He called it locker room talk. The federal agency called it a career-ending pattern
A security guard who got fired - then declared unfit for all federal contract work - just lost his bid to overturn that second blow.
The US District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment to the Federal Protective Service on September 29, backing the agency's decision that a former Hana Industries guard could no longer work on its contracts.
Hana, a private security firm under contract to the Service - a division of the Department of Homeland Security - had terminated the guard in 2022 and reported the employment action. That report kicked off a separate fitness review under federal suitability regulations.
The Service flagged eight concerns. It sustained three.
The first: dereliction of duty for failing to secure doors on two dates in January 2022 and failing to keep the required security forms. The guard conceded the doors may have been "left open" on one date but said the forms were completed and misplaced. The Service concluded it was "more likely true than untrue" that the failures happened.
The second was a January 29, 2022, confrontation with another officer. Both were armed. The guard said the other officer provoked it; Hana's account had the other officer trying to disengage while the guard followed him into a hallway. The Service found the guard was "the primary aggressor."
Third was conduct. Hana reported the guard labelled colleagues who reported his door-locking lapses "snitches" and "rats" and confronted another officer for going to management. He described the remarks as "a regular occurrence akin to locker room talk between officers." That did not land.
Two counts were withdrawn. Three others, tied to conduct predating a previous favorable determination, were mitigated and played no part in the final decision.
The guard, representing himself, argued the Service cherry-picked Hana's version and ignored his evidence. The court was not moved. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, the standard is whether the agency's reasoning was supported by the record. It was.
He also raised disparate treatment - another officer behaved similarly and kept their job. The Service found that "not material." The regulations zero in on the individual's character and conduct, not how an employer handled someone else.
His claim to a formal APA hearing also failed. The regulations do not require one.
For HR teams reporting employment actions to government agencies, what gets documented and reported can feed into a separate federal process with career-ending consequences the employer does not control.
