The federal government is preparing to undertake one of the most ambitious IT transformations in decades: Modernizing and unifying human resources information technology across agencies. The technology itself is not the greatest challenge. Instead, success will hinge on the government’s ability to establish an effective, authoritative and disciplined governance structure capable of making informed, timely and sometimes difficult decisions.
The central tension is clear: Agencies legitimately need flexibility to execute mission-specific processes, yet the government must reduce fragmentation, redundancy and cost by standardizing and adopting commercial best practices. Historically, each agency has evolved idiosyncratic HR processes — even for identical functions — resulting in one of the most complex HR ecosystems in the world.
We need a governance framework that can break this cycle. It has to be a structured requirements-evaluation process, a systematic approach to modernizing outdated statutory constraints, and a rigorous mechanism to prevent “corner cases” from derailing modernization. The framework is based on a three-tiered governance structure to enable accountability, enforce standards, manage risk and accelerate decision making.
The governance imperative in HR IT modernization
Modernizing HR IT across the federal government requires rethinking more than just systems — it requires rethinking decision making. Technology will only succeed if governance promotes standardization, manages statutory and regulatory constraints intelligently, and prevents scope creep driven by individual agency preferences.
Absent strong governance, modernization will devolve into a high-cost, multi-point, agency-to-vendor negotiation where each agency advocates for its “unique” variations. Commercial vendors, who find arguing with or disappointing their customers to be fruitless and counterproductive, will ultimately optimize toward additional scope, higher complexity and extended timelines — that is, unless the government owns the decision framework.
Why governance is the central challenge
The root causes of this central challenge are structural. Agencies with different missions evolved different HR processes — even for identical tasks such as onboarding, payroll events or personnel actions. Many “requirements” cited today are actually legacy practices, outdated rules or agency preferences. And statutes and regulations are often more flexible than assumed, but in order to avoid any risk of perceived noncompliance or litigation.
Without centralized authority, modernization will replicate fragmentation in a new system rather than reduce it. Governance must therefore act as the strategic filter that determines what is truly required, what can be standardized and what needs legislative or policy reform.
A two-dimensional requirements evaluation framework
Regardless of the rigor associated with the requirements outlined at the outset of the program, implementers will encounter seemingly unique or unaccounted for “requirements” that appear to be critical to agencies as they begin seriously planning for implementation. Any federal HR modernization effort must implement a consistent, transparent and rigorous method for evaluating these new or additional requirements. The framework should classify every proposed “need” across two dimensions:
Applicability (breadth): Is this need specific to a single agency, a cluster of agencies, or the whole of government?
Codification (rigidity): Is the need explicitly required by law/regulation, or is it merely a policy preference or tradition?
This line of thinking leads to a decision matrix of sorts. For instance, identified needs that are found to be universal and well-codified are likely legitimate requirements and solid candidates for productization on the part of the HR IT vendor. For requirements that apply to a group of agencies or a single agency, or that are really based on practice or tradition, there may be a range of outcomes worth considering.
Prior to an engineering discussion, the applicable governance body must ask of any new requirement: Can this objective be achieved by conforming to a recognized commercial best practice? If the answer is yes, the governance process should strongly favor moving in that direction.
This disciplined approach is crucial to keeping modernization aligned with cost savings, simplification and future scalability.
Breaking the statutory chains: A modern exception and reform model
A common pitfall in federal IT is the tendency to view outdated laws and regulations as immutable engineering constraints. There are in fact many government “requirements” — often at a very granular and prescriptive level — embedded in written laws and regulations, that are either out-of-date or that simply do not make sense when viewed in a larger context of how HR gets done. The tendency is to look at these cases and say, “This is in the rule books, so we must build the software this way.”
But this is the wrong answer, for several reasons. And reform typically lags years behind technology. Changing laws or regulations is an arduous and lengthy process, but the government cannot afford to encode obsolete statutes into modern software. Treating every rule as a software requirement guarantees technical debt before launch.
The proposed mechanism: The business case exception
The Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management have demonstrated the ability to manage simple, business-case-driven exception processes. This capability should be operationalized as a core component of HR IT modernization governance:
Immediate flexibility: OMB and OPM should grant agencies waivers to bypass outdated procedural requirements if adopting the standard best practice reduces administrative burden and cost.
Batch legislative updates: Rather than waiting for laws to change before modernizing, OPM and OMB can “batch up” these approved exceptions. On a periodic basis, these proven efficiencies through standard processes to modify laws and regulations to match the new, modernized reality.
This approach flips the traditional model. Instead of software lagging behind policy, the modernization effort drives policy evolution.
Avoiding the “corner case” trap: ROI-driven decision-making
In large-scale HR modernization, “corner cases” can become the silent destroyer of budgets and timelines. Every agency can cite dozens of rare events — special pay authorities, unusual personnel actions or unique workforce segments — that occur only infrequently.
The risk is that building system logic for rare events is extraordinarily expensive. These edge cases disproportionately consume design and engineering time. And any customization or productization can increase testing complexity and long-term maintenance cost.
Governance should enforce a strict return-on-investment rule: If a unique scenario occurs infrequently and costs more to automate than to handle manually, it should not be engineered into the system.
For instance, if a unique process occurs only 50 times a year across a 2-million-person workforce, it is cheaper to handle it manually outside the system than to spend millions customizing the software. If the government does not manage this evaluation itself, it will devolve into a “ping-pong” negotiation with vendors, leading to scope creep and vulnerability. The government must hold the reins, deciding what gets built based on value, not just request.
Recommended governance structure
To operationalize the ideas above, the government should implement a three-tiered governance structure designed to separate strategy from technical execution.
The executive steering committee (ESC)
Composition: Senior leadership from OMB, OPM and select agency chief human capital officers and chief information officers (CHCOs/CIOs).
Role: Defines the “North Star.” They hold the authority to approve the “batch exceptions” for policy and regulation. They handle the highest-level escalations where an agency claims a mission-critical need to deviate from the standard.
The ESC establishes the foundation for policy, ensures accountability, and provides air cover for standardization decisions that may challenge entrenched agency preferences.
The functional control board (FCB)
Composition: Functional experts (HR practitioners) and business analysts.
Role: The “gatekeepers.” They utilize the two-dimensional framework to triage requirements. Their primary mandate is to protect the standard commercial best practice. They determine if a request is a true “need” or just a preference.
The FCB prevents the “paving cow paths” phenomenon by rigorously protecting the standard process baseline.
The architecture review board (ARB)
Composition: Technical architects and security experts.
Role: Ensures that even approved variations do not break the data model or introduce technical debt. They enforce the return on investment (ROI) rule on corner cases — if the technical cost of a request exceeds its business value, they reject it.
The ARB enforces discipline on engineering choices and protects the system from fragmentation.
Federal HR IT modernization presents a rare opportunity to reshape not just systems, but the business of human capital management across government. The technology exists. The challenge — and the opportunity — lies in governance.
The path to modernization will not be defined by the software implemented, but by the discipline, authority, and insight of the governance structure that guides it.
Steve Krauss is a principal with SLK Executive Advisory. He spent the last decade working for GSA and OPM, including as the Senior Executive Service (SES) director of the HR Quality Service Management Office (QSMO).
You just left a high-level meeting with agency leadership. You and your colleagues have been informed that Congress passed new legislation, and your agency is expected to implement the new law with your existing budget and staff. The lead program office replied, “We can make this work.” The agency head is pleased to hear this, but has reservations. How?
Another situation: The president just announced a new priority and has assigned it to your agency. Again, there is no new funding for the effort. Your agency head assigns the priority to your program with the expectation for success. How do you proceed?
Today, given the recent reductions in force (RIFs), people voluntarily leaving government, and structural reorganizations that have taken place and will likely continue, answering the question “How to proceed?” is even more difficult. There is a real need to “know” with a level of certainty whether there are sufficient resources to effectively deliver and sustain new programs or in some cases even the larger agency mission.
Members of the Management Advisory Group — a voluntary group of former appointees under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump — and I believe the answer to these and other questions around an organization’s capabilities and capacity to perform can be found by employing the Operational Readiness and Resiliency Index (ORRI). ORRI is a domestic equivalent of the military readiness model. It is structured into four categories:
Workforce
Performance
Culture
Health
Composed of approximately 50 data elements and populated by existing systems of record, including payroll, learning management systems, finance, budget and programmatic/functional work systems, ORRI links capabilities/capacity with performance, informed by culture and health to provide agency heads and executives with an objective assessment of their organization’s current and future performance.
In the past, dynamic budgeting and incrementalism meant that risk was low and performance at some levels predictable. We have all managed some increases or cuts to budgets. Those days are gone. Government is changing now at a speed and degree of transformation that has not been witnessed before. Relying on traditional budgeting methods and employee surveys cannot provide insights needed to assess whether current resources provide the capabilities or capacity for future performance of an agency — at any level.
So how does it work?
As is evident with the illustration above, ORRI pulls mainly from existing systems of record. Many of these systems are outside of traditional human resources (HR) departments to include budget, finance and work-systems. Traditionally, HR departments relied on personnel data alone. These systems told you what staff were paid to do, not what they could do. It is focused on classification and pay, not skills, capacity or performance.
Over the years, we have made many efforts to better measure performance. The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) as amended, the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), category management and other efforts have attempted to better account for performance. These tools — along with improvements in budgeting to include zero-based budgeting, planning, programming and budgeting systems, and enterprise risk management — have continued to advance our thinking along systems lines. These past efforts, however, failed to produce an integrated model that runs in near real-time or sets objective performance targets using best-in-class benchmarks. Linking capabilities/capacity to performance provides the ability to ask new questions and conduct comparative performance assessments. ORRI can answer such questions as:
Are our staffing plans ready for the next mission priority? Can we adapt? Are we resilient?
Do we have the right numbers with the right skills assigned to our top priorities?
Are we over-staffed in uncritical areas?
Given related functions, where are the performance outliers — good and bad?
Given our skill shortages, where do I have those skills that are at the right level available now? Should we recruit, train or reassign to make sure we have the right skills? What is in the best interest of the agency/taxpayer?
Is our performance comparable — in named activity, to the best — regardless of sector?
What does our data/evidence tell us about our culture? Do we represent excellence in whatever we do? Compared to whom?
Where are we excelling and why?
Where can we invest to demonstrate impact faster?
Focusing on workforce and performance are critical. However, if you believe that culture eats strategy every time, workforce and performance needs to be informed by culture. Hence ORRI includes culture as a category. Culture in this model concentrates on having a team of executives that drive and sustain the culture, evidenced by cycles of learning, change management success and employee engagement. Health is also a key driver for sustained higher performance. In this regard, ORRI tracks both positive and negative indicators of health, as is evident in the illustration. Again, targets are set and measured to drive performance and increase organizational health. Targets are set by industry best in class standards and strategic performance targets necessary for mission achievement.
Governmentwide, ORRI can provide the Office of Management and Budget with real-time comparative performance around key legislative and presidential priorities and cross-agency thematic initiatives. For the Office of Personnel Management, it can provide strategic intelligence on talent, such as enterprise risk management based on an objective assessment: data driven, on critical skills, numbers, competitive environment and performance.
ORRI represents the first phase of an expanded notion of talent assessment. It concentrates on human talent: federal employees.
Phase two of this model will expand the notion of operating capabilities to include AI agents and robotics. As the AI revolution gains speed and acceptance, we can see that agencies will move toward increased use of these tools to increase productivity and reduce transactional cost of government services. Government customer service and adjudication processes will be assigned to AI agents. Like Amazon, more and more warehouse functions will be assigned to physical robots. Talent will need to include machine capabilities, and the total capabilities/capacity reflect the new performance curve — optimizing talent from various sources. This new reality will require a reset in the way government plans, budgets, deploys talent, and assesses overall performance. Phase three will encompass the government’s formalized external supply chains which represent the non-governmental delivery systems — essentially government by other means. For example, the rise of public/private partnerships is fundamentally changing the nature of federated government; think of NASA and its dependence on Space X, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and others. ORRI will need to expand to accurately capture these alternative delivery systems to overall government performance. As the role of the federal government continues to evolve, so too do our models for planning, managing talent and assessing performance. ORRI provides that framework.
John Mullins served on the Trump 45 Transition Team and later as the senior advisor to the director at OPM. Most recently Mullins served as strategy and business development executive for IBM supporting NASA, the General Services Administration and OPM.
Mark Forman was the first administrator for E-Government and Information Technology (Federal CIO). He most recently served as chief strategy officer at Amida Technology Solutions.
Businessman hold circle of network structure HR - Human resources. Business leadership concept. Management and recruitment. Social network. Different people.
After a year of upheaval for federal employees, the Trump administration appears to be only getting started on its plans for overhauling the career civil service.
Further federal workforce changes are expected to continue into 2026 and beyond, according to the goals the administration recently laid out in its President’s Management Agenda.
Many of the priorities, as the Office of Management and Budget outlined, either already have — or soon will — significantly impact federal employees.
Here are three workforce changes from the Trump administration that federal employees should look for in the new year:
Future federal staffing plans
The sheer size of the federal workforce changed considerably over the past year, with executive branch agencies losing a cumulative total of more than 300,000 federal employees, according to numbers from the Office of Personnel Management.
With those staffing cuts in place, agencies are beginning to assemble future-looking plans to further reshape their workforces over the next few years.
As a months-long hiring freeze starts to thaw, the Trump administration has required all agencies to submit annual staffing plans for the coming year, subject to review and approval by OMB and OPM officials. The administration also directed agencies to form strategic hiring committees, composed mainly of political appointees, to oversee all recruitment efforts.
Agencies’ staffing plans must “consider efficiencies” of organizational restructuring and consolidation, removal of “unnecessary management layers,” the elimination of “unnecessary” jobs and contractor positions, managing the performance of underachieving employees — and much more, Trump administration officials explained in November guidance.
Until OMB and OPM approve the staffing plans, agencies will have to stick to a four-to-one ratio of removing to hiring employees, according to the guidance.
An OMB senior official speaking on background recently told Federal News Network that the administration will measure agencies’ progress toward fulfilling the first PMA priority by seeing how they adhere to Trump’s latest executive order on federal hiring. The goal over the next few years is to ensure that while hiring does take place, it’s in a way that maintains the smaller size of the current federal workforce.
“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.”
In past administrations, there have been efforts to dramatically downsize the federal workforce — most recently during the Clinton administration in the 1990s. But a recent report from the Federation of American Scientists said those prior efforts had “decidedly mixed results,” and cautioned the Trump administration not to make the same mistakes.
“The cuts came before changes to agency to-do lists that never materialized,” FAS wrote. “It will be important for this administration to learn lessons from the past to avoid some of the long-term damage wrought by the Clinton years, for which agencies are still paying.”
Many experts have also raised concerns of the loss of federal workforce expertise, due to the reductions that have already taken effect. Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, warned that the loss of institutional knowledge will worsen over time.
“The forced exodus of over 212,000 civil servants has created dangerous gaps in food safety inspection, Social Security processing, veterans’ healthcare and disaster response,” Stier told Federal News Network. “This loss of expertise directly harms Americans’ access to critical services and will take decades to repair.”
Going forward, Robert Shea, a former OMB official in the George W. Bush administration, said doing more work with significantly fewer employees is both a challenge, and a possible opportunity.
“Agencies that rely on existing processes will fail. Agencies that rethink how work gets done may actually improve,” Shea told Federal News Network. “The upside of AI and automation only materializes if feds are given the authority, training and political cover to use these tools.”
“Accountability” of federal employees
A focus on “accountability” has been another common theme for the Trump administration’s federal workforce changes — it’s an area of emphasis in the PMA, and likely to strengthen and expand in 2026 and beyond.
Already, “accountability” has appeared as a priority in the administration’s efforts to remove protections for career federal employees in “policy-influencing” positions, make reforms to the Senior Executive Service, and create a new governmentwide recruitment plan.
Heading into 2026, OPM has also estimated that around 50,000 career federal employees will be reclassified as “Schedule Policy/Career,” a move that would make the impacted workers at-will and easier to fire.
The Trump administration touted Schedule Policy/Career as a way to drive “accountability” in the federal workforce, while offering agencies more flexibility. But critics of the policy, formerly known as “Schedule F,” have warned that it will politicize the non-partisan career civil service.
“Ultimately, this ‘trauma’ leads to the federal government’s loss of talent and institutional knowledge, which damages our national security and makes us more vulnerable to bad actors; reduces government accountability to its citizens; and generates even more loss of trust in government,” said Raymond Limon, a former member of the Merit Systems Protection Board and career-long federal executive in human capital.
Going forward, the Trump administration’s efforts on expanding these plans are “on track to get more severe,” according to the Partnership’s Stier.
“The expansion of Schedule Policy/Career authority threatens career protections, creates a climate of fear that drives talented professionals to leave government and further diminishes the services received by the public,” Stier told Federal News Network.
All told, the administration’s overhauls will lead to a “collapse of long-standing assumptions about civil service protections,” according to Shea.
“Constraints on removing career employees that were once treated as untouchable have been challenged directly,” Shea said. “Regardless of how courts ultimately rule, the impact will be long lasting.”
In 2026, federal employees are also facing significant changes in the way agencies measure performance, another way that OPM has said it is looking to increase “accountability” of employees.
OPM is looking to change performance management standards for federal employees. OPM Director Scott Kupor argues that “performance culture” in government is broken, and far too many federal employees are rated as high performers at their agencies.
“We have rampant ratings inflation and a lack of accountability for poor performers that fails to meaningfully differentiate between excellence, successful achievement of one’s objectives and poor performance,” Kupor wrote in a Dec. 5 blog post.
In June, OPM outlined plans to end “inflation” in performance ratings, and more strictly delineate between different levels of performance for employees. The changes also call on agencies to swiftly remove poor performers — and not substitute a suspension, for instance, when a full removal is more appropriate.
Forthcoming final regulations are expected to cement the emphasis of “accountability” in the administration’s changes to employee performance evaluations.
The idea of “accountability” also appears in the President’s Management Agenda, as part of a goal of fostering a “merit-based federal workforce.”
“The president’s executive orders and the PMA, together, call for revolutionary change, and together with OPM, we’re delivering,” OMB Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said in a Dec. 9 CHCO Council meeting. “The president directed agencies to reform the workforce, to maximize efficiency and productivity … Federal agencies have created meaningful efficiencies, allowing them to laser focus on their statutory duties.”
“Merit-based” workforce reforms
Finally, the Trump administration is calling for a focus on “merit-based” hiring across the federal workforce. It’s a top priority of the administration’s President’s Management Agenda, but also something that has appeared across multiple efforts from OPM.
In May, OPM first issued the administration’s new “merit hiring plan,” setting goals for reducing the government’s time-to-hire, as well as focusing on skills-based recruitment and a streamlined process.
The hiring guidance also required all agencies to assess candidates on USAJobs on how they plan to support the administration’s priorities when applying for open positions.
But in 2026, the goals of the “merit hiring plan,” in combination with the Trump administration’s PMA priority, are expected to take further effect, as agencies move forward with their new annual staffing plans.
“Moving forward, hiring will be based on merit and focused on practical skill, competence and dedication to the Constitution,” OMB’s Ueland said.
Combined, the merit hiring plan, performance changes, and newly required annual staffing plans will significantly reshape the federal workforce going forward.
“For those of you who have been in the private sector, much of this will seem like motherhood and apple pie,” Kupor wrote in a Nov. 21 blog post. “We are now inviting the federal government to join the planning party.”
OPM’s new “Tech Force” recruitment initiative, as an example, will embed the “merit hiring” principles as agencies look to onboard private-sector technologists and early-career talent through the new program.
But some of the hiring changes are common across recent presidential administrations. Recruitment strategies such as skills-based hiring and the use of shared certificates appeared in the Trump administration’s hiring guidance, similar to prior efforts from the Biden administration.
The FAS report noted, “the perennial need to hire federal employees more quickly and efficiently … have appeared in every PMA to date.”
Let’s start with the good news: artificial intelligence may NOT be the buzzword for 2026.
What will be the most talked about federal IT and/or acquisition topic for this year remains up for debate. While AI will definitely be part of the conversation, at least some experts believe other topics will emerge over the next 12 months. These range from the Defense Department’s push for “speed to capability” to resilient innovation to workforce transformation.
Federal News Network asked a panel of former federal technology and procurement executives for their opinions what federal IT and acquisition storylines they are following over the next 12 months. If you’re interested in previous years’ predictions, here is what experts said about 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The panelists are:
Jonathan Alboum, federal chief technology officer for ServiceNow and former Agriculture Department CIO.
Melvin Brown, vice president and chief growth officer at CANI and a former deputy CIO at the Office of Personnel Management.
Matthew Cornelius, managing director of federal industry at Workday and former OMB and Senate staff member.
Kevin Cummins, a partner with the Franklin Square Group and former Senate staff member.
Michael Derrios, the new executive director of the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University and former State Department senior procurement executive.
Julie Dunne, a principal with Monument Advocacy and former commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service.
Mike Hettinger, founding principal of Hettinger Strategy Group and former House staff member.
Nancy Sieger, a partner at Guidehouse’s Financial Services Sector and a former IRS CIO.
What are two IT or acquisition programs/initiatives that you are watching closely for signs of progress and why?
Brown: Whether AI acquisition governance becomes standard, templates, clauses, evaluation norms, 2026 is where agencies turn OMB AI memos into repeatable acquisition artifacts, through solicitation language, assurance evidence, testing/monitoring expectations and privacy and security gates. The 2025 memos are the anchor texts. I’m watching for signals such as common clause libraries, governmentwide “minimum vendor evidence” and how agencies operationalize “responsible AI” in source selections.
The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) phased rollout and how quickly it becomes a de facto barrier to entry. Because the rollout is phased over multiple years starting in November 2025, 2026 is the first full year where you can observe how often contracting officers insert the clause and how primes enforce flow-downs. The watch signals include protest activity, supply-chain impacts and whether smaller firms get crowded out or supported.
Hettinger: Related to the GSA OneGov initiative, there’s continuing pressure on the middleman, that is to say resellers and systems integrators to deliver more value for less. This theme emerged in early 2025, but it will continue to be front and center throughout 2026. How those facing the pressure respond to the government’s interests will tell us a lot about how IT acquisition is going to change in the coming years. I’ll be watching that closely.
Mike Hettinger is president and founding principal of Hettinger Strategy Group and former staff director of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Management.
The other place to watch more broadly is how the government is going to leverage AI. If 2025 was about putting the pieces in place to buy AI tools, 2026 is going to be about how agencies are able to leverage those tools to bring efficiency and effectiveness in a host of new areas.
Cornelius: The first is watching the Hill to see if the Senate can finally get the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) Act passed and to the President’s desk. While a lot of great work has already happened — and will continue to happen — at GSA around OneGov, there is only so much they can do on their own. If Congress forces agencies to do the in-depth analysis and reporting required under SAMOSA, it will empower GSA, as well as OMB and Congress, to have the type of data and insights needed to drive OneGov beyond just cost savings to more enterprise transformation outcomes for their agency customers. This would generate value at an order of magnitude beyond what they have achieved thus far.
The second is the implementation of the recent executive order that created the Genesis Mission initiative. The mission is focused on ensuring that the Energy Department and the national labs can hire the right talent and marshal the right resources to help develop the next generation of biotechnology, quantum information science, advanced manufacturing and other critical capabilities empower America’s global leadership for the next few generations. Seeing how DOE and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) partner collaboratively with industry to execute this aspirational, but necessary, nationwide effort will be revelatory and insightful.
Cummins: Will Congress reverse its recent failure to reauthorize the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF)? President Donald Trump stood up the TMF during his first term and it saw a significant funding infusion by President Joe Biden. Watching the TMF just die with a whimper will make me pessimistic about reviving the longstanding bipartisan cooperation on modernizing federal IT that existed before the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
I will be closely watching how well the recently-announced Tech Force comes together. Its goal of recruiting top engineers to serve in non-partisan roles focused on technology implementation sounds a lot like the U.S. Digital Service started by President Barack Obama, which then became the U.S. DOGE Service. I would like to see Tech Force building a better government with some of the enthusiasm that DOGE showed for cutting it.
Sieger: I’m watching intensely how agencies manage the IT talent exodus triggered by DOGE-mandated workforce reductions and return-to-office requirements. The unintended consequence we’re already observing is the disproportionate loss of mid-career technologists, the people who bridge legacy systems knowledge with modern cloud and AI capabilities.
Agencies are losing their most marketable IT talent first, while retention of personnel managing critical legacy infrastructure creates technical debt time bombs. At Guidehouse, we’re fielding unprecedented requests for cybersecurity, cloud architecture and data engineering services. The question heading into 2026 is whether agencies can rebuild sustainable IT operating models or whether they become permanently dependent on contractor support, fundamentally altering the government’s long-term technology capacity.
My prediction of the real risk is that mission-critical systems are losing institutional knowledge faster than documentation or modernization can compensate. Agencies need to watch and mitigate for increased system outages, security incidents, and failed modernization projects as this workforce disruption cascades through 2026.
Sticking with the above theme, it does bear watching how the new federal Tech Force hiring initiative succeeds. The federal Tech Force initiative signals a major shift in how the federal government sources and deploys modern technology talent. As agencies bring in highly skilled technologists focused on AI, cloud, cybersecurity and agile delivery, the expectations for speed, engineering rigor and product-centric outcomes will rise. This will reshape how agencies engage industry partners, favoring firms that can operate at comparable technical and cultural velocity.
The initiative also introduces private sector thinking into government programs, influencing requirements, architectures and vendor evaluations. This creates both opportunity and pressure. Organizations aligned to modern delivery models will gain advantage, while legacy approaches may struggle to adapt. Federal Tech Force serves as an early indicator of how workforce decisions are beginning to influence acquisition approaches and modernization priorities across government.
Dunne: Title 41 acquisition reform. The House Armed Services Committee and House Oversight Committee worked together to pass a 2026 defense authorization bill out of the House with civilian or governmentwide (Title 41) acquisition reform proposals. These reform proposals in the House NDAA bill included increasing various acquisition thresholds (micro-purchase and simplified acquisition thresholds and cost accounting standards) and language on advance payments to improve buying of cloud solutions. Unfortunately, these governmentwide provisions were left out of the final NDAA agreement, leaving in some cases different rules the civilian and defense sectors. I’m hopeful that Congress will try again on governmentwide acquisition reform.
Office of Centralized Acquisition Services (OCAS). GSA launched OCAS late this year to consolidate and streamline contracting for common goods and services in accordance with the March 2025 executive order (14240). Always a good exercise to think about how to best consolidate and streamline contracting vehicles. We’ve been here before and I think OCAS has a tough mission as agencies often want to do their own thing. If given sufficient resources and leadership attention, perhaps it will be different this time.
FedRAMP 20x. Earlier this year, GSA’s FedRAMP program management office launched FedRAMP 20x to reform the process and bring efficiencies through automation and expand the availability of cloud service provider products for agencies. All great intentions, but as we move into the next phase of the effort and into FedRAMP moderate type solutions, I hope the focus remains on the security mission and the original intent to measure once, use many times for the benefit of agencies. Also, FedRAMP authorization expires in December 2027 – which is not that far away in congressional time.
Alboum: In the coming year, I’m paying close attention to how agencies manage AI efficiency and value as they move from pilots to production. As budgets tighten, agencies need a clearer picture of which models are delivering results, which aren’t, and where investments are being duplicated.
I’m also watching enterprise acquisition and software asset management efforts. The Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) Act has been floating around Congress for the last few years. I’m curious to see whether it will ultimately become law. Its provisions reflect widely acknowledged best practices for controlling software spending and align with the administration’s PMA objective to “consolidate and standardize systems, while eliminating duplicative ones.” How agencies manage their software portfolios will be a crucial test of whether efficiency goals are turning into lasting structural change, or just short-term fixes.
Derrios: I’ll be watching how GSA’s OneGov initiative shapes up will be important because contract consolidation without an equal focus on demand forecasting, standardization and potential requirements aggregation may not yield the intended results. There needs to be a strong focus on acquisition planning between GSA and their federal agency customers in addition to any movement of contracts.
In 2025, the administration revamped the FAR, which hadn’t been reviewed holistically in 40 years. So in 2026, what IT/acquisition topic(s) would you like to see the administration take on that has long been overlooked and/or underappreciated for the impact change and improvements could have, and why?
Cummins: Despite the recent Trump administration emphasis on commercialization, it is still too hard for innovative companies to break into the federal market. Sometimes agencies will move mountains to urgently acquire a new technology, like we have seen recently with some artificial intelligence and drones initiatives. But a commercial IT company generally has to partner with a reseller and get third-party accreditation (CMMC, FedRAMP, etc.) just to get access to a federal customer. Moving beyond the FAR rewrite, could the government give up some of the intellectual property and other requirements that make it difficult for commercial companies to bid as a prime or sell directly to an agency outside of an other transaction agreement (OTA)? It would also be helpful to see more FedRAMP waivers for low-risk cloud services.
Cornelius: It’s been almost 50 years since foundational law and policy set the parameters we still follow today around IT accessibility. During my time in the Senate, I drafted the provision in the 2023 omnibus appropriations bill that required GSA and federal agencies to perform comprehensive assessments of accessibility compliance across all IT and digital assets throughout the government. Now, with a couple years of analysis and with many thoughtful recommendations from GSA and OMB, it is time for Congress to make critical updates in law to improve the accessibility of any capabilities the government acquires or deploys. 2026 could be a year of rare bipartisan, bicameral collaboration on digital accessibility, which could then underpin the administration’s American by Design initiative and ensure important accessibility outcomes from all vendors serving government customers are delivered and maintained effectively.
Derrios: The federal budgeting process really needs a reboot. Static budgets do not align with multi-year missions where risks are continuous, technology changes at lightning speed, and world events impact aging cost estimates. And without a real “return on investment” mentality incorporated into the budgeting process, under-performing programs with high sunk-costs will continue to be supported. But taxpayers shouldn’t have to sit through a bad movie just because they already paid for the ticket.
Brown: I’m watching how agencies continue to move toward the implementation of zero trust and how the data layer becomes the budget fight. With federal guides emphasizing data security, the 2026 question becomes, do programs converge on fewer, interoperable controls, or do they keep buying overlapping tools? My watch signals include requirements that prioritize data tagging/classification, attribute-based access, encryption/key management and auditability as “must haves” in acquisitions.
Alboum: Over the past few years, the federal government has made significant investments in customer experience and service delivery. The question now is whether those gains can be sustained amid federal staffing reductions.
Jonathan Alboum is a former chief information officer at the Agriculture Department and now federal chief technology officer for ServiceNow.
This challenge is closely tied to the “America by Design” executive order, which calls for redesigned websites where people interact with the government. A beautiful, easy-to-use website is an excellent start. However, the public expects a great end-to-end experience across all channels, which aligns directly with the administration’s PMA objective to build digital services for “real people, not bureaucracy.”
So, I’ll be watching to see if we meet these expectations by investing in AI and other technologies to lock in previous gains and improve the way we serve the public. With the proper focus, I’m confident that we can positively impact the public’s perception and trust in government.
Hettinger: Set aside the know and historic challenges with the TMF, we really do need to figure out how to more effectively buy IT at a pace consistent with the need of agencies. Maybe some of that is addressed in the FAR changes, but those are only going to take us so far (no pun intended). If we think outside the box, maybe we can find a way to make real progress in IT funding and acquisition in a way that gets the right technology tools in the hands of the right people more quickly.
Dunne: I think follow through on the initiatives launched in 2025 will be important to focus on in 2026. The formal rulemaking process for the RFO will launch in 2026 and will be an important part of that follow through. And now that we have a confirmed Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, I think 2026 will be an important year for industry engagement on topics like the RFO.
Sieger: If the administration could tackle one long-overlooked issue with transformative impact, it should be the modernization of security clearances are granted, maintained and reciprocally recognized for contractor personnel supporting federal IT initiatives.
The current clearance system regularly creates 6-to-12 month delays in staffing critical IT programs, particularly in cybersecurity and AI. Agencies lose qualified contractors to private sector opportunities during lengthy adjudication periods. The lack of true clearance reciprocity means contractors moving between agency projects often restart the process, wasting resources and creating knowledge gaps on programs.
This is a strategic vulnerability. Federal IT modernization depends on contractor expertise for specialized skills government cannot hire directly. When clearance processes take longer than typical IT project phases, agencies either compromise on talent quality or delay mission-critical initiatives. The opportunity cost is measured in delayed outcomes and increased cyber risk.
Implementing continuous vetting for contractor populations, establishing true cross-agency clearance reciprocity, and creating “clearance portability” would benefit emerging technology areas such as AI, quantum, advanced cybersecurity, where talent competition is fiercest. From Guidehouse’s perspective, we see clients are repeatedly unable to staff approved projects because cleared personnel aren’t available, not because talent doesn’t exist.
This reform would have cascading benefits: faster modernization, better talent retention, reduced costs and improved security through continuous monitoring rather than point-in-time investigations.
If 2025 has been all about cost savings and efficiencies, what do you think will emerge as the buzzword of 2026?
Brown: “Speed to capability” acquisition models spreading beyond DoD. The drone scaling example is a concrete indicator of a broader push. The watch signals for me are increased use of rapid pathways, shorter contract terms, modular contracting and more frequent recompetes to keep pace with technology change.
Cornelius: Governmentwide human resource transformation.
Julie Dunne, a former House Oversight and Reform Committee staff member for the Republicans, a former commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration, and now a principal at Monument Advocacy.
Dunne: AI again. How the government uses it to facilitate delivery of citizen services and how AI tools will assist with the acquisition process, and AI-enabled cybersecurity attacks. I know that’s not one word, but it’s a huge risk to watch and only a matter of time before our adversaries find success in attacking federal systems with an AI-enabled cyberattack, and federal contractors will be on the hook to mitigate such risks.
Cummins: Fraud prevention. While combating waste, fraud and abuse is a perennial issue, the industrial scale fraud revealed in Minnesota highlights a danger from how Congress passed COVID pandemic-era spending packages without the same level of checks and balances that were put in place for earlier Obama-era stimulus spending. Federal government programs generally still have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to preventing improper payments, such as by using better identity and access management and other security tools. Stopping fraud is also one of the few remaining areas of bipartisan agreement among policymakers.
Hettinger: DOGE may be gone, or maybe it’s not really gone, but I don’t know that cost savings and efficiencies are going to be pushed to the backburner. This administration comes at everything — at least from an IT perspective — as believing it can be done better, faster and cheaper. I expect that to continue not just into 2026 but for the rest of this administration.
Derrios: I think there will have to be a focus on how government needs and requirements are defined and how the remaining workforce can upskill to use technology as a force multiplier. If you don’t focus on what you’re buying and whether it constitutes a legitimate mission support need, any cost savings gained in 2025 will not be sustainable long-term. Balancing speed-to-contract and innovative buying methodologies with real requirements rigor is critical. And how your federal workforce uses the tools in the toolbox to yield maximum outcomes while trying to do more with less is going to take focused leadership. To me, all of this culminates in one word for 2026, and that’s producing “value” for federal missions.
Sieger: Resilient innovation. While 2025 focused intensely on cost savings and efficiencies, particularly through DOGE-mandated cuts, 2026’s emerging buzzword will be “resilient innovation.” Agencies are recognizing the need to continue advancing technological capabilities while maintaining operational continuity under constrained resources and heightened uncertainty.
The efficiency drives of 2025 exposed real vulnerabilities. Agencies lost institutional knowledge, critical systems became more fragile, and the pace of modernization actually slowed in many cases as talent departed and budgets tightened. Leaders now recognize that efficiency without resilience creates brittleness—systems that work well under ideal conditions but fail catastrophically when stressed.
Resilient innovation captures the dual mandate facing federal IT in 2026: Continue modernizing and adopting transformative technologies like AI, but do so in ways that don’t create new single points of failure, vendor dependencies or operational risks. It’s about building systems and capabilities that can absorb shocks — whether from workforce turnover, budget cuts, cyber incidents or geopolitical disruption — while still moving forward.
Alboum: Looking ahead, governance will take the center stage across government. As AI, data and cybersecurity continue to scale, agencies will need stronger oversight, greater transparency and better coordination to manage complexity and maintain public trust. Governance won’t be a side conversation — it will be the foundation for everything that comes next.
Success will no longer be measured by how much AI is deployed, but by whether it is secure, compliant and delivering tangible mission value. The conversation will shift from “Do we have AI?” to “Is our AI safe, accurate and worth the investment?”
As a tumultuous year for the federal workforce comes to a close, many employees are in a much different position now than they were at the start of 2025.
The Trump administration’s efforts to reduce staffing across agencies resulted in the loss of more than 317,000 federal employees governmentwide. It’s a 13.7% decrease compared with September 2024 workforce numbers, Office of Personnel Management data shows.
At the same time, 68,000 new federal employees joined the civil service during 2025, according to OPM Director Scott Kupor. Combining both attrition and hiring data, the administration’s changes over the course of 2025 amounted to a net staffing decrease of about 10.8%.
Kupor touted the results as exceeding the administration’s goals, saying relatively few losses were due to reductions in force (RIFs) and firings of probationary employees. Out of all employees who left their jobs in the last year, “over 92% did so voluntarily,” he said, mainly via the deferred resignation program (DRP).
“None of this is to minimize the impact of anyone losing a job, but the ‘mass firing’ headlines do not in fact tell the full story,” Kupor wrote in a Dec. 10 post on X.
But some federal workforce experts argue that the administration’s reductions in 2025 amounted to a “forced exodus.” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, pointed to what he said have become “dangerous gaps” in key federal services, like food safety inspection, Social Security processing, veterans’ healthcare and disaster response.
“This loss of expertise directly harms Americans’ access to critical services and will take decades to repair,” Stier told Federal News Network.
Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) also pushed back against the idea of the administration’s DRP being “voluntary.” He said many feds who left government felt they had no choice — they felt threatened they would be fired anyway, if they did not leave through the DRP.
“Federal workers were hit with DOGE, watched agencies shutter, were threatened with imminent reductions in force, demagogued and bombarded with those mindless ‘5 things’ emails,” Walkinshaw said Dec. 11. “Nothing about that was voluntary — the ‘fork in the road’ was coercion.”
Still, the workforce cuts so far align with the Trump administration’s overall goal to “downsize the federal workforce,” as the Office of Management and Budget recently laid out in the new President’s Management Agenda. Specifically, the administration said it is targeting cuts of “unnecessary positions” and “poor performers,” while emphasizing more efficiency.
“We’ve seen significant success in right-sizing the federal workforce and addressing performance issues,” Eric Ueland, OMB’s deputy director for management, said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting.
The workforce reductions hit some agencies harder than others. The top three agencies facing staffing reductions are the departments of Defense, Agriculture and Treasury — with Treasury’s reductions mostly concentrated within the IRS, according to research from the Partnership for Public Service.
By scale, DoD has seen the largest staffing reduction across government. The department lost over 61,600 employees during 2025 — a total of about 8% of its total workforce.
Following just behind DoD, the Treasury Department lost more than 31,600 employees, yielding a staffing reduction of nearly 28%.
And at USDA, the loss of more than 21,600 employees over the last year amounted to a roughly 22% staffing decrease overall.
But other agencies, such as USAID and the Education Department, saw even deeper cuts to their workforces, despite being smaller agencies by volume.
Governmentwide, the loss of more than 300,000 federal employees has shown up in a multitude of ways. At the IRS, for instance, an agency watchdog warned there will likely be issues with the 2026 tax filing season, as a direct result of the 25% cut to the IRS workforce. And at USDA, the staffing reductions are affecting the work of some of the department’s underlying agencies.
The Partnership for Public Service said the cuts are harming communities as well. An analysis of more than 530 stories on the federal government throughout 2025 shows the impacts of the federal workforce reductions across the country.
“Notably, more than 45% of these stories involve harms to science-related sectors, including agricultural research, healthcare and public land management,” the Partnership said. “Together, they show the direct, tangible consequences these changes are having on individuals, organizations and communities.”
Over the course of 2025, the impacts also continued to spread. In a survey the Partnership conducted in September, 46% of respondents said they or someone they know had been impacted by the government cuts. That’s up from 29% of respondents who said the same in March.
Still, there are many who view the Trump administration’s changes positively. About 80% of those who are supportive of the federal workforce overhauls said they believe the changes will make their communities and lives better, the Partnership’s September survey found. But even among those who were supportive of the changes, 41% still expressed concerns about a loss of experience and knowledge in the federal workforce in the short term.
The changes are impacting many who have stayed in their jobs as well. Federal employees are experiencing disruptions in the workplace at a rate far higher than the national average, according to a recent Gallup survey.
Close to one-third — about 29% — of federal employees say their workplace has been disrupted “to a very large extent.” That’s nearly triple the 10% of U.S. employees who say the same, Gallup found. Across the federal workforce, it’s leading to increases in stress and loneliness, as well as a decline in employee engagement.
Robert Shea, a federal workforce policy expert and former OMB official from the George W. Bush administration, said the workforce changes have had a “chilling effect” on leaders across the career civil service — something he believes will continue into 2026 and beyond.
“Many career officials are now more cautious about how, when and whether they offer professional advice,” Shea told Federal News Network. “That’s particularly when that advice could be perceived as resistance rather than implementation.”
The hybrid and remote work paradigms spawned by COVID, coupled with the severe downsizing of the federal workforce, are resulting in a surfeit of federal office space, both owned and leased. Add the aging of the federal inventory and the growing cost and impact of decades of deferred maintenance, and literally hundreds of government properties nationwide have the potential to be vacated and disposed of. And yet, in the world of federal real estate, there persists the sense that despite all the alignment on the need for action, the federal government is still struggling to effectuate the changes everyone agrees it so desperately needs. A brief survey of the landscape underscores the challenges the government faces as it continues its halting efforts to modernize and right-size its real property portfolio.
The Office of Management and Budget’s Reduce the Footprint and Freeze the Footprint initiatives of 2012 and 2015, respectively, arguably began the process of reigning in government space requirements and were quite successful at the agency level. But the lack of meaningful change in the size of the portfolio led to great congressional disenchantment, particularly with the General Services Administration’s real property disposal program. That led to the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act of 2016, which expedited parts of the disposal process and established the Public Buildings Reform Board to facilitate the identification of properties for disposal. Following COVID, low levels of building utilization further spurred Congress to pass the USE IT Act in 2024, which required agencies to track their space utilization and gave GSA more authority to relocate agencies out of underutilized buildings.
Fast forward to today and there has been meaningful progress. Per USE IT and further direction from OMB, agencies are reporting their utilization data; agencies now are considering sharing space in each other’s buildings; GSA is accelerating the process of preparing buildings for disposal; and GSA now is using commercial real estate brokers, not only to market major properties for disposal, but to actually conduct the sales as well. All of these steps make great sense and represents marked change from past practice.
It seems clear that the structural imbalance between the size of the government’s owned portfolio and the funding available to maintain it now is widely recognized, and the shift of agencies to smaller, leased spaces will continue in earnest. This long-in-the-making alignment between Congress and the administration should be a harbinger of a long overdue, and potentially more rapid, realignment of the federal real estate portfolio.
Unfortunately, the typical headwinds remain. For example, even in the best of times, federal real estate has struggled to gain the attention and focus needed to effect meaningful change. Administrative matters typically take a back seat to program and policy issues, and staffing and funding, both for GSA and the agencies, are more challenging than ever.
But much hard-earned momentum has been built around the needed transformation of the federal real estate portfolio, and there are still opportunities to sustain it. Ideally, GSA, with support from OMB, would work aggressively with agencies to firm up strategic housing plans based on new staffing levels. Centralized funding, perhaps along the lines of a revolving fund paid back by agency rental payments, would enable agencies to conduct the GSA-directed relocations and consolidations necessary to adapt their real estate footprints to their new staffing needs. This would allow for the release of older, inefficient buildings and the acquisition of newer, leased space as necessary. With OMB’s focus and attention (and extensive contract support), GSA could greatly expand use of existing tools like its exchange authority, “administrator’s discretion,” ground leases, negotiated sales and more, to facilitate more private sector-like transactions and trim the portfolio more aggressively.
In this ideal world, GSA would also proactively expand its coordination with local governments, especially in Washington, D.C., to understand the likely future use and zoning of these now-surplus properties. That would enable GSA to address its statutory obligations for historic preservation and environmental mitigation from a “best value” standpoint. From there, GSA could then perform its due diligence to ensure that the sales maximize values while avoiding market saturation and other negative community impacts. With top-down direction, focus and resources, the potential exists to finally get to a leaner and more productive portfolio for government agencies, better outcomes for the communities, and better values for taxpayers.
Adam Bodner is a principal at ABodner Consulting and is vice president of the Federal Real Property Association. The views expressed are his own.
The Defense Department is expanding secure methods of authentication beyond the traditional Common Access Card, giving users more alternative options to log into its systems when CAC access is “impractical or infeasible.”
A new memo, titled “Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Unclassified & Secret DoD Networks,” lays out when users can access DoD resources without CAC and public key infrastructure (PKI). The directive also updates the list of approved authentication tools for different system impact levels and applications.
In addition, the new policy provides guidance on where some newer technologies, such as FIDO passkeys, can be used and how they should be protected.
“This memorandum establishes DoD non-PKI MFA policy and identifies DoD-approved non-PKI MFAs based on use cases,” the document reads.
While the new memo builds on previous DoD guidance on authentication, earlier policies often did not clearly authorize specific login methods for particular use cases, leading to inconsistent implementation across the department.
Individuals in the early stages of the recruiting process, for example, may access limited DoD resources without a Common Access Card using basic login methods such as one-time passcodes sent by phone, email or text. As recruits move further through the process, they must be transitioned to stronger, DoD-approved multi-factor authentication before getting broader access to DoD resources.
For training environments, the department allows DoD employees, contractors and other partners without CAC to access training systems only after undergoing identity verification. Those users may authenticate using DoD-approved non-PKI multi-factor authentication — options such as one-time passcodes are permitted when users don’t have a smartphone. Access is limited to low-risk, non-mission-critical training environments.
Although the memo identifies 23 use cases, the list is expected to be a living document and will be updated as new use cases emerge.
Jeremy Grant, managing director of technology business strategy at Venable, said the memo provides much-needed clarity for authorizing officials.
“There are a lot of new authentication technologies that are emerging, and I continue to hear from both colleagues in government and the vendor community that it has not been clear which products can and cannot be used, and in what circumstances. In some cases, I have seen vendors claim they are FIPS 140 validated but they aren’t — or claim that their supply chain is secure, despite having notable Chinese content in their device. But it’s not always easy for a program or procurement official to know what claims are accurate. Having a smaller list of approved products will help components across the department know what they can buy,” Grant told Federal News Network.
DoD’s primary credential
The memo also clarifies what the Defense Department considers its primary credential — prior policies would go back and forth between defining DoD’s primary credential as DoD PKI or as CAC.
“From my perspective, this was a welcome — and somewhat overdue — clarification. Smart cards like the CAC remain a very secure means of hardware-based authentication, but the CAC is also more than 25 years old and we’ve seen a burst of innovation in the authentication industry where there are other equally secure tools that should also be used across the department. Whether a PKI certificate is carried on a CAC or on an approved alternative like a YubiKey shouldn’t really matter; what matters is that it’s a FIPS 140 validated hardware token that can protect that certificate,” Grant said.
Policy lags push for phishing-resistant authentication
While the memo expands approved authentication options, Grant said it’s surprising the guidance stops short of requiring phishing-resistant authenticators and continues to allow the use of legacy technologies such as one-time passwords that the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Office of Management and Budget have flagged as increasingly susceptible to phishing attacks.
Both the House and Senate have been pressing the Defense Department to accelerate its adoption of phishing-resistant authentication — Congress acknowledged that the department has established a process for new multi-factor authentication technologies approval, but few approvals have successfully made it through. Now, the Defense Department is required to develop a strategy to “ensure that phishing-resistant authentication is used by all personnel of the DoD” and to provide a briefing to the House and Senate Armed Services committees by May 1, 2026.
The department is also required to ensure that legacy, phishable authenticators such as one-time passwords are retired by the end of fiscal 2027.
“I imagine this document will need an update in the next year to reflect that requirement,” Grant said.
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