The government’s dispersed systems for managing human resources for the federal workforce are on the verge of a major transformation, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

By January, OPM said it expects to award a federal contract that will eventually result in a cohesive HR system for all agencies to use. But in the short term, creating a governmentwide HR entity will mean working to consolidate the more than 100 systems agencies currently use for workforce management.

It’s not the first time OPM has attempted to merge the disparate HR IT systems across government. But Dianna Saxman, OPM’s associate director of HR Solutions, said the effort currently underway is “different.”

“We’re really leveraging the collective wisdom of the entire federal community,” Saxman said Tuesday during a public meeting of the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council. “We’ve already brought experts from many different agencies into a steering committee that is helping us to set the strategy up front.”

Along with employing a steering committee at OPM, Saxman said many federal human capital leaders have started collaborating internally with other agency executives, like chief information officers and chief data officers, to plan the integration of the upcoming HR system.

“What we’re seeing in these agency engagements is a lot of enthusiasm and support for the overall effort,” Saxman said.

Once implemented, the new system will be the source for agencies, HR offices and federal employees to manage personnel records, payroll systems and performance data, while also having the capability to provide federal workforce analytics.

After OPM awards the HR IT contract in January, the agency will spend the next several months implementing the core HR system by the end of April. From there, OPM plans to work one-on-one with agencies to configure the platform to meet their unique needs.

All told, OPM’s end goal is to have the HR IT system fully adopted governmentwide by September 2027.

The value of the anticipated contract award in January is not yet clear. But it comes after OPM released a request for proposals (RFP) in October, detailing a specific plan of action to modernize and centralize the more than 100 current federal HR systems.

In May, OPM had previously released its initial RFP through the General Services Administration schedules program, which emphasized the need for interoperability in governmentwide human capital systems. The May RFP came just weeks after OPM initially announced a sole source award to Workday in early May, but then quickly canceled that award.

The expected timing for awarding the HR IT contract also “aligns beautifully” with the Trump administration’s newly released President’s Management Agenda, Saxman said. She highlighted three key goals in the new agenda that dovetail with the HR IT consolidation effort.

For one, a centralized HR IT platform would underly the administration’s goal of fostering a “merit-based” federal workforce, Saxman explained.

“As we look to foster greater merit, we’re able to do that by having an end-to-end HR IT capability that allows us really to see what’s happening with the federal workforce, with skillsets we have available [and] how people are being promoted and evaluated,” Saxman said. “This gives us that visibility.”

The Trump administration’s goal of making “buying power” more efficient calls for consolidated contract opportunities that are “smarter, faster, cheaper,” according to another component of the new PMA.

“A lot of the contracting processes in government are really decentralized, and there’s a lot of repetitive action there,” Saxman said. “This effort seeks to centralize the purchasing of a private sector core human capital capability at OPM — we would have one entity buying it on behalf of the entire federal government.”

On top of that, Saxman noted that OPM’s effort aligns with the goal of leveraging technology, as the PMA seeks to “consolidate and standardize systems,” while also incorporating “digital-first” government services and eliminating data siloes.

“We’re going to be consolidating over 100 systems into one, reducing the number of system integrations that are required and the complexity of managing all of these systems,” she said.

Saxman outlined what she said will eventually be an array of benefits for agencies, HR offices, federal employees and external stakeholders, once legacy HR systems are decommissioned and the new system is fully implemented.

“There are many manual data requests that come out from OPM, many different stakeholder groups,” she said. “But we’ll have an opportunity where the data will be readily available in dashboards, so we can have a real view of what’s happening with the federal workforce at any point in time.”

OPM also hopes to ease the workload for HR employees by eventually moving all personnel records to single files, even when employees transition between multiple agencies throughout their career. Currently many federal employees have personnel records that span across multiple different HR systems.

“Our goal here is to have one system that they can manage their employee record,” Saxman said.

For signs of success, Saxman said OPM will be measuring and looking for improvements in employee experience, cost savings and better data overall.

“A lot of our HR professionals are working with outdated, disparate technologies that are not serving them well, that are not serving our employees well,” Saxman said. “As a federal community, this is something that we have wanted to do for a long time.”

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The Trump administration has laid out its President’s Management Agenda, providing a framework for the administration’s overarching priorities to drive change in the federal government for the next few years.

The new PMA, which the Office of Management and Budget published Monday, includes three key priority areas, each of which contain several underlying goals the administration wants to meet, such as eliminating “woke” government, ending “over-classification” and “buying American.”

Many of the goals contained in the management agenda are already taking shape through a number of President Donald Trump’s executive orders and other changes to government the president has initiated since taking office.

“In his first months in office, President Trump already took bold and decisive actions to begin to reshape the federal government and end its weaponization against American citizens,” OMB Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland wrote Monday in a memo to agencies.

A senior OMB official, speaking on background, said the PMA takes the president’s promises, as well as the administration’s work already underway, and creates a framework to “institutionalize” those end goals.

“Some of the previous PMAs have been all-encompassing and trying to be everything to everybody, whereas this PMA is very clearly tied to what President Trump promised the American people he would do when he got elected,” the official said in an interview with Federal News Network. “These are going to be priorities every agency focuses on for the full Trump administration.”

The Trump administration’s three PMA priorities are:

• Shrink the government and eliminate waste
• Ensure accountability for Americans
• Deliver results, buy American

The PMA has been a staple of presidential administrations for more than 20 years. Generally, each PMA aims to address systemic challenges in government management by setting goals and holding agency executives accountable. It’s a way for the White House to work with agencies to establish top priorities, then monitor progress toward priority-based goals.

Performance.gov, the website that hosts the administration’s PMA, so far contains only an outline of Trump’s management agenda. Details are missing on which federal leaders will be tasked with delivering on the goals, where there has already been progress, and how the administration will measure results for each priority.

An OMB official blamed the 43-day government shutdown for the limited details on the PMA website. Though confirming that more information would eventually be available, the official did not provide a specific timeline.

“We’ll work with the agencies and identify where they’re already making progress and start putting out — as PMAs in the past have — updates on the success that’s been had, what metrics we’re going to be looking at measuring and what agencies are going to be part of different leads for the individual goals,” the official said.

Shrinking the government

For the Trump administration, the first priority in the PMA focuses on shrinking the government and eliminating waste, particularly in programs that Trump has described as “woke” or “weaponized.”

To meet that end, the PMA’s first priority defines three key goals:

• Eliminate woke, weaponization and waste
• Downsize the federal workforce
• Optimize federal real estate

Already, the Trump administration has taken significant steps toward those goals. Agencies spent much of this year under a hiring freeze, while the administration simultaneously reduced the size of the federal workforce by more than 300,000 employees.

Going forward, the OMB official pointed to Trump’s latest executive order on federal hiring as a way to measure progress toward the PMA’s first priority. The Oct. 15 order called on agencies to form strategic hiring committees composed mainly of political appointees, as well as create staffing plans for the coming year.

“A key part of that will be making sure agencies are putting in place those hiring committees,” the official said. “They’re making very strategic decisions around who they’re hiring and what positions they’re hiring for, so we don’t just inflate the federal government again and overwhelm all the success we’ve had in reductions to date.”

Trump’s first priority area in the PMA is a clear departure from the Biden administration’s agenda, which had centered on strengthening the federal workforce and included efforts to increase federal hiring and workforce development.

On top of reducing the federal workforce, the Trump administration’s first PMA priority additionally focuses on removing programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA), as well as ending a number of federal programs the administration described as “wasteful.”

That goal already began taking shape earlier this year, as the Trump administration directed agencies to end DEIA programs, and remove federal employees who worked on DEIA-related projects. The administration has also sought to shrink certain agencies, including USAID and the Education Department.

As a final piece of its first PMA priority, the administration said it plans to shrink the government’s real estate holdings by offloading “unnecessary” leases and federal buildings, as well as moving agency facilities to more “cost-effective” locations.

Trump has signed a number of executive orders this year focused on making federal architecture “beautiful,” and changing the way agencies prioritize federal building locations, while also requiring all federal employees to work on-site full time.

A focus on accountability

In addition to shrinking government, the administration will also be focused on driving “accountability” as the second PMA priority. The effort will impact federal employees, agency programs and government contractors, according to the agenda’s outline.

The underlying goals for achieving Trump’s second priority area are:

• Foster merit-based federal workforce
• End censorship and over-classification
• Demand partners who deliver

Many of the goals under the second PMA priority are familiar, as the administration has already attempted to reach those ends. For instance, the administration has created a new “Schedule Policy/Career” classification for federal employment, and altered performance management standards for federal employees.

“One benefit of the way that PMA is structured for this administration is it’s going to be easy to integrate this PMA into performance reviews for individual employees across the government and hold them accountable for delivering on the president’s priorities,” the OMB official said.

The Office of Personnel Management in May also issued a “merit hiring plan,” which in part called on agencies to question job applicants on how they will adhere to the president’s priorities.

“A lot of this is following up on executive orders and policy decisions made by the president early on,” the OMB official said. “We’re going to be having agencies strategically hiring [and] they need to do so following the merit hiring plan.”

The second priority area also includes a focus on implementing Trump’s orders related to collective bargaining and labor-management relations at agencies. On top of that, the administration also detailed goals of promoting transparency in the federal government, such as through “find[ing] and annihilat[ing] government censorship of speech.”

Additionally, the second PMA priority includes goals of changing government contracting by working with “the best businesses,” and tasking political appointees, rather than career employees, with leading grant processing work.

“It’s making sure that those receiving federal dollars were chosen based on merit, because they’re going to deliver the outcomes that are expected,” the OMB official said.

Modernize technology, “deliver results”

The third and final priority area in the Trump administration’s PMA focuses on consolidating federal procurement, as well as adopting more modern technology into government services.

The priority contains two key goals:

• Efficiently deploy the buying power of the federal government and buy American
• Leverage technology to deliver faster, more secure services

Attempting to advance technology in government has been a long-standing goal across multiple administrations and throughout many agencies. But the OMB official said for the Trump administration, the goal will be to focus on finding modernization initiatives that can be turned around in shorter timeframes, and “moving out of 10-year, 15-year efforts.”

“We are being more specific in where we’re focused and making sure that we’re tackling projects that we can get done, so that we get the results and the benefits of that,” the official said.

The third priority, once again, mirrors many steps that the administration has already taken, such as attempting to reshape the federal acquisition process.

The priority area also focuses on a familiar throughline from the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency of eliminating “waste.”

Some underlying goals in the PMA’s third priority area, for instance, focus on reducing the number of “confusing” government websites. Another focuses on removing “duplicative” data collections and eliminating data siloes.

“Instead of having dozens or hundreds siloed IT systems,” the OMB official said. “We’re going to be able to work off of consolidated IT systems that can operate in an integrated fashion.”

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