund the system, which both members of Congress and federal employee unions have called misguided and pointed to as one of the core reasons for USPS’s current financial difficulties.

The Government Accountability Office predicts that the fund will run out of money by 2030 due to USPS inability to make payments.

The task force also recommended reforming the entire federal government pension system, in which USPS employees participate, by increasing employee contributions and converting to a defined contribution system.

USPS has a generally positive track record for funding employee pensions when compared with the rest of the government, but the task force recommended reforming the entire system to meet more with private sector trends for ending the accrual of funds in pension accounts.

Beyond employee benefit changes, the report also recommends removing cost caps on mail and package delivery, more concretely defining what constitutes part of the USPS Universal Service Obligation — which ensures a minimum level of service to all Americans, no matter their geographic location — strengthening the USPS Board of Governors, relying more on private sector involvement and pursuing cost-cutting measures.

But postal unions contest much of the task force’s basis for its recommendations in the first place.

“This poorly conceived report makes many of its recommendations based on myth and misinformation that instead of improving mail services, would deliver higher prices and less service for the public,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, in a statement.

“This report calls for slashing universal service. Recommendations would slow down service, reduce delivery days and privatize large portions of the public Postal Service. Most of the report’s recommendations, if implemented, would hurt business and individuals alike. No institution is better suited for the e-commerce revolution than the USPS. This is why some on Wall Street and their enablers on this task force want to position the Postal Service for sale to private interests. The recommendations of the task force are not in the public interest.”

“It is, for all sorts of reasons, extremely difficult to do,” Warren said at a Nov. 29 Creating Future Forward Government event hosted by FCW. “We have put forward legislative proposals, we will continue to, but, again, we’re not going to miss the opportunity.”

He explained that the stars would have to perfectly align to allow for the policy and legislative actions necessary to effect complete transformation, and the Trump administration “would be unwise” to act on the expectation of full reform.

But that doesn’t mean that the administration can’t find avenues for reforming and improving the federal workforce for the 21st century within current legislation.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 established the federal workforce rules and protections that agencies still use today, but the 40-year-old legislation was not designed to accommodate the highly skilled and technically advanced workers of today.

“The workplace in general has changed dramatically,” said Warren, explaining that the original CSRA was designed for a clerk-based workforce, whereas today the small number of clerking duties left at federal agencies are often outsourced.

To adapt, administrations have issued special hiring authorities and workarounds so that agencies can hire for modern needs.

“If you look at how government has adapted over that time, it’s actually pretty impressive,” said Sean Morris, federal human capital leader at Deloitte. “Some aspects of what we have is actually working.”

The problem, according to Morris, is not so much that the workforce needs are changing, but that they are happening at such a fast rate.

“The change is coming at us so quickly, we don’t have the ability in government to be able to pivot,” said Morris.

According to Warren, the best solution in lieu of a total civil service overhaul is to use the “tremendous latitude in this area of the law for administrative discretion” to make government hiring more adaptable.

The Trump administration has already taken advantage of some of this, issuing direct hiring authorities and an alternative pay and classification system for sorely needed positions at federal agencies.

But agencies still need to be given a better grasp of what the regulations and authorities actually allow them to do in hiring new personnel.

“Even amongst the experts in this area and the [chief human capital officers] … there is a very imperfect understanding,” said Warren, explaining that agencies have historically sought out special hiring authorities and then never actually used them, because they didn’t know what was allowed. ”Part of it is an abundance of caution.”

The Trump administration is also looking to change federal retirement benefits practices to better attract personnel that only want to spend a couple of years or so in government work before moving on to something else.

The last time the Office of Personnel Management attempted to change the retirement benefits structure, it was met with strident opposition from federal employee groups.

Those proposals, however, simply sought to eliminate certain benefits without offering alternative systems.

According to Warren, a defined contribution retirement package that an employee can take with them after leaving government service may be a better alternative.

About 19 percent of the 1.6 million people eligible have chosen the new system, according to Defense officials. While DoD has no target or goal for the number of people to enroll in the BRS, they want to make sure everyone is informed of the choice available — and that the deadline is Dec. 31, said Jeri Busch, DoD’s director of military compensation policy, during a Wednesday press call.

Among other things, they’re sending notifications through the Defense Finance and Accounting Service’s Smartdocs email system to every service member who is eligible and hasn’t made an opt-in decision; and they’re including reminders on Leave and Earnings statements, she said.

About 1.6 million active-duty and reserve troops are eligible to opt into the new retirement system, which promises a smaller pension check for those who complete a 20-year career but offers cash payments into a personal retirement account that service members can keep regardless of how long they stay in the military, as well as other benefits such as continuation pay at 12 years. Traditionally, only about 20 percent of service members stay long enough for the traditional retirement.

All troops entering the military starting in 2018 are automatically enrolled into the new Blended Retirement System. But those with fewer than 12 years of service as of the end of 2017 can make the choice in 2018 to either stay with the legacy system or switch to the new BRS. They must actively choose and opt in to BRS either in MyPay (Army, Air Force and Navy) or Marine Online.

“For some, this can be a difficult decision, that requires weighing both options, and considering personal and professional goals,” said Busch.

“We’re certain there are individuals out there who may not have made their decision yet … or as we all tend to do, may just be procrastinating,” she said. For those, there are a number of credible resources and tools that are available for free, she said, to include certified, qualified personal financial managers on installations or available through Military OneSource.

Officials said 307,213 service members had made the decision to opt in as of Nov. 26, including 243,715 active duty and 53,498 Guard and Reserve members.

DoD’s position is still that there is no target or goal for the number of service people to opt in to the new BRS. Instead, their goal is to make sure troops have the resources to help this highly personal decision, Busch said.

The Dec. 31 deadline is set in law, and DoD doesn’t have the authority to extend that deadline. Officials are also prepared to handle any last-minute surge in the online enrollment systems that could happen, Busch said. The DoD MyPay system, for Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as the separate Marine Corps system, MarineOnline, have been fully tested, including stress-tested, she said.

The Army, Navy and Air Force don’t require their service members to take any steps if they’re going to stay with the legacy retirement system. If they do nothing, service members will automatically remain enrolled in the traditional retirement system. But in order to choose the BRS, they must actively take the steps to opt in and fill out paperwork stating that intent.

The Marine Corps is the only service that requires its members to register their decisions regardless of whether they opt in to the BRS or stay with the legacy system. Of those eligible, nearly 37 percent of Marines had opted in to the BRS as of Sept. 30, a higher percentage than the other services.

And more than half of the eligible Marine Corps members had made their decision as of Sept. 30.

But officials don’t attribute the Marine Corps participation rate to the requirement to register their decision, regardless of the choice, Busch said. “We think it’s more the fact that the Marine Corps, as is their culture [is] very much engaged from a leadership perspective, all the way down to the squad level, to make sure their members are aware of all the information about BRS, and are taking action,” she said.

Consequently, DoD will continue to engage with the leadership within all the service branches as the deadline approaches, she said.

Resources available for those making their BRS decision:

• BRS Website: https://militarypay.defense.gov/BlendedRetirement/ 
• BRS Comparison Calculator: https://militarypay.defense.gov/Calculators/BRS/ 
• Installation Personal Financial Managers: These trained professionals can provide free financial counseling to service members and their families, and have received training on the BRS. Ask the family center or finance office where the personal financial managers are located, and make an appointment. Contact information is also available on MilitaryOneSource. (Scroll down to the installation program directory. 
• MilitaryOneSource: Provides free financial support 24/7, which is especially helpful for Reserve and National Guard members and those stationed in remote areas. Call 1-800-342-9647.

Regardless of how much you have before retirement, your first step should be to sign up for a preretirement counseling seminar at your agency. Most agencies and their field activities hold these seminars periodically, with more sessions scheduled when buyouts and RIFs are imminent.

If your organization doesn’t provide a preretirement course at a time convenient for you to attend (or even offer one), consider enrolling in a course offered by an outside firm. In some cases, your agency will pay for it.

Your next step is to meet with your agency’s benefits counselor to go through your official personnel folder (OPF) and make sure that it includes complete documentation of all your federal employment (including any military service), the effective dates of each adjustment to your pay, and records of your health benefits and life insurance coverage, plus any designations of beneficiaries you may have filed.

If your OPF is accurate, ask your benefits counselor to verify when you will be eligible to retire and whether you will be able to carry your health and life insurance into retirement.

Next ask for an estimate of your potential retirement annuity. If you owe any deposits or redeposits, you can ask your benefits counselor to show you the effect of making or not making the payment. Then if you want to make a deposit or redeposit, you can ask the counselor to tell you how to do it.

If you had a period of active duty service in the armed forces (or are or will be receiving reserve retired pay), you’ll need to assess the impact of making or not making a deposit to get credit for that time in your annuity. On the other hand, if you are (or will be) receiving military retired pay, you may have to make a deposit to get credit for that time and, at retirement, waive that pay.

Finally, if you owe any money to your agency, you’ll want to arrange a repayment schedule so that your annuity is not offset in order to recoup the debt.

When you have set your retirement date, you’ll need to ask your benefits counselor for two copies of the necessary retirement forms. You’ll fill one out for your counselor and one for yourself. Your counselor will review the forms and contact you to clear up any questions or problems that may arise.

Once the paperwork is done and you’ve confirmed your retirement date, you can relax and start enjoying the time that remains.

Reg Jones was head of retirement and insurance planning at the Office of Personnel Management. Email your retirement-related questions to fedexperts@federaltimes.com.