With an impending winter storm expected to dump as much as 10 inches of snow — and then freezing rain on top of that — in the Washington, D.C. metro area, the Office of Personnel Management decided late Friday night to close federal offices on Monday and institute maximum telework.
OPM said in its weather status update that telework and remote workers are expected to work, but “non-telework employees generally will be granted weather and safety leave for the number of hours they were scheduled to work. However, weather and safety leave will not be granted to employees who are on official travel outside of the duty station or on an Alternative Work Schedule (AWS) day off or other non-workday.”
Additionally, OPM said emergency employees are expected to report to their worksite unless otherwise directed by their agencies.
Scott Kupor, OPM director, posted the decision on X.
Update (and the final one) – We have decided to close federal offices in the region for Monday. We will update the official status on the @USOPM website shortly. We hope that everyone stays safe (and warm) over the weekend. https://t.co/iJugsRw0iz
WTOP, Federal News Network’s partner station, said snow is expected to start in the DC metro area Saturday night and then get heavier into Sunday morning. Temperatures aren’t expected to climb out of the 20s, making the situation more difficult.
For federal employees outside of the DC metro area affected by the winter storm, each agency will make their operating status decision, according to the governmentwide dismissal and closure policy, which OPM updated in December.
“Federal field office heads generally make workforce status decisions for their agencies’ employees and report those workforce status decisions to their agencies’ headquarters,” the guidance stated. “Agencies located outside the ‘Washington capital beltway’ should consider governmentwide operating status announcements when developing local operating status announcements. Employees should always check their agencies’ operating status. Agency-issued operating status announcements should include procedures concerning telework, arrival and departure times, and leave requests.”
In previous years, the Federal Executive Boards (FEBs) coordinated weather and other emergency related closures. The Trump administration eliminated the FEBs in April.
The number of federal employees able to participate in situational telework or who are full-time teleworkers or remote workers is unclear. The Trump administration mandated federal employees return to the office on a full-time basis in January.
OPM did issue the fiscal 2025 telework report to Congress in December. In that report for 2024, 1.3 million, or 53%, of all employees were eligible to telework, which was a 2.2% decrease from 2023. Of those employees who were eligible to telework, 1 million, or 40%, participated in some form of telework, routine or situational. OPM said this was a decrease of 3.6% over 2023.
Agencies are getting more information on how to implement the recently finalized “rule of many.” The federal hiring strategy, several years in the making, aims to create broader pools of qualified job candidates while adding flexibility for federal hiring managers.
A series of guidance documents the Office of Personnel Management published earlier this month outlined the steps agencies should take to begin using the “rule of many” when hiring. OPM’s new resources also detail how the “rule of many” intersects with other aspects of the federal hiring process, such as shared certificates, skills-based assessments and veterans’ preference.
Under the “rule of many,” federal hiring managers score job candidates on their relevant job skills, then rank the candidates based on those scores. From there, hiring managers can choose one of several options — a cut-off number, score or percentage — to pare down the applicant pool and reach a list of qualified finalists to select from.
OPM’s new guidance comes after the agency finalized regulations last September to officially launch the “rule of many.” The concept was initially included in the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, and OPM during the Biden administration proposed regulations on the “rule of many” in 2023.
“Coupled with the use of functional skills assessments … the [rule of many] gives hiring managers the much-needed flexibility to distinguish candidates based on their demonstrated functional merit-based qualifications for the role in question,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote in a Sept. 8 blog post, the same day OPM issued the final rule.
The “rule of many” aligns with some aspects of the Trump administration’s merit hiring plan, OPM said, such as using technical assessments and shared certificates. OPM said the “rule of many” in particular aligns with skills-based hiring, since it can expand candidate pools with applicants who have more fitting skillsets.
The “rule of many” also encourages agencies to use more “comprehensive” assessments, like structured interviews or job simulations, OPM said in its new guidance. And it can “support improved hiring outcomes, particularly for nontraditional candidates, veterans and those with varied career paths,” OPM added.
But for many agencies, the actual adoption of the “rule of many” may be put on the back burner, according to Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service. She said without enough funding or staffing, agencies are not likely to overhaul their current and already well-established hiring practices in the short term.
“The ‘rule of many’ is a good tool, but until those ingredients are all put together, I don’t think that you’ll see it rolled out immediately,” Mattingley said in an interview.
OPM’s finalization of the “rule of many” last September officially ended agencies’ ability to use the past “rule of three” hiring practice. The older candidate assessment technique already had been largely phased out, but previously restricted agencies to only selecting from the top three ranked applicants.
The “rule of many” also differs from most agencies’ current candidate-vetting technique, called “category rating,” which lets federal hiring managers assort job applicants into categories such as “qualified,” “better qualified,” and “best qualified,” then select a candidate for the job from the highest category.
When “category rating” was introduced years ago, it was an improvement over the “rule of three,” but Kupor said “category rating” created other challenges — namely, that all candidates within a single category would be considered equally qualified.
“In other words, the categories are minimum hurdles for consideration, but they don’t distinguish between applicants within a category,” Kupor said in September. “For example, if a score of 80% is the minimum hurdle to qualify into the ‘best qualified’ category, an applicant who scores 100% is treated no differently than one who scores 80%.”
OPM said in its new guidance that the “rule of many” uses the strengths of “category rating,” while adding flexibility to the process. It also allows for “finer distinctions” between candidates and broadens the range of applicants available for selection.
In most cases, OPM said the “rule of many” is preferable over “category rating.” But there are also best use cases for each hiring mechanism. Higher-level positions with more robust assessments will usually require the finer distinctions between candidates that the “rule of many” provides. But for more entry-level positions that don’t require highly technical qualifications, the “category rating” system may be just as effective.
Adopting the “rule of many” will also require a significant cultural shift at agencies, which the Partnership’s Mattingley said can be difficult. Existing strategies like skills-based hiring have not yet been fully adopted at agencies, which may indicate that the uptake of the “rule of many” will also be slow, she explained.
“Until agencies crack the nut on really leveraging skills-based hiring, I don’t think it’s going to be this big change in the immediate future,” Mattingley said. “You need skills-based hiring in order to leverage the rule of many, because you have to be able to make much finer technical assessments on the skills between candidates if you’re going to rank them in the way rule of many does.”
OPM’s “rule of many” guidance comes a few months after President Donald Trump officially lifted the governmentwide hiring freeze. But the White House has emphasized that when hiring, agencies should still focus on maintaining their now-smaller staffing sizes.
“Hiring is still a big question this year,” Mattingley said. “It does look like the administration is going to encourage agencies to hire, except at the same time, agencies are still facing budget uncertainty. They’re facing downward pressure on headcount.”
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).
As he marked one year since being sworn into office, President Donald Trump on Tuesday touted the actions of his administration — including praising the major reductions to the federal workforce throughout 2025.
“I don’t want to cut people, but when you cut them and they go out and get a better job, I like to cut them,” Trump said during a nearly two-hour press briefing, while also stating his administration “slashed tremendous numbers of people off the federal payroll.”
The White House on Tuesday also released a list of “365 wins” over the last year, commending the administration’s efforts to ensure a “merit-based” federal workforce. The list includes federal workforce actions overhauling the probationary period; eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion across government; requiring employees to work on-site full-time; slashing federal jobs; and limiting agencies to one new hire for every four employees who exit the civil service.
“I say, get rid of everybody that’s unnecessary, because that’s the way you make America great again,” Trump said. “When you have all these jobs where people are sitting around doing nothing and they get a lot of money from the government, it’s no good.”
But good government groups such as the Partnership for Public Service tell a much different story of the administration’s impact on the federal workforce. Max Stier, the Partnership’s president and CEO, described 2025 as “the most significant reduction in federal government capacity that we’ve ever experienced in our history.”
“And that reduction in capacity is best represented in our most important asset: our federal workforce,” Stier told reporters on a press call last week.
Governmentwide, federal workforce data shows that about 320,000 federal employees left government during 2025, while just tens of thousands joined the civil service. The Office of Personnel Management reported a net loss of about 220,000 federal employees over the course of the year.
“It tells a disturbing story about who we’ve lost in our government and what is actually happening to the workforce,” Stier said. “But it doesn’t tell you anything about what is truly most fundamental — their morale and what they think about what’s happening right now.”
The Partnership, a non-profit organization that advocates for non-partisan, “good government” reforms, released a report on Tuesday, noting that the Trump administration’s actions over the last year created “confusion, distrust and stress within the federal workforce.”
“There were large-scale layoffs of employees, cuts to government programs and the ending of many grants, altering how the government does — or does not — serve the public and the outcomes it can achieve,” the report states. “Not only did the government lose invaluable expertise, it became less responsive to public needs and less prepared to keep Americans safe.”
“It is impossible to gain a full picture of the layoffs and their impact,” the Partnership added. “The administration has provided few specifics about what positions have been eliminated and which personnel have been laid off or incentivized to resign.”
The Partnership’s report also detailed the specific impacts of federal workforce losses over the last year, including effects at agencies like the IRS, Social Security Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, FEMA and many others.
As a result of the governmentwide staffing cuts, the Partnership argued, agencies are less prepared to deliver disaster assistance during emergencies, and less efficient in administering crucial government programs, leading to delays in basic services and increased wait times.
By contrast, OPM Director Scott Kupor has argued that the Trump administration’s federal workforce overhauls will lead to better employee accountability, merit and performance across government. Kupor also touted the loss of one-third of OPM’s internal workforce during 2025, while saying the agency’s service delivery improved.
“President Trump was clear from day one: The federal workforce must be accountable, performance-driven and focused on serving the American people,” Kupor said in a Dec. 31 press release. “This year, OPM delivered on that vision — modernizing government operations, rewarding excellence and putting taxpayers first.”
But Rob Shriver, director of the Civil Service Strong program at Democracy Forward, questioned the Trump administration’s workforce reductions, saying there are no forward-looking plans for continuing to effectively deliver services after the cuts.
“The singular focus on headcount reduction as a blunt instrument reveals that DOGE was never about efficiency,” Shriver, a former acting director of OPM during the Biden administration, said in commentary on Tuesday. “It was about retribution and stifling dissent by intimidating federal workers into leaving their jobs or, if they decided to stay, intimidating them into not questioning their political leaders.”
At the same time, information on the federal workforce’s perspective over the course of 2025 will likely be limited. After months of postponing, OPM last year opted to cancel the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. In an attempt to fill the data gap, the Partnership conducted its own federal workforce survey.
The results of the Partnership’s survey are expected to be released in March. But Partnership officials have said it will still be difficult as an external organization to replicate the depth of data OPM can attain through FEVS.
Going forward, the Trump administration is looking to make further changes for the federal workforce, including overhauls to the probationary period and federal hiring processes, as well as performance management and senior executive development.
OPM’s Kupor said the upcoming changes will make government “leaner,” while making federal employees more results-oriented, accountable and efficient.
But some painted a darker picture for federal employees throughout 2026.
“The harms caused by these cuts have already begun to play out, and we’ll see more and more of that in 2026, when the impacts of the thoughtless workforce cuts are felt more deeply around the country,” Shriver said.
The Trump administration is also expected to soon issue a final rule to implement “Schedule Policy/Career.” The forthcoming regulations will let agencies reclassify career federal employees in “policy-influencing” positions, in effect removing their civil service protections and making them easier to fire at-will.
“The change of our federal government into one that is a loyalist workforce, as opposed to a professional one, is a process that we anticipate moving forward in 2026,” Stier said. “As challenging as 2025 was, I think we can expect even harder days ahead in 2026.”
The Office of Personnel Management extended the deadline to apply for the U.S. Tech Force, due to what it said has been “tremendous interest and a recent surge in applications.”
The Tech Force program initially launched in December, as a way to temporarily hire technologists into government for two-year stints to work on critical tech challenges across agencies. Those interested now have until Feb. 2 to apply for a spot in the program, according to a Thursday social media post. OPM is targeting 1,000 recruits to the program by March.
It’s not clear how many individuals have so far submitted applications to Tech Force. But OPM Director Scott Kupor said more than 35,000 people expressed initial interest in the program.
“We’re working through our funnel now of how many of those people will give us a resume, how many people will do the application,” Kupor said Wednesday during an event hosted by Washington AI Network. “From my perspective, the interest is phenomenal.”
The federal tech recruitment program incorporates skills-based hiring practices by not requiring candidates to have a college degree to apply for the program. It is also targeted in large part toward hiring early-career talent — something the government has struggled with for years.
“If we do nothing, basically, we have a pending problem where we’re going to have a ton of people retiring over the next five or 10 years, and we’ve done absolutely nothing to actually replenish the pipeline,” Kupor said. “So, to us, this is the perfect opportunity. We can fill a talent gap in the technology area, and we can also start to solve what we call the early-career problem in government.”
Early-career staffing in government, however, has declined over the last year due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Currently, 7.9% of the federal workforce is under age 30, compared with 8.9% a year ago. In contrast, about 41% of the federal workforce is over age 50, and 13.5% of federal employees are eligible to retire, according to OPM workforce data.
“You saw a disproportionate number of young, tech-savvy federal employees being shown the door,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told reporters Thursday. “The federal government has had a history of insufficient generationally diverse talent, and that went down even further over the course of the past year.”
Additionally, as part of the more than 320,000 federal employees who left government last year, OPM workforce data shows that agencies lost nearly 13,000 IT managers governmentwide. That includes a net loss of about 4,300 IT managers in the Defense Department, and 1,400 IT managers at the IRS.
But through the Tech Force program, Kupor said his goal of creating more flexibility for technologists to move between jobs in the federal and private sectors may lead to better recruitment of early-career federal employees.
“If you’re an early-career person, you don’t need to make a 40-year decision as to whether you’re going to be in government or be in the private sector,” Kupor said. “I think it would be healthy, both for the government and for the private sector, if we had more people who come in and out … We want to create a fluid career track, particularly for early-career folks.”
Kupor expressed interest in scaling up the initial 1,000-member Tech Force cohort over time. He also discussed the possibility of expanding the federal recruitment program to other fields, such as HR specialists and financial analysts.
To recruit talent for Tech Force, OPM is collaborating with various private sector companies, along with the NobleReach Foundation — a non-profit organization with an existing STEM scholarship program targeted toward public service. The organization is expected to work with OPM to help connect agencies with Tech Force recruits in AI, cybersecurity, data science and more.
“We’re at a transformational time right now — how people think about their careers is going to be very different,” NobleReach CEO Arun Gupta said Wednesday during the Washington AI Network event. “You may decide you want to stay, you may decide to leave, but we celebrate both options. We want them to be ambassadors for understanding what public service is about and stay connected to public service.”
The Tech Force hiring effort is far from the first time the government has created a short-term program seeking to recruit technologists and early-career talent. Initiatives during past administrations have included the U.S. Digital Service, now called the U.S. DOGE Service, as well as the U.S. Digital Corps.
“Some of what we’re seeing right now, frankly, is duplicating stuff that used to exist that no longer does … and we did see an outflow of a lot of tech talent in the federal government,” Stier said. “It is obviously better that they’re now trying to bring more tech talent in, but it’s going to be more difficult given the track record that they’ve had in shutting down preexisting programs that were intended to solve for the same problems.”
Stier also emphasized the importance of integrating the temporary Tech Force employees with the current federal workforce to maximize technological progress in agency programs.
“It is not really possible to achieve significant long-term improvement by trying to strap on some external force that parachutes in for a short period of time,” Stier said. “You really need to invest in the people that are already there, that have deep knowledge not only about the subject matter of the programs, but also about the way government works.”
The Pentagon doesn’t know exactly how many civilian employees telework or work remotely across the Department of Defense, according to the Government Accountability Office.
While DoD has good data on which positions are eligible for telework or remote work, it does not consistently track whether civilian employees are actually using those programs. As a result, official figures have at times overstated remote work usage by counting eligible positions instead of the number of employees approved to telework or work remotely, a new watchdog report shows.
In May 2024, for instance — a period within the December 2021 to February 2025 span reviewed in the new GAO report — the Pentagon publicly reported it had 61,549 remote employees. One month later, however, the Defense Department told GAO it had 35,558 remote workers.
“The reason that happened is because they were reporting position eligibility. They were not reporting the individual employees. That’s exactly what we found — they had good data on the positions eligible but didn’t have such good data on who was actually using those programs,” Alissa Czyz, director of defense capabilities and management at GAO, told Federal News Network.
“We found that two-thirds of the positions in 2024 were eligible for telework, but the data were not very good when you got to the individual employee level,” she added.
Czyz said her team found that most DoD civilians were already working in person even before the current return-to-office policy, and that fully remote workers made up only a tiny fraction of the workforce.
“According to our data, the vast majority of civilians — about 81% — were in person. About 1% were doing remote work. That perception that large amounts of federal employees were teleworking, at least at the Department of Defense, did not bore out in our analysis,” Czyz said.
Since President Donald Trump terminated remote work for federal employees, about 8% of the DoD civilian workforce — roughly 62,000 employees — had not returned to in-person work. About 6%, or 45,000 workers, did not return to office after accepting offers for deferred resignation. The government used the deferred resignation program last year to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Another 2%, or about 17,000 people, did not return due to reasonable accommodations.
No formal review of telework, remote work
Office of Personnel Management guidance requires agencies to evaluate how telework and remote-work programs affect their mission, employee recruitment and retention, and operating costs. However, GAO found that the Defense Department has not evaluated the impact of those programs on the department’s broader goals.
While there were scattered efforts across the department to assess some aspects of telework and remote work, there was no comprehensive, departmentwide evaluation of both benefits and drawbacks of those programs. One data source — the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey — previously included telework-related questions, but OPM canceled the survey this year.
Czyz said her team was able to gather some anecdotal feedback on telework and remote work, with DoD officials citing benefits such as improved communication, recruitment advantages for hard-to-fill positions and potential cost reductions. Some disadvantages included reduced in-person collaboration and decreased morale among employees who were not eligible for telework. But ultimately officials were not able to provide concrete data demonstrating cost savings or other outcomes.
“I mean, the bottom line was they were not conducting formal evaluations of telework or remote work,” Czyz said. “There was maybe some anecdotal cost savings with reduction in office space and that sort of thing, but there had been no formal evaluation of cost savings in the department.”
DoD also hasn’t assessed whether increased in-person requirements have created new costs, but GAO is examining those potential increases as part of a separate review of the department’s use of office space. That review comes as DoD seeks to reduce its office footprint while simultaneously bringing employees back to the office. GAO expects to release that report in early spring.
The Pentagon updated its telework policy in 2024 for the first time since 2012, instructing DoD components to “actively promote” telework and remote work and to eliminate barriers to program execution through education and training. The department has since rolled back the policy.
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at (301) 830-2747.
The new landscape of civilian federal government employment during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 global outbreak looks strikingly similar to your house. That’s because most likely it is, say U.S. Army personnel advisors. In an effort to protect the health of the military workforce while maintaining operational momentum, many organizations are sending civilian employees home. Telework has expanded to meet the need. (Photo courtesy of April Gail Pilgrim)
Andy’s story is an all too familiar one for many executives leaving federal service.
Andy — not his real name — found what he thought was the perfect fit in the private sector after leaving federal service earlier this year. It was with a big company, in a sector he was intimately familiar with and the opportunities across the federal sector were growing.
But less than a year into his new position, Andy is joining the ever growing number of former federal employees who are hanging out their own shingle as a consultant.
“There was a little bit of a mismatch in expectations, probably both on my part and on the company’s part. I thought the role I would fill would make use of my background and skills at a policy level. But the company was looking for someone who was more technical and could help out at the tactical level,” said Andy, who requested anonymity in order to talk about his experience with a federal contractor. “Too many times people in these private sector companies don’t actually understand how to leverage government executives and government executive expertise.”
Andy’s story likely will be repeated by hundreds of federal executives over the next year.
If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn over the last month, you may have seen what seems to be a constant stream of executives leaving federal service. Whether they’re retiring or they took the deferred resignation program or it’s just through normal attrition, the exodus of federal executives feels more acute than ever before.
Just take a look at the numbers:
There are 551 fewer Senior Executive Service (SES) members in 2026 than in 2025, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s new workforce data website. The number of SESers dropped to 7,336 as of Jan. 8, 2026, from 7,887 in August 2024.
Meanwhile the pipeline of people at the General Schedule, or GS-14 and GS-15 levels, who are in line to become SESers, also saw significant one-year reductions.
The reduction of employees at the GS-14 level comes after years of growth. For example, in 2019, agencies had 117,600 GS-14s, but the 8,000 drop between 2024 and 2025 basically erases all the growth since 2023.
The changes to employees at the GS-15 level are less dramatic, but still erases growth, albeit smaller growth, since 2021.
The reduction of senior leaders isn’t all that different than what agencies saw across the board last year. There are 219,000 fewer federal employees in 2025 than in 2024.
Interestingly enough, OPM says the median age of the federal worker remains at 47 years old, but the percentage of federal employees who are eligible to retire dropped to 13.5% from 15%. The Small Business Administration and NASA have the largest percentage of employees, more than 25% respectively, who are eligible to retire.
OPM says 105,858 retired from federal service in 2025. The Defense Department saw the largest number of employees leave via retirement at 31,689, while the departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Justice, Treasury and Health and Human Services all saw more than 6,000 employees leave via retirement.
Pipeline of future leaders narrows
Concerns over the impending retirement wave isn’t new. Good government groups and employee organizations have been highlighting their concerns for decades. But with the combination of retirements, employees taking the DRP, the administration firing probationary employees and people just plain quitting, there is more concern than ever about the pipeline of current and up-and-coming federal managers.
Michelle Sutter, the director of the Senior Executives Association board, spent over 15 years in government before leaving last year under the DRP. Sutter said the one-year reductions in SESers, as well as GS-14s and GS-15s, is worrisome for several reasons.
“In conversations with our members, a consistent theme that we hear is that we have executive-level employees that are literally, at times, doing the jobs of three to four people, and that’s unprecedented, because it tells us that regardless of whether you’re at the operational level or the executive level, you’ve got people functioning in roles sometimes that are outside of their daily operations that they would normally do,” Sutter said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The effect of this is it puts stress on the leaders. It makes it difficult to focus on mission delivery. If you’re having a tough time focusing on mission delivery, it makes it difficult to provide services to the American people. It also creates a stressful situation and leads to burnout because leaders are in a position where it’s difficult to lead effectively when you’re trying to manage daily operations, doing multiple roles yourself, and then you’re expected to lead teams and manage programs and make sure that you meet the needs of the agencies.”
Sutter said GS-14s and GS-15s, who are more at the operational level, are facing similar challenges.
While these GS-14 and GS-15s may now have more opportunities to step into acting or temporary roles that would help them prepare to move into the SES, burnout, cuts to training and education opportunities and the need to deal with constant change remain a big challenge for these employees.
Sutter said the pipeline of senior managers who are ready to move into the SES has also been narrowed.
“We need to really focus on our career senior executives. I think over the next year, success is really going to depend on stabilizing leadership teams being disciplined about the use of different roles, whether they be acting or permanent, and really investing in executive development and recognizing that executive effectiveness is critical to mission delivery,” Sutter said. “This is not about routine federal leadership as it was in the past. How agencies support career executives now will absolutely shape continuity, performance and leadership capacity well beyond the transition.”
Sutter added that SEA was pleased to see OPM coming out with new training and education programs. She said SEA hopes agencies have the funding and give employees the time to take advantage of these courses.
Advice for those joining the private sector
For those executives jumping on the wave of leaving federal service, the private sector may be just as challenging. But the experiences of Andy and others demonstrate what executives need to consider as they move into industry.
“The job market is pretty tough for a lot of people today. It’s flooded. It’s kind of a buyer’s market at the moment,” Andy said. “It’s easy to say, you really need to make sure that, that you’ve got the right fit. But for somebody who really needs a job and needs the income, that may be easier said than done. But I would say, ideally, you really should be conscious about that fit aspect. The one thing that I found as I talked to other government executives, who had worked with industry, is they made a similar comment that they thought part of the challenge was that a lot of times people in these companies don’t actually understand how to leverage government executives and government executive expertise.”
Tim Teal, the CEO and founder The Bellwether Group and a former National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command official, posted some solid advice on LinkedIn about what federal executives should keep in mind as they are leaving government.
Teal said most of the exits he’s seen were not about competence. They were about mismatched expectations. “The executive thinks they are there to advise and shape strategy. The company expects immediate impact,” he said. “In government, authority is derived from role, statute, and mission. In industry especially government contracting sector, authority is derived from revenue, margin and growth.”
Another rule of thumb Teal highlighted was about reputation. He said if you think your reputation will protect you from layoff or other challenges, you are incorrect. Teal said reputations open doors. Performance keeps them open.
“The most successful former government leaders I know didn’t cling to status. They learned the business. They tied their value to outcomes. And they never confused respect with immunity,” he wrote to Federal News Network in an email. “The biggest mistake I see is people negotiating the title before they understand the business. If you do not know how the company makes money, who buys from them and where they are hurting, you are walking in blind. Don’t accept roles with vague charters. If no one can clearly explain what success looks like in six months, that role probably will not last six months.”
As for Andy, who is now going out on his own as a consultant, he said while his experience was definitely eye opening, he doesn’t blame the company or himself for things not working out. But he does offer one piece of advice: “Trust your gut. I did have some sort of ticklish feelings in my gut, like, that’s not the answer that I was looking for.”
Congress is seeking more in-depth information on staffing numbers, federal contracts, remote work agreements and other federal workforce details, according to several provisions of the two spending bills Senate and House appropriators released over the weekend.
The latest two-bill “minibus,” which has bipartisan, bicameral support, includes appropriations for Financial Services and General Government, as well as National Security and the State Department. The package tees up fiscal 2026 spending levels for the State Department, Treasury Department, Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration and Small Business Administration, along with many other agencies.
For OPM, lawmakers are now eyeing $167.5 million in appropriations for 2026. That’s about $51.5 million short of OPM’s enacted $219 million appropriation for fiscal 2025. But along with the topline numbers, appropriators also appear to be looking for more details on federal workforce numbers and programs, according to a joint explanatory statement released Sunday alongside the legislation.
For one, the spending minibus includes a provision seeking further data on changes to the federal workforce size over the last year. No later than 60 days after the bill is enacted, OPM would have to publish specific data points on the number of civilian federal employees. That includes the numbers prior to the start of President Donald Trump’s term, as well as the numbers as of Sept. 30, 2025 — the final date of the deferred resignation program (DRP) — and finally, the current federal workforce levels.
The legislation additionally calls for a report from OPM of how many employees opted into the DRP, as well as the agencies, occupations, locations and pay rates for those now-former federal employees.
OPM already recently released some further information on federal workforce numbers. The updated “Federal Workforce Data” website details employee data by geographic location, agency, age, education level, bargaining unit status — and much more. The new platform also reaffirms the significant reshaping the federal workforce experienced over the last year, showing that the current federal workforce size is the lowest it’s been in at least a decade.
In addition to details on federal workforce size, congressional appropriators are also seeking more information about agencies’ use of remote work agreements for federal employees. Within 90 days of enactment, OPM would have to detail how and when employees are deemed eligible for remote work, how often those agreements are reviewed, and how remote work agreements influence locality pay adjustments, according to the legislation.
The policy provision comes shortly after OPM released updated telework and remote work guidance, which now aligns with the Trump administration’s significant curtailing of telework and remote work across the federal workforce. While emphasizing as much on-site presence as possible, OPM’s revised guidance also defined limited exceptions to return-to-office requirements for certain federal employees.
A separate provision of the spending bill would require OPM to report to Congress at least two days before signing any potential sole-source contracts, as well as any contracts worth $2 million or more.
The new provision comes as OPM is working out the details of a federal contract and action plan to modernize and centralize the more than 100 current federal HR systems used across government. During May 2025, OPM initially announced a sole-source contract award to that end, but then quickly canceled the award. OPM later issued a request for proposals (RFP), and agency officials have said they expect to soon award a contract that will eventually result in one cohesive, governmentwide HR system.
Separately, congressional appropriators are also planning to direct OPM to provide quarterly updates on the Postal Service Health Benefits program, “including any gaps in OPM’s capacity to successfully implement the program.”
The provision comes a few years after OPM first established the PSHB program for Postal Service employees. In July 2025, OPM’s inspector general office then reported that the agency’s enrollment platform for PSHB was at risk of an “operational failure” due to staffing reductions within OPM.
Bipartisan, bicameral appropriators agreed to the latest appropriations minibus on Sunday, looking to generally lower spending levels in comparison with enacted appropriations for fiscal 2025. Subcommittee leaders said the agencies that fall under those two bills would see a cumulative total of $9 billion less in spending than last fiscal year.
The proposed budget cuts are more modest than many of the steeper spending reductions the Trump administration requested for fiscal 2026, which now appear to be off the table. The new legislation marks further progress toward Congress reaching a government spending agreement, just weeks away from the Jan. 30 funding deadline.
The latest minibus comes after congressional appropriators teed up a three-bill minibus early last week. The House later passed those three bills, which are now under consideration in the Senate. In total, three of the 12 appropriations bills for 2026 have completely cleared Congress.
The Presidential Rank Awards are back for 2026, and the Office of Personnel Management is now looking for nominations. The prestigious honors program is reserved for career members of the Senior Executive Service and other senior career employees. OPM’s new call for nominations marks a restart of the awards program, which the Trump administration canceled for 2025. Agencies have until Feb. 5 to submit nominations to OPM for any executives they want to be considered for a 2026 award.
Congress takes another step toward fully funding the government this year. House and Senate negotiators have found common ground on the fiscal 2026 Financial Services and General Government, National Security, Department of State and related programs bills. House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittee leadership agreed to the full year spending bill over the weekend. Lawmakers said these agencies would see a total of $9 billion less than what they received in 2025. But the Treasury Department, for instance, would see a $700 million increase over the president's request, but more than a $2 billion cut as compared to 2025. House lawmakers passed a mini-bus bill last week to fund several agencies including the departments of Commerce, Justice, Interior and Health and Human Services.
There’s been a steep decline in federal employees’ ability to join a union. New data from the Office of Personnel Management shows that currently, about 50% of feds are not eligible to be part of a bargaining unit. That’s a 20% increase in ineligibility from just a year earlier. It leaves about 38% of federal employees who are in a bargaining unit and another 12% who are eligible, but who haven’t officially joined up. The shift is largely due to President Trump’s orders last year for most agencies to terminate their union contracts.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says some of its cyber directives are no longer needed. CISA is retiring 10 emergency directives issued to federal agencies between 2019 and 2024. Typically CISA issues an emergency directive when a cyber vulnerability poses an urgent and immediate risk to federal systems and data. The ones being retired include the 2021 emergency directive that told agencies to address the SolarWinds Orion software compromise. CISA said the directives are being retired because the objectives were achieved or changes in cyber practices have made them obsolete.
The National Security Agency is bringing a familiar face back to serve as its number two official. Timothy Kosiba has been named deputy director of the NSA. He’ll serve as the senior civilian official at the agency overseeing strategy execution, policy, operations and management of civilian leadership. Kosiba began his career at the NSA and served in leadership roles including chief of Computer Network Operations and then deputy commander of NSA Georgia. Kosiba spent the last three years in various roles in the private sector.
The wait for awards under the General Services Administration's Alliant 3 IT services governmentwide acquisition contract may soon be over. GSA said in a new notice on Sam.gov that it plans to make Alliant 3 awards by the end of March. GSA has been evaluating proposals since last April and released the initial solicitation in June 2024. Over those 18 months, GSA issued 12 amendments to the RFP and had to justify continuing the initiative under President Donald Trump's federal acquisition executive order from March 2025.
President Donald Trump took aim at defense contractors Wednesday, announcing new restrictions on executive pay and stock buybacks as part of the administration’s push to speed procurement and revitalize the defense industrial base. The government already has a whole set of tools in its toolbox to incentivize, reward or penalize companies based on their performance. What is different here, however, are the remedies the administration is focused on. The main challenge in implementing this executive order will be defining the key parameters contractors are going to be held accountable for. In addition, while Trump promised to cap executive pay at $5 million, the figure did not make it into the executive order. Instead, the president directed the defense secretary to ensure future contracts require executive compensation to be tied to performance, such as on-time delivery and increased production.
The Defense Department has long tried to simplify and reform the reserve duty status system, which has expanded to more than 30 separate statutes scattered across about 20 different titles of federal law. This complex system has created pay and benefits inequities and frequent administrative delays when National Guard members and reservists shift between duty statuses. A new bipartisan bill would consolidate more than 30 different duty statuses under which National Guard members and reservists can be called to service to just four. If passed, the Duty Status Reform Act would ensure service members performing assignments in the same category receive the same pay and benefits. Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.), the bill’s sponsor, said the effort is his “number one priority, returning to Congress.”
The Federal Bureau of Prisons is offering retention-based federal pay incentives to correctional officers and other critical frontline positions, in an attempt to address longstanding understaffing across the agency.
The upcoming retention bonuses will take effect in February, according to an all-staff message BOP Director William K. Marshall III sent Monday.
“These retention incentives are about keeping the experience in our institutions while we throw everything we have to deliver reinforcements and bring relief to an exhausted workforce,” Marshall wrote in the Jan. 5 email, viewed by Federal News Network.
The BOP for years has faced significant workforce challenges, including persistent understaffing and high use of overtime. The Government Accountability Office once again named the management of the federal prison system as an item on its 2025 high-risk list, in part due to the workforce issues at BOP.
Retention incentives are one way federal agencies can try to address challenges with keeping employees in their jobs — and it’s a tactic that BOP has used for years. Generally, agencies provide the pay incentives to federal employees in positions that are considered hard to fill. The pay increases are distributed over a certain time period and up to a certain percentage, as long as the employee meets the incentive requirements.
“We will continue to pursue special salary rates for hard to fill positions where they make sense and will have the greatest impact,” Marshall wrote.
Using retention incentives is a temporary pay fix — federal regulations state that agencies must review the bonuses annually to determine if they are still needed. Agencies are required to terminate incentives when the conditions that warranted the incentives in the first place no longer apply.
Because the incentives are susceptible to being revoked, some have advocated for larger pay fixes for the BOP workforce. A representative with the American Federation of Government Employees, speaking anonymously for fear of professional retaliation, called for the implementation of an across-the-board, permanent federal pay increase for all frontline BOP staff.
“While the retention incentives are appreciated, it’s doing nothing for us long-term. You’re attracting them, but you’re not retaining them. Within two years, they could say, ‘I’ve met my requirement,’ and then leave us to go to a different agency,” the union representative told Federal News Network. “We have to fix the pay structure to incentivize people to stay.”
The new incentives also come as BOP correctional officers are expected to receive a 3.8% federal pay raise, as part of President Donald Trump’s orders for a larger 2026 pay increase for certain law enforcement personnel.
But the AFGE official said that leaves other critical BOP positions, such as psychologists and nurses, with the smaller 1% raise — something that will likely sow tension among the frontline employees.
“The agency is putting a divide in our workforce — a lot of people in the field are just genuinely frustrated that the agency would take one group and pay them a certain amount and not the others,” the union official said. “This causes such a wedge.”
The upcoming federal pay incentives are a departure from BOP’s actions last March, when the agency reduced, and in some cases fully removed, retention incentives for certain correctional officers and other BOP staff. At the time, BOP said the decision to remove the incentives was made in an effort to address budget shortfalls. But the resulting pay cuts led some employees to leave their jobs.
Now, the value of the upcoming retention pay incentives depends on the employee’s position and location, as well as the staffing levels at that specific BOP facility. BOP defined three “tiers” of institutions, based on staffing levels, to determine the size of the bonus.
“Tier 1 and tier 2 institutions represent our most critically understaffed locations and will receive the strongest support,” Marshall wrote.
For instance, correctional officers at “tier 1” institutions will receive a 10% pay bonus, while correctional officers at “tier 2” institutions will receive a 5% pay bonus.
Meanwhile, all mid-level practitioners and psychologists — regardless of location — will receive a 25% retention bonus, the BOP email shows. All lieutenants, registered nurses and special education teachers will receive a 10% bonus.
Any BOP employees who are eligible for a new retention incentive, but who are already receiving an incentive, will maintain only the higher of the two values, at least until the end of September.
In his all-staff message, Marshall encouraged more BOP staff members to become correctional officers, saying that “those who choose that path will be eligible for the same special salary rates and location-based incentives while gaining the critical skills necessary to strengthen the security of our institutions.”
FILE - In this Aug. 26, 2020, file photo, the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind. The federal Bureau of Prisons will begin allowing inmates to have visitors again in October, months after visits were suspended at the 122 federal prisons across the U.S. The visitation plan is detailed in an internal memo issued Monday, Aug. 31, and obtained by The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)
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.
Clearer numbers on the federal workforce are coming into view, after the Office of Personnel Management launched a major update to one of its largest data assets on Thursday.
A new federal workforce data website from OPM aims to deliver information on the federal workforce faster, with more transparency and more frequent updates, than its predecessor, FedScope.
“This is a major step forward for accountability and data-driven decision-making across government,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said Thursday in a press release.
OPM’s new platform also reaffirms the significant reshaping the federal workforce experienced over the last year. The latest workforce data, now publicly available up to November 2025, shows governmentwide staffing levels at a decade low. According to OPM’s numbers, the government shed well over 300,000 federal employees last year, impacting virtually all executive branch agencies. When accounting for hiring numbers, there has been a net loss of nearly 220,000 federal employees since January 2025.
Data on federal employees’ bargaining unit status has also shifted significantly under the Trump administration. OPM’s new data platform shows that the share of the federal workforce represented by unions dropped from about 56% to about 38% over the last year, as a result of President Donald Trump’s orders to end collective bargaining at most agencies.
And agencies reported a 75% decrease in telework hours between January and October 2025, due to Trump’s on-site requirements for the federal workforce, which the president initiated on his first day in office.
The new website is the result of a major update to OPM’s legacy data asset, FedScope, which had been in need of significant modernization for years. In a report from 2016, the Government Accountability Office recommended that OPM update the FedScope platform and improve the availability of workforce data.
Users of OPM’s new public-facing website can filter the workforce data by geographic location, agency, age, education level, bargaining unit status — and much more.
Additional data that was not accessible on the legacy FedScope platform is also now readily available, including information on retirement eligibility, telework levels, performance ratings and hiring activities for the federal workforce.
Information on race and ethnicity across the federal workforce, however, is not featured on OPM’s new platform. That’s due to Trump’s executive order last year to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) across government.
OPM had been working to update several of its workforce data assets since at least the end of the Biden administration. Federal News Network reported in early January 2025 that the agency was already in the process of building out its data management capabilities for FedScope and the Enterprise Human Resources Integration system (EHRI).
OPM, under the Trump administration, then announced plans last July to relaunch FedScope with “immediate enhancements.”
“OPM will continue releasing new data, visuals and features on the site each month and will iterate on the platform as user feedback is received,” OPM said in its press release Thursday. “This launch represents just the beginning, with regular updates and new enhancements planned on an ongoing basis.”
A group of fired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees is getting their jobs back — for the second time — and will receive nine months of back pay.
Last month, NOAA sent an email to several fired employees, informing them that their April 2025 termination is being rescinded and they have the option to return to their jobs.
“As we discussed, NOAA is committed to a fresh start and we are eager to have you back on the team,” according to the email obtained by Federal News Network. “We recognize that it has been over six months since you were in this role, and we are prepared to support your transition back into the workplace.”
Probationary employees are generally still serving in their first year on the job, and are easier to remove than more tenured federal employees. But some affected federal employees were serving in probationary periods because they had recently accepted promotions.
Those employees were briefly reinstated following rulings by federal judges in March, only to be fired again in April after the Supreme Court paused the lower courts’ reinstatement orders. During that brief period, a fraction of reinstated NOAA employees completed their probationary period.
A reinstated NOAA employee, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, told Federal News Network that eligible individuals received calls from the agency’s human resources office with reinstatement offers just before Christmas, and that about 40 former employees have been reinstated.
“It will be like as if you never left. It will be as if you’ve been on administrative leave the entire time,” the employee recalled.
A NOAA spokesperson declined to comment.
Terminated employees who do not want their jobs back will still receive about nine months of back pay. NOAA will designate their separations as voluntary resignations from federal service, effective Dec 22, 2025.
“Please note that a decision to depart from federal service voluntarily will not impact your pay for the period on administrative leave. You will still receive back pay for the period of April 10, 2025 to January 12, 2026,” the email states.
According to the email, former NOAA employees who received reinstatement offers had until Monday to accept the offer. Those who accepted the offer will return to work on Jan. 12.
The email states that failure to respond by the deadline “may result in disciplinary action against you, up to and including your removal from the federal service.”
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled in September that the Office of Personnel Management unlawfully “directed agencies to fire under false pretense,” and ordered agencies to update personnel records to specify that these employees were not fired for poor performance or misconduct.
The judge, however, stopped short of offering reinstatement to fired probationary employees, citing a Supreme Court ruling last summer that the Trump administration has broad authority to reshape and shrink the federal workforce.
It’s not clear how many former NOAA employees declined reinstatement. The reinstated employee told Federal News Network that many former employees have “moved on” and pursued other work.
“I feel like I really closed the NOAA chapter for myself and sort of mourned that. It’s a place I originally thought I would spend my entire career — at least a significant portion. It’s a place where people are very passionate about the work, including myself,” the former employee said. “I had gone through that kind of grieving period. And I think having to even just make the decision of whether or not I was going to go back was emotional in many ways. You think you’ve moved on, and then all of a sudden, very unexpectedly, this opportunity presented itself.”
The former employee said a “sense of the importance of public service” was part of the reason for accepting reinstatement.
“Especially right now with how severe the staffing cuts have been at NOAA, when they can’t hire more people — at least right now, in most parts of the agency — I felt called to go back and help support my old office,” the reinstated employee said.
Politico’s E&E News reported last month that the Environmental Protection Agency has also rehired probationary employees it fired in early 2025.
Updated guidance on federal telework and remote work from the Office of Personnel Management now emphasizes as much in-person presence as possible for the federal workforce.
OPM’s latest revisions aim to better align with the Trump administration’s return-to-office orders from January 2025. The new guidance, which OPM updated in December, now says federal employees should generally be “working full-time, in-person.” And while federal telework and remote work can be “effective” tools on a case-by-case basis, OPM said those flexibilities “should be used sparingly.”
Beyond that, agencies should also have procedures for verifying that employees are working on-site, full-time, unless given an exemption, OPM said. And in the limited cases where employees are teleworking, agencies should have a process to determine whether teleworking is successful, or if it should be revoked.
“While individual agencies are in the best position to define what it means to ‘ensure that telework does not diminish employee performance or agency operations,’ determinations should be based on metrics and clear performance standards, along with the overarching principal that work should generally be performed in-person at an agency worksite,” OPM wrote in the December guidance document.
OPM’s new document also details when telework and remote work are “acceptable,” and the role of agencies in managing federal telework and remote work policies. When developing their policies, for instance, agencies should consider IT security, performance management and work schedules, among other factors, OPM explained.
Overall, the guidance should help agencies create “telework and remote work policies that are consistent across the federal government,” OPM said.
Nearly a year after President Donald Trump first ordered a full return to office for the federal workforce, around 90% of federal employees are now working on-site full-time, according to OPM Director Scott Kupor.
“The reality is we’re in a re-baselining period,” Kupor wrote in a Jan. 2 blog post. “After years of operating at levels of remote work and telework well beyond pre-pandemic norms, the government needs to reset expectations, tackle issues like excess office space, modernize our tools, and rebuild confidence that we can deliver consistently no matter where we work.”
The new on-site numbers from OPM come after Trump, on his first day in office, ordered all agencies to terminate remote work agreements, and return all federal employees to full-time on-site work, with a few exceptions. The current 90% in-the-office rate, according to Kupor, leaves about 10% of federal employees who have been exempted from on-site requirements and kept their telework or remote work agreements.
Agencies have granted limited exceptions for certain employees with disabilities, qualifying medical conditions or another “compelling reason” to telework, according to OPM. The new guidance additionally exempts military spouses and Foreign Service spouses working overseas from on-site work requirements. But agencies can still revoke federal telework agreements if they appear to diminish performance, or if an employee has repeated unexcused absences, OPM said.
“The president’s memorandum correctly recognizes individual circumstances matter and made clear that agencies should review these to make reasonable accommodations where appropriate,” Kupor wrote in his blog post. “But — and I realize many people may disagree with this — commuting time alone is not grounds for an accommodation.”
For locality pay purposes, OPM reaffirmed that employees with telework agreements are considered to be located at their agency worksite, as long as they are reporting in-person at least twice per two-week pay period. Employees on remote work agreements, who are not expected to report regularly on-site, are considered to be located at their alternative worksite.
The new document also defines when “situational telework” is appropriate, stating that it should only be authorized for a “compelling agency need,” and as long as it does not “diminish agency operations.” Regardless of the reason, OPM said situational telework is temporary and approved on a case-by-case basis — not part of a regular telework schedule.
Appropriate uses of situational telework include when federal facilities close due to inclement weather, or when an employee has a short-term illness or injury, or a religious observation, OPM explained.
In opposition to the Trump administration’s return-to-office push, some federal workforce experts have argued there are significant benefits of hybrid work — or a mix of in-person work and telework. Many say the availability of telework improves recruitment and retention, as well as agency outcomes. Federal employees themselves have also reported enhanced performance and productivity while operating in a hybrid work environment.
In contrast, Kupor said he believes the workplace suffers when employees aren’t in the office — and that communication and collaboration are “sub-par.”
“Strong connections are a feature of strong teams; those connections are much harder to build virtually,” Kupor wrote. “Proximity is especially important for new employees who may need more training, supervision, and mentoring.”
The federal retirement inventory has reached yet another new high. The Office of Personnel Management now has over 50,000 applications still awaiting a finalized annuity. The increase comes after more than 13,000 retirement applications entered OPM’s systems in December. It's taking OPM about 67 days to process a retirement case from start to finish. But OPM's numbers don’t include any retirement cases still pending with agencies. Some retirees report major delays in receiving their payments, months after separating from government.
The U.S. DOGE Service is looking for new hires. The White House-based tech shop is looking to fill positions within its core team as well as roles that work directly with other agencies to support their digital services. USDS doesn’t have traditional position descriptions. It’s encouraging candidates who are experts in their fields to apply and that USDS officials will match them to a position that’s the right fit. USDS is looking for candidates with backgrounds in engineering, product design, procurement and more.
The General Services Administration has kicked a Hampton Inn in Lakeville, Minnesota out of its FedRooms program. GSA removed the Hilton property from its lodging and travel systems after the hotel canceled rooms reserved for employees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Hotels participating in the federal travel program agree to honor government rates and accommodate travelers conducting official business. GSA said the Hampton Inn's decision to deny service based solely on an individual agency affiliation is not aligned with federal standards. In 2025, there are over 11,000 FedRooms properties available in over 3,000 markets around the globe.
The Secret Service wants to hire thousands of new staff over the next two years. The Secret Service is aiming to hire 4,000 new officers and staff through 2028. That would swell the agency’s ranks to 10,000 total employees, including 6,800 law enforcement officers. The Secret Service has struggled to recruit and retain agents and officers in recent years amid an expanding, high-profile mission. To meet its goals, the agency said it’s streamlining the recruiting process through accelerated hiring events. And it’s also offering many retirement-eligible staff retention incentives to keep them around longer.
The CIA has a new top lawyer. Josh Simmons has joined the spy agency as general counsel after being confirmed by the Senate late last month. Simmons previously served as principal deputy general counsel at the State Department. He also served stints as senior advisor and attorney advisor in State’s Office of the Legal Adviser. Simmons joined the CIA as the Trump administration faces persistent questions about the legality of its military actions in Venezuela and the Caribbean.
The Office of Federal Procurement Policy’s requests for new ways to improve federal acquisition regulations is closing soon. There are five days left for industry, agencies and others to comment on the next steps for improving the Federal Acquisition Regulations. OFPP's call for public comments closes on January 12. So far, OFPP has received 86 different ideas for how to continue to modernize and improve federal acquisition processes. These range from ensuring the “rule of two” remains in place for small businesses to expanding oral presentations and streamlined source selection beyond IT acquisitions to limiting the flow down requirements to small business subcontractors. Additionally, OFPP Administrator Kevin Rhodes held a series of roundtables last month with contractors, industry associations and others to gain their perspectives of the FAR overhaul.
Marines, civilians and industry experts will be able to test generative artificial intelligence tools against real-world challenges in early March at a now-rescheduled Marine Corps GenAI workshop. Originally scheduled for November, the service had to move the event due to a lapse in federal funding. The workshop will now take place March 9 through March 12 at Quantico, Virginia. Officials said the event will help the service identify high impact use cases for AI and develop the Marine Corps “North Star” to guide rapid AI integration. Participating commands are being asked to register Marines and civilians with “demonstrated expertise in AI and AI-related fields.”
Senators warn the IRS workforce may be stretched too thin in the upcoming tax filing season. The IRS lost about 25% of its workforce last year through voluntary separations and retirements. A recent watchdog report found these staffing cuts will make it more difficult for the IRS to detect fraud, process tax returns and provide tax help over the phone and in-person at its Taxpayer Assistance Centers. Seventeen senators asked top Treasury and IRS officials what steps they’re taking to assist taxpayers during this year’s filing season.
The Army has launched a new platform designed to modernize how it manages soldiers’ training data. The Army Training Information System replaced the legacy Digital Training Management System. The platform gives soldiers and commanders real-time visibility into training records, unit metrics and training schedules. The system was built using agile software methodologies and developed with continuous feedback from soldiers at all echelons. Army officials said the platform is designed to reduce time spent on administrative tasks to give soldiers more time for actual training.
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.”
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 specifics of a larger federal pay raise for law enforcement officers are coming into view, following President Donald Trump’s directive to offer a 3.8% salary increase for certain positions.
In a memo Wednesday, the Office of Personnel Management established new “special salary rates” for federal law enforcement personnel, as a way to implement the bigger raise for 2026.
“These new special rates support ongoing agency hiring efforts for mission-critical law enforcement positions essential to implementing the administration’s priorities to secure the border, enforce federal laws, and protect public safety,” OPM wrote. “Without these special rates, agencies may face challenges in recruiting and retaining the personnel needed to carry out these missions effectively.”
The pay increase for law enforcement is nearly quadruple the 1% federal pay raise that most civilian employees on the General Schedule will receive, but in line with a 3.8% raise for military members. Trump signed an executive order finalizing the 2026 federal pay raise on Dec. 18.
The pay increase will take effect Jan. 11, coinciding with the first day of the General Schedule’s first full pay period of 2026.
OPM’s new memo comes after Trump directed OPM Director Scott Kupor to “assess whether to provide” up to a 3.8% raise for “certain federal civilian law enforcement personnel.”
After consulting with various agencies, OPM determined that the following law enforcement personnel will receive a 3.8% federal pay raise for 2026:
Customs and Border Protection law enforcement officers, including Border Patrol agents, officers, criminal investigators, and Air and Marine interdiction agents
ICE personnel, including special agents, detention and deportation officers, and technical enforcement officers
Secret Service personnel, including security specialists, officers, investigators and technicians
Federal Protective Service criminal investigators and officers
Federal Bureau of Prisons correctional officers
FBI special agents
Drug Enforcement Administration special agents
U.S. Marshals Service officers and special agents
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives special agents
National Park Service park police officers
Interior Department law enforcement officers
Forest Service law enforcement officers and criminal investigators
Agriculture Department law enforcement officers in the Office of Safety, Security and Protection
State Department criminal investigators in the Diplomatic Security Service
National Nuclear Security Administration couriers
The memo provides more specifics on the eligibility of certain law enforcement personnel for the 2026 raise. The pay tables for law enforcement are also now available on OPM’s website.
Like the rest of the General Schedule, law enforcement pay rates are still capped at the pay rate for level IV of the Executive Schedule, which for 2026 is $197,200.
“This statutory pay cap will prevent some covered law enforcement personnel from receiving the full 3.8% increase, but most employees should receive at least a 1% adjustment,” OPM wrote.
OPM also told agencies to request additional special salary rates for other law enforcement positions, as needed. Generally, special salary rates are reserved for federal positions deemed particularly difficult to recruit and retain.
The Office of Personnel Management is addressing what have become growing concerns in Congress over the significant delays in federal retirement processing this year.
In a letter sent Tuesday to a group of House Democrats, OPM Director Scott Kupor touted the benefits of the new online retirement application (ORA) in helping to streamline processing, while at the same time arguing that outdated systems — not staffing levels — are to blame for the current challenges HR employees are facing.
“The main issues with federal HR, we have found, are not low staffing levels, but inefficient and outdated technology and antiquated, cumbersome regulations and processes,” Kupor wrote in the Dec. 30 letter, obtained by Federal News Network. “OPM under the Trump administration has done in a matter of months what the government failed to do for multiple generations: modernize the paper-based federal retirement system.”
Kupor’s comments are a response to a Dec. 22 letter from Democrats on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which raised concerns about the significant delays retiring federal employees are currently experiencing. Those delays are largely due to a surge of retirement applications from employees who opted into the deferred resignation program (DRP) earlier this year.
Now two months after thousands of federal employees separated from government on Sept. 30, some retirees have told Federal News Network they are still awaiting any retirement-related payments. Some also expressed frustrations about limited information from their agencies on the status of their applications.
In light of the challenges, a group of Democratic lawmakers last week pressed OPM for more details on retirement processing, and how OPM is helping other agencies manage the high volumes of applications. The Democrats’ letter criticized the DRP-inflicted surge of retirements as a “foreseeable and avoidable administrative failure.”
Kupor, in response, pushed back against the lawmakers’ criticisms that the DRP was not a truly voluntary program for federal employees. He also said OPM is “rapidly fixing” the manual, paper-based processes involved in federal retirement — namely through the launch of the ORA earlier this year. Over the last few months, Kupor said ORA helped expedite the retirement process at agencies where applications had been stalled.
“For example, just recently we were able to fast track 1,500 ORA applications that had been backlogged in the HR department of an executive branch agency to bypass the HR organization and transmit the applications electronically to payroll and then to OPM,” Kupor wrote. “These applications had been sitting for months — and were likely to be sitting for months longer; ORA enabled us to address this challenge.”
This year, OPM has also managed to improve its ability to provide interim annuities to more retirees immediately after their applications reach OPM, according to Kupor.
“This is a massive benefit to our retirees that we designed specifically to address the significant volume of applications we anticipated receiving in the wake of DRP,” Kupor wrote.
Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), who led the Democrats’ letter to OPM last week, said he appreciated Kupor’s response to their concerns, but added that “the facts remain and are stubborn.”
“First, the Trump administration fired or drove out hundreds of thousands of qualified civil servants. Now they’re facing a historic backlog of retirement applications managed by understaffed HR departments in the midst of a rocky rollout of a new IT system,” Walkinshaw said in a statement to Federal News Network. “I very much hope that Mr. Kupor can succeed in ensuring timely processing of federal retirement applications. But right now, he is failing.”
Due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, HR staffing decreased by about 5%, with agencies losing a cumulative total of about 2,600 employees, according to fiscal 2025 data. That does not include HR employees who took the DRP offer themselves and separated after September.
Despite the reductions, Kupor said federal HR is “hardly understaffed,” and that the main challenge is not with workforce size, but rather with outdated systems. With fully digital retirement applications in the ORA, he said processing times become much faster.
“As of today, ORA applications are being completed in approximately 40 days, compared with 90 days for paper-based applications,” Kupor wrote. “I am fully confident that this 40-day time period will continue to be reduced as we are able to get the payroll providers fully integrated into the new system.”
Kupor said OPM has also been meeting regularly with agency HR offices, payroll providers and the CHCO Council to “provide information about digitalization of the retirement process and offer support on an ongoing basis.”
“Any delays that annuitants are experiencing from HR-related activities should be directed toward these individual agencies,” he added.
Many retiring federal employees have told Federal News Network their applications are stuck in the earlier steps of the retirement process, with progress lagging in their agency HR offices and payroll providers. Some employees who retired in September said their applications have not yet made it to the later part of the process at OPM, where annuity finalization occurs.
Federal retirement experts have also said more issues appear to be occurring in individual agency HR offices, rather than at OPM — but that both entities are seeing delays. At the IRS, for instance, several retirees told Federal News Network they are still awaiting payments, or any information on the status of their retirement applications, and that phone calls to the HR office often go unanswered.
“It’s all dead ends,” one retiring IRS employee, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, told Federal News Network. “As a government employee, and after all the service that I gave, this is how we’re getting treated. People are sitting here with nothing because of the decisions they made. We can’t afford it.”
Still, Kupor pointed again to significant progress with the rollout of ORA earlier this year. The government’s major payroll providers — the National Finance Center (NFC), Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) and Interior Business Center (IBC) — have been onboarded to the new platform. Additionally, all CFO Act agencies, aside from the State Department, are currently using ORA, according to Kupor.
Smaller payroll providers including those at the General Services Administration and Postal Service are in an “interim adoption status,” Kupor said. OPM expects those providers to be fully onboarded to ORA in early 2026.
The largest remaining challenge with retirement processing delays, according to Kupor, is payroll providers who have not managed to fully automate their processes.
“We will be prevented from full automation until they free up the required resources to integrate with ORA,” Kupor wrote. “This integration will enable us to receive employee payroll information electronically, which will vastly accelerate processing times.”
Probationary federal employees are on track to see more restrictions when appealing any future terminations, according to a new proposal from the Trump administration.
Under new proposed regulations from the Office of Personnel Management, fired probationary employees would only be able to appeal their termination if they believe it was due to discrimination based on “partisan political reasons” or “marital status” — or if their agency diverged from standard termination procedures.
“These limited grounds of appeal for probationary terminations reflect the historical principle that probationary periods serve as a critical evaluation phase for new federal employees, and thus that agencies should enjoy great flexibility in separating employees serving probationary or trial periods,” OPM wrote in its proposal, which is scheduled to be published Tuesday on the Federal Register.
Generally, OPM’s regulations seek to alter both the latitude and method for probationary federal employees to appeal an agency’s decision to fire them. Along with limiting options for appeal, the proposal would put OPM in charge of adjudicating employees’ cases, rather than the Merit Systems Protection Board.
“Continuing to allow employees to appeal to the MSPB would not be as efficient as OPM adjudicating appeals,” OPM wrote. “MSPB procedures unnecessarily add complexity to a process designed for federal agencies to evaluate whether it is in the public’s interest to retain employees newly hired into the federal service.”
Instead of MSPB, fired probationary employees would rely on OPM’s Merit System Accountability and Compliance (MSAC) office to determine appeals — something OPM said “will provide much needed clarity and efficiency.” OPM also noted that unlike MSPB, the MSAC office does not have board quorum requirements — something that has previously stalled MSPB’s ability to complete some parts of its work.
But under OPM’s proposal, probationary employees would miss out on several key procedures MSPB uses in appeal cases. Currently, federal employees who appeal an adverse action at MSPB are given the right to a hearing, as well as an opportunity for a “discovery” phase to collect more information on the case.
OPM, however, argued that those steps of the process are costly and unnecessary. Under the proposed regulations, OPM in most cases would neither hold appeal hearings nor conduct a “discovery” phase. The agency would simply make decisions based on written records, unless it determines that additional information or a hearing is needed.
“While employees may lack some procedural mechanisms … streamlining the process will not have a consequential impact upon the substantive outcomes of the appeals, while improving the efficiency and consistency of the process,” OPM wrote.
OPM’s proposal marks the latest change the Trump administration is making to the federal probationary period, impacting new federal hires and recently promoted federal employees. OPM said the changes would help streamline and standardize the appeals process, as well as hold probationary employees more accountable.
The Trump administration has repeatedly argued that agencies have not been effectively using the federal probationary period for decades. In the new proposal, OPM pointed to a 2005 MSPB study, as well as a 2015 Government Accountability Office report — both of indicated “pervasive” issues with the probationary period.
“To this day, poor performance in the civil service has not been adequately addressed,” OPM wrote.
Some federal workforce experts, despite agreeing there is a need for probationary period reforms, have argued that the Trump administration’s heavier focus on terminations runs counter to the core purpose of a probationary period: ensuring agencies have highly qualified employees.
OPM’s proposed regulations align with the Trump administration’s broader overhaul of the federal probationary period earlier this year. In June, OPM issued a final rule that cemented an executive order from President Donald Trump.
Under the June rule, probationary employees can be terminated for broader reasons. Agencies can now decide whether to keep probationary employees based on the needs and interests of the agency, whether a probationer’s employment would advance the organizational goals of an agency, and whether it would advance the “efficiency of the service” — on top of considering both performance and conduct.
Additionally, near the end of the probationary period, OPM now requires that agencies affirmatively certify that probationary employees should continue in their new jobs, rather than earning tenure “by default.” And if a probationary employee is being fired, agencies no longer have to give a reason why — they only need to provide a date effective, which can be as soon as “immediately.”
The Trump administration’s changes also come after agencies faced multiple legal battles earlier this year, after firing tens of thousands of probationary employees based on “performance.” In September, a federal judge ruled that the firings were unlawful. Over the course of 2025, federal employees at some agencies were reinstated, while others were re-fired.
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