The White House won a legal victory when a federal agency ruled that the Obama administration did not violate a military veteran’s rights when it rejected his application under a new jobs program for recent graduates. The ruling limited the reach of a law that says vets must get first preference in hiring for federal jobs.
The case involved a disabled veteran, David Dean, who applied for a job under the Pathways Recent Graduates Program, a federal internship system created by President Obama in 2010. Dean’s application was rejected because the White House limited the program to people who had finished their studies within the previous two years and he fell outside that requirement.
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Dean sued, arguing the two-year requirement was arbitrary and the rejection therefore violated the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act, a 1998 law that says vets must be given preference in all federal hiring decisions provided they are at least minimally qualified for the job.
On Thursday, the Merit Systems Protections Board, a quasi-independent federal agency that acts as a watchdog on federal hiring laws, ruled in favor of the White House. It said the veterans preference does not automatically trump the other eligibility requirements the White House had created for the program.
“[W]e cannot agree with the appellant’s claim that the Pathways Program’s minimum education eligibility requirement inherently violated his and other veterans’ preference rights,” the board ruled.
A spokesman for the Labor Department, the official defendant in the case, declined to comment, noting the ruling could be appealed and the administration was therefore treating it as “ongoing litigation.” Dean could not be reached for comment.
The law mandating that veterans go to the front of the line in federal hiring has caused heartburn for human resources officials, many of whom feel it limits their choices too much.
“Our survey of HR staff found that 28 percent said they do not announce [job openings] with [the general public] because a veteran may ‘block the list,'” the MSPB said in a January report on federal recruitment.
Dean, who acted as his own lawyer, had been involved in a prior legal tussle with the administration in 2010 when he argued that its Federal Career Internship Program violated the veterans’ preference rules because it was directed at particular schools and job fairs, and therefore unfairly avoided veterans. In that case, the MSPB agreed with Dean and ordered the White House to bring the program in line with the law.
The administration instead shut down the internship program and one month later replaced it with the Pathways program, which it claimed complied with veterans’ preference. Dean sued again, arguing that the new program was really created to circumvent the board’s 2010 ruling.
“It’s basically just [Federal Career Internship Program] redux,” Dean said in a 2011 interview with the Federal Times. “I see no difference between Pathways and FCIP. It’s still set up to bypass veterans hiring.”
In its Thursday ruling, the merit protection board agreed that the newer program was a revamped version of the internship program, saying it was “fair to characterize the Pathways Programs as successors to FCIP.” Nevertheless, the board said it was created “in good faith to address the inherent problems with FCIP that underlay the board’s [2010] decision.”
The board said the Pathways programs’ two-year limit was necessary to meet its educational requirements. The board further noted that 34 veterans had met the current program’s minimum requirements.
“If the minimum educational requirement did not prohibit these 34 individuals from being considered, then it does not follow that the requirement violated anyone’s veterans’ preference rights,” the board ruled.
