When the federal government’s independent board to hear appeals of suspensions, firings and other actions taken against civil servants went dark for five years, nobody won.

It served virtually no one’s ideological interest, achieved no one’s goals and took no work off anyone’s plate. And, of course, neither employees nor agencies were winning their cases. Some observers called the five years without a functioning central panel of the Merit Systems Protection Board “unconscionable,” while others said it was simply bad business.

“You have to have finality,” Tristan Leavitt, one of President Biden’s two board member nominees the Senate confirmed earlier this year, finally restoring a fully functioning board, told Government Executive in a recent interview. “Leaving everyone in limbo, it's bad for the agency employee, taxpayers.”

MSPB’s central panel lost its quorum—and with it, its ability to render decisions—in early 2017 and has been without a singly presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed member since early 2019. President Trump nominated multiple slates to fill the vacancies, but they never received a vote on the Senate floor.

Leavitt, who served at MSPB as its de facto executive director prior to his appointment, and Ray Limon, a former career Senior Executive Service employee and Biden’s second pick for the board, are now working together to sort through the unprecedented backlog of 3,500 cases that built up over the last five years. They are slowly making progress,...

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