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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
House Democrats are pressing the Office of Personnel Management for answers on how the agency is addressing abnormally high volumes of federal retirement applications that are inundating the government’s processing systems.
In a letter sent Monday, a group of lawmakers raised concerns about the delays retiring federal employees are currently experiencing, amid a major retirement influx spurred by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program (DRP).
“This foreseeable and avoidable administrative failure is the clear result of an administration that has prioritized a purge of the federal civil service over government efficiency, leaving thousands of federal employees in administrative and financial limbo,” the lawmakers wrote in the Dec. 22 letter, obtained by Federal News Network.
The letter from Democrats, led by Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), comes in direct response to reporting last week from Federal News Network, which showed that many retiring federal employees are facing significant delays on their applications, while being left in limbo with limited information from their agencies. Some are still waiting for their retirement payments to kick in, months after officially separating from government.
“This surge of applications caused by the administration’s policies has now overwhelmed agency HR offices and payroll providers before many cases even reach OPM, a bottleneck the administration should have anticipated and planned for if it were serious about efficiency,” the Democrats wrote.
The lawmakers, who are all members of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called for OPM Director Scott Kupor to explain how OPM has been handling the retirement surge, and how it has been working with agencies who are facing delays of their own in processing retirement applications.
The committee Democrats are giving Kupor until Jan. 29 to detail how OPM has been helping agencies manage the processing challenges, how OPM plans to assess the impacts of HR staffing reductions, and how the application surge has affected customer service. The letter also calls for detailed data on how many agencies and payroll providers have been onboarded onto OPM’s new retirement platform.
“Federal employees, who devoted decades to careers in public service and provided valuable, non-political expertise to federal agencies now find themselves trapped in a prolonged cycle of delayed payments and benefits, lost paperwork, limited communication, and financial and administrative uncertainty,” the lawmakers wrote.
McLaurine Pinover, a spokeswoman for OPM, told Federal News Network that the agency “is aware of the longstanding challenges in the federal retirement system, which predate this administration.”
“That is why we are working diligently to modernize and digitize the retirement process, while prioritizing interim pay so retirees continue to receive income without disruption,” Pinover said.
Earlier this year, OPM launched a new platform, called the online retirement application (ORA), as a way to modernize the government’s paper-based retirement processing system. Agency officials have said the new ORA platform has been crucial over the past several months for managing the unusually high volumes of applications — something that would have been “extremely difficult” in the legacy system. In November, OPM reported that about one-third of incoming retirement applications were digital, and two-thirds were paper-based.
Although the lawmakers said OPM’s modernization efforts are “necessary,” they argued that the ORA is “insufficient” in addressing the immediate-term challenges of lower HR staffing, coupled with larger retirement volumes driven by the Trump administration’s DRP.
“As a result, retiring employees are often unable to reach already overburdened HR staff to correct errors, confirm receipt of paperwork or obtain basic status updates,” the lawmakers wrote. “This further compounds delays and administrative failures across the retirement process.”
Currently, OPM is far above its typical retirement workload due to the DRP, and seeing slower processing times as a result. In October and November combined, OPM took in nearly 44,000 retirement applications from agencies — more than triple the volume OPM saw at that time in 2024. The time it takes for OPM to process an application and finalize a retiree’s annuity has also continued to increase for most of 2025.
Along with OPM, agencies are also seeing slowdowns in their HR processing work, as they are required to review retiring employees’ applications before forwarding them to OPM.
A second wave of federal retirement applications is also expected imminently — something that will further flood the government’s processing systems in the coming months.
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