Federal Workforce Reproductive Rights Protection Act

HB9448 operates through four distinct mechanisms, each of which goes beyond a general workplace-benefit question. Section 2 directs the Comptroller General to publish a list of states and territories where abortion restrictions enacted on or after June 24, 2022, or that became enforceable on or after that date, are in effect. Section 3 then prohibits any Executive agency from using appropriated funds to relocate its headquarters or a significant portion of its operations to any listed state, or to lease, purchase, or construct new facilities there. The practical consequence is that state abortion law becomes a federally enforced criterion governing where the government may physically operate.

Section 4 gives every federal employee the right to decline any reassignment, transfer, or detail whose destination is a listed state, citing medical, reproductive, family planning, or personal health considerations. Promotions and new appointments may not require relocation to a listed state unless that requirement is waived for the same set of purposes. This provision embeds abortion-access geography into federal personnel decisions at every level of the career ladder.

Section 5 requires agency heads to authorize travel and transportation allowances for employees and their eligible dependents to travel out of state to obtain any reproductive health care service not accessible where the employee lives. The Office of Personnel Management must issue implementing regulations within 90 days. Section 6 separately entitles employees to up to 21 days of fully paid administrative leave, with no loss of benefits or performance ratings, specifically for travel to obtain abortion services when those services are unavailable in the employee's state or territory of residence or primary duty station. Both provisions draw directly on federal appropriations.

Section 7 amends the National Security Act of 1947 and bars Executive agencies from requesting, investigating, or considering, in any security-clearance determination or personnel action, whether an individual used abortion services, traveled for abortion, or provided material support to someone obtaining abortion care. These are substantive changes to the legal framework governing clearance adjudications, not merely privacy guidelines.

The American Council opposes this bill on principled grounds. Each of its operative sections uses the authority and resources of the federal government to insulate abortion access from the ordinary consequences of state law. Federal funds would pay for employees to travel to obtain abortions, paid leave would be available specifically for that travel, agency location decisions across the country would be structured around abortion-law geography, and security-clearance law would be revised to place abortion conduct categorically beyond investigative reach. This is not a question of employer neutrality. It is the federal government deploying its full institutional weight on one side of the most morally contested question in American public life, while obligating every taxpayer to underwrite the result. Unborn human life possesses inherent worth, and legislation that systematically expands the reach of abortion by leveraging federal employment, federal funds, and federal law is wrong in principle regardless of the workplace-equity framing in which it is presented.