OPM officials tout agency’s transformation under Biden
Leaders at the federal government’s dedicated HR agency said the organization has come a long way since being targeted for elimination by the first Trump administration.
Just six years removed from an unsuccessful bid to break up the federal government’s dedicated HR agency, officials at the Office of Personnel Management are touting the agency’s transformation during the Biden administration.
Leaders at the agency this week released a 12-page report outlining OPM’s recent accomplishments, from measures to improve pay equity and increase early-career recruitment of federal workers to efforts to improving the services it provides to other agencies.
“Over the last four years, the agency has demonstrated in numerous ways that a strong, well-run OPM is essential to a well-functioning government that effectively serves the American people,” the document states. “[Today], OPM is a strong, healthy, well-run organization that has reestablished its essential role in a well-functioning government and is primed to build on that success. Though there is more work to do, the agency has the right people and plans in place to continue the forward momentum.”
OPM highlighted its work protecting federal workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and helping agencies adapt to a new hybrid work environment that has persisted past the virus’ ebb, as well as helping to implement President Biden’s vision of the federal government as a model employer. That includes Biden’s $15 federal minimum wage, banning the use of job applicants’ salary history as part of the hiring and pay-setting process and standardizing the maps used to determine the locality pay of both General Schedule and Federal Wage System workers.
Officials also overhauled internal processes to improve the agency’s service delivery, both to federal workers and other agencies. OPM closed 2024 with under 14,000 pending retirement applications—coming within 1,000 claims of the agency’s goal—and ascended to the top of the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s rankings of federal agencies’ customer service. And OPM received an ‘A’ grade on its Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act scorecard for the first time.
Acting OPM Director Rob Shriver told reporters Tuesday that the agency’s current stature marks a complete transformation from the agency that fell victim to the 2015 hack of federal personnel records and was nearly absorbed by the General Services Administration.
“This agency is in as strong a position as it’s been in all of the years I’ve been connected with OPM, and that dates back to when I was an attorney with [the National Treasury Employees Union] in the 90s,” he said. “This version of the agency is really hitting on all cylinders, delivering across the board for the federal enterprise and it is ready to continue to do that for the incoming administration. It’s my view that there is a lot of value that the Office of Personnel Management can bring to any president’s administration, and our place as the strategic human capital leaders of the federal government has been reestablished.”
Shriver defended his agency’s regulations aimed at preventing—or at least slowing—the reimplementation of Schedule F, the first Trump administration’s plan to strip tens of thousands of federal workers in so-called “policy-related” positions of their civil service protections. Trump has vowed to revive the policy upon his inauguration later this month.
“The normal steps under the Administrative Procedure Act would be for a new administration to follow the same process that we did to change the regulation,” Shriver said. “It’s not just about following the process though—they will have to justify why their position is the better position and why it is more grounded in current law than our position. You have to have the kind of administrative record to back that up . . . I can’t predict what the new administration will do, whether they’ll reimplement Schedule F or what that would look like, but what I can say is that the regulation on the books is the strongest action this administration could have taken in support of the policy we believe in: that career civil servants are essential to democracy, and the decisions to hire and fire them should be based merit, not politics.”
And he said he was hopeful that the Trump administration would pick up the baton on OPM’s legislative proposal to centralize the administration of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, based on lessons learned from the creation and launch of the new Postal Service Health Benefits Program last fall. The decentralized nature of the current system has made it difficult for OPM to audit the program for improper enrollment and other potential improper payments.
“If you look at FEHB overall, our ability to address [improper enrollment questions] is really hamstrung by the program’s decentralized nature,” Shriver said. “OPM simply doesn’t have the data to identify improper enrollments, conduct analysis and address root causes. We can issue guidance to agencies and carriers, and we can check in with them and encourage it, but we just don’t control it. But under the postal system, we have the data, and I can tell you that just with what we did to launch that program, we have seen a number of root causes of improper enrollments, and they’re not people being fraudulent, but often are just oversights.”