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 It has to be a structured requirements-evaluation process, a systematic approach to modernizing outdated statutory constraints, and a rigorous mechanism to prevent “corner cases” from derailing modernization.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 Many “requirements” cited today are actually legacy practices, outdated rules or agency preferences.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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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).

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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.”

The post A sea of challenges opens up with 105,000 feds retiring first appeared on Federal News Network.

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• 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.
  (Call for nominations for 2026 Presidential Rank Awards - Office of Personnel Management)
• 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.
  (House, Senate appropriators agree on another spending bill - House Appropriations Committee)
• 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.
  (Federal workforce bargaining unit status - Office of Personnel Management)
• 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.
  (CISA retires 10 emergency directives - CISA )
• 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.
  (NSA announces Tim Kosiba as next NSA deputy director - National Security Agency)
• 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.
  (GSA plans to make awards under Alliant 3 GWAC before April - Sam.gov)
• 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.
  (Trump order targeting defense contractor pay, stock buybacks is ‘full of ambiguity’ - Federal News Network )
• 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.”
  (New bipartisan bill seeks to overhaul complex reserve duty status system - Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.))

The post Presidential Rank Awards return in 2026 first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Brian Domenici

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.”

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Federal employees who are looking to join the Senior Executive Service may soon see changes from the Trump administration, as it looks to reform the training programs that are meant to prepare feds for SES positions.

New proposed regulations from the Office of Personnel Management outline the agency’s plans for changing the requirements, timeframe and content of SES “candidate development programs.”

If implemented, federal employees interested in joining the SES would see a shorter timeline for completing the development program, more rigorous requirements to fulfill, and more consistency in the training content — regardless of which agency they work for.

Overall, OPM stated the agency is looking to drive a “shift in the culture of the SES” through the proposed changes, while also emphasizing the role of SES members in executing the Trump administration’s policy agenda.

“By increasing program standards and training requirements, an SES [candidate development program] will better equip program participants to excel in senior leadership roles and effectively implement the president’s agenda,” the Dec. 18 proposed rule noted.

Candidate development programs generally help prepare career federal employees for roles in the SES. But currently, the programs are inconsistent across government, according to OPM. Different agencies set different training requirements for potential SES members. Some agencies simply don’t have an SES candidate development program to begin with.

“Inconsistencies … have yielded mixed results across participating agencies,” OPM officials wrote. “That variability has resulted in different training and development experiences … and leads to some programs that are more effective than others in preparing their leaders.”

Specifically, OPM is proposing to create a standardized and governmentwide version of the SES candidate development program. By using a consistent training template, OPM said the program will be more streamlined and lead to consistent metrics that can be compared across agencies and over time.

On top of standardizing and revising the content of SES candidate development programs, OPM also proposed shortening the timeline for participants to complete the program. The plan is to bring the timeframe down to 9-12 months in most cases, rather than the 1-2 years candidates currently get to complete the program.

“This length of time involves considerable expense and resources to ostensibly turn ‘almost ready’ talent into ‘ready now’ talent,” OPM wrote. “Decreasing the program cohort duration allows for a more expedited timeline of identifying near ready talent and preparing them fully to fill SES vacancies.”

Along with shortening the timeframe, OPM is also looking to increase the required training hours in the development program, from 80 hours up to 100 hours. Candidates would also have to complete at least 10 hours of “coaching and mentoring,” as well as at least one “developmental assignment” lasting about four months.

OPM said the added requirements would “enhance and broaden the candidate’s experience, increase his or her knowledge, and maximize his or her understanding of the overall functioning of the agency, so the candidate is prepared for a range of agency positions at the SES level.”

Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, said she generally sees OPM’s increased focus on the SES candidate development programs as a positive change. Although there have been discussions for more than a decade on possible reforms to the programs, she said over time, not many changes have moved forward.

“Anything that starts thinking about how to make the programs more consistent, more robust, and how to ensure you’re getting qualified folks into the Senior Executive Service — that’s a good focus,” Mattingley said in an interview with Federal News Network. “But it will still take a while just see that play out. Agencies are going to have to re-evaluate their programs make them fit with OPM’s standards — and then actually send people through it.”

Currently, SES candidate development programs are largely inconsistent, both within and across agencies, Mattingley said. Some employees who join the SES have completed a development program, but many simply apply for a senior-level position without any further training. At the same time, some employees who complete a candidate development program may not end up joining the SES.

Mattingley said it will be important to track how much agencies ultimately invest in their training and development programs. That includes investments in developing entry-level employees at the start of the leadership pipeline, she added.

“This is not a new idea,” Mattingley said. “People have been trying to reform the SES for many years, but agencies didn’t implement it in the way or at the scale that I think people hoped that would happen.”

In its new proposal, OPM said development programs are a “crucial” tool for agencies, as they assemble succession management in their workforces and prepare “high-potential” employees for the SES.

“These programs aim to cultivate leaders equipped with a governmentwide perspective and the competencies necessary to tackle complex challenges,” OPM wrote. “Through the introduction of more stringent … certification requirements, OPM aims to enhance training and development for aspiring SES and accelerate the placement of well-prepared leaders to ensure leadership continuity.”

OPM’s new regulations build on initial guidance from May, which told agencies to begin changing how they hire and develop SES candidates. That same guidance also directed agencies to update their SES candidate development programs to align with “new administration priorities.”

Many of the changes for the SES also come in response to an executive order President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office, calling for restored “accountability” in the SES.

The proposed regulations are open to public comments until Feb. 17. OPM is looking for feedback in particular on additional research it should consider, if there should prescribe time requirements for specific topic areas, the benefits of expanding assessments in the development program, and where there have been similar “promising practices” in the private sector.

Marcus Hill, president of the Senior Executives Association, expressed support for efforts to improve consistency and rigor in the training standards, but cautioned that SES candidate development programs should remain non-partisan and be able to transcend presidential administrations.

“SES candidate development programs play a vital role in preparing leaders who can serve any administration with professionalism, integrity and readiness,” Hill said. “We encourage OPM to implement these changes in a way that preserves agency flexibility, avoids unnecessary administrative burden and ensures that high-quality leadership development is accessible across the federal government, including at smaller and resource-constrained agencies.”

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