My Clinic Win: Protecting Civil Servants with the Federal Legislation Clinic

During his second year of law school, Rosenfeld participated in the Federal Legislation Clinic, in which students work with nonprofit clients to advance their legislative priorities in Congress. Here, Rosenfeld reflects on his clinic experience, including how his research helped inform current draft legislation aimed at protecting intelligence personnel, the findings that took him by surprise and the value of “legislative lawyering.”

“Coming into law school, I wanted to expand my knowledge of the legal and political intricacies of passing legislation on Capitol Hill. The Federal Legislation Clinic offers hands-on training in legislative lawyering: the combination of political, legal and governmental skills needed to write and advance legislation. It’s a very practical application of the law, but one that we don’t often get the opportunity to experience as law students.

I worked on behalf of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonprofit organization here in D.C. devoted to promoting good government. My assignment was to research the potential implications of former President Donald Trump’s proposed Schedule F program on the intelligence community. That executive order, which has since been repealed by the Biden administration, would have reclassified thousands of federal employees and stripped them of certain civil service job protections.

My research partner, Anna Kitsmarishvili, L’24, and I scoured the original executive order, relevant court cases, the U.S. Code and any and all interpretations of the proposal. We were surprised to discover that members of the intelligence community were already vulnerable to potential government manipulation due to a number of preexisting national security exceptions to federal employment protections.

For example, the Secretary of Defense and other leaders in the national security community can unilaterally remove certain intelligence personnel for national security purposes — something that could be exploited by any potential administration willing to bend or bust rules and standards as they currently exist. Our research helped highlight this and other vulnerabilities that expose these employees to the risk of political malfeasance.

Throughout the process, we met weekly with POGO and stayed in constant communication with them about our findings. We drafted a final memo that summarized the threat of Schedule F and other instances in which overly broad statutory language had the potential to undermine workplace protections for intelligence personnel. We also proposed legislative solutions, including ways to make these statutes more specific or subject to additional government supervision.

Recently, we got the incredible news that, thanks in part to work by POGO in collaboration with Senate legislative staff, the most recent draft of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025 — the bill that authorizes funding and outlines oversight of the U.S. intelligence community — incorporates some of the changes we suggested, including a proposed amendment to the U.S. Code that would strengthen workplace protections for the intelligence community through increased congressional oversight. The bill was passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in May, and I’m hopeful it will receive bipartisan support going forward.

Seeing our work included in the draft bill is not only a personal victory, but also a validation of everything the Federal Legislation Clinic hopes to do: give students like me the legal and practical skills needed to advocate on behalf of our clients and change the law for the better, all with the constant support of the clinic staff.

As someone interested in government work, taking part in the clinic was an invaluable and formative experience. It gave me the opportunity to work in an area of the law that I have always been interested in and affirm that I want to pursue it.”

Georgetown Law offers the country’s largest and most highly regarded clinical education program: every year, more than 300 students participate in our 17 different clinics. Under the supervision of faculty and fellows, they have the opportunity to engage in real-life lawyering. In this series, students share their “clinic wins” — the large and small accomplishments that came through their clinic experiences.