Communicating Directly with Federal Workforce
Scott Kupor is the new director for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). He has a background in the private sector, having spent nearly 30 years in the tech and venture capital world.
Among his goals for OPM are creating “surgical,” transparent fiscal reforms that respect the dignity of federal employees. He also aspires to shape the federal workforce into one that’s efficient, innovative, and merit-based, rather than entrenched in legacy systems rewarding tenure and an aversion to taking risks.
Part of the approach he will use is to explain both the “what” and “why” of the actions being taken. In his testimony before the Homeland Security Committee, he noted that secrecy undermines trust and effectiveness. He also believes a resilient, values-driven culture is key to successful organizational change
Blog on OPM for the People
In his first blog post for communicating directly with the federal workforce (and the American public), Kupor wrote:
My goal is to open up the federal workforce to the people it serves – the American taxpayer. Every Friday (I hope), to share a behind-the-scenes look at what’s happening at OPM, what we’re focused on, and why it matters to you.
These blogs reflect Kupor’s beliefs and how they will impact management decisions. In the first few weeks of his posts, he appears to be open about what is going on at OPM and why some actions are being taken. We can expect that sentences such as “By the end of this calendar year, OPM will have seen about 1,000 departures, roughly one-third of our workforce” federal employees will not rejoice over the direction OPM is taking.
In the same posting, Kupor wrote: “[O]perational efficiency is a continuous process. You don’t just reduce costs and move on. Rather, we have a lot of work ahead of us to re-prioritize, re-focus and, yes, re-energize to prove that government can adapt, improve, and lead by example.”
In his latest post, it is becoming clear how OPM sees the future of government. Citing significant “legal wins” and how “[W]hen the law intersects with important policy issues, things get really exciting!”, Kupor displays the values and issues that will be guiding his tenure at OPM.
Luevano v. Ezell
For more background on this recent event, this FedSmith article highlights the history and its impact on the federal workforce. While some comments about the article display the emotions from those who disagree with the direction now being taken by the federal government, here is how the new OPM Director views the decision:
This decision enables the government to operate in a common-sense manner – by testing job candidates for the skills they claim to possess versus the historical practice of relying on a candidate’s own self-assessment. Step one in the path toward true merit-based hiring.
This clearly shows that testing will be resumed for most new employees joining the federal government. “PACE had been validated as correlating with key job skills, supporting a merit-based civil service.” Any new test is likely to be different than PACE or at least an updated version of it as it was last used in 1981.
AFGE v. Trump
In the FedSmith article summarizing the Court of Appeals decision allowing the administration to move forward with banning federal unions based on national security concerns, the article raised the question: “Will federal employee unions survive?”
It is significant that the OPM Director cites this as such an important direction for the federal government. Kupor wrote:
A central tenet of President Trump’s administration is to improve the efficiency and accountability of the federal workforce and to ensure we can attract and retain exceptional civil servants. For too long federal spend has traveled in only one direction – more dollars and more headcount – without a focus on whether we are doing the most important things on behalf of the American people at the most efficient cost. In addition, the government has been hampered in its ability to hire based on merit.
When Democrats were in the White House, unions played a major role in government.
For example, under President Clinton, Janice LaChance was the OPM Director. She had been deeply involved in advocating for a labor union when she was director of communications and political affairs for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) for about five years before starting work at OPM. Her major accomplishments included elevating OPM’s profile to Cabinet status, advancing Clinton’s government reform agenda, pushing telework for federal employees, and championing diversity and workforce modernization.
LaChance strengthened federal employee unions by making them “partners” in government, embedding them in decision-making councils, and positioning OPM as a neutral broker between unions and agencies and advocating programs favored by unions.
Prior to Clinton, President Carter championed the Civil Service Reform Act in coordination with AFGE’s National President, Ken Blaylock, and enabled the labor relations program created with an executive order to be strengthened by labor legislation.
Under Republicans, a different philosophy sometimes emerges.
Donald Devine was the OPM Director under President Reagan. Devine reduced the federal workforce through attrition. Civilian employment in the executive branch dropped by more than 100,000 positions between 1981 and 1984. He also curtailed union influence.
This was in addition to President Reagan’s 1981 confrontation with the air traffic controllers’ union. After a deadline passed, he ordered the firing of more than 11,000 controllers who remained on strike.
He also advocated merit pay and performance appraisal systems with mixed results. He encountered numerous obstacles in his efforts to try to change the government’s culture, which he later outlined in a report.
Of course, what is often not mentioned in court filings is that federal employee unions often use their money and influence to help support and elect Democrats. They often function as an adjunct of that party operating within the federal government and, with official time and free office space and supplies, some of their efforts to elect political allies are effectively supported with government funds.
Optimizing Government
There are reports that the federal government will reduce its workforce by about 300,000 employees in 2025. This would be a decrease of about 12.5% for the year.
OPM Director Scott Kupor recently said 80% of those federal employees would leave voluntarily, and only 20% would be fired. This is roughly twice as many of the 154,000 workers that Reuters reported had taken buyouts last month.
If this estimate is correct, employees leaving the federal workforce will be more than twice the 5.9% attrition rate in the federal civilian workforce in fiscal year 2023. That is the most recent measure of voluntary departures and compiled by the Partnership for Public Service.
According to the Partnership for Public Service, between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, the federal workforce expanded by more than 140,000 employees, a change of over 7%.
The largest increase occurred in 2023, adding over 80,000 federal employees, increasing the size of the full-time, permanent federal workforce to over 2 million employees.
Legacy Management in Government
In his confirmation hearing, Kupor criticized a government culture that rewards legacy, risk-avoidance at all costs, and tenure. He stated this kind of system undermines innovation and effectiveness. Instead, he advocated for a system that rewards merit, innovation, measured risk-taking, and efficiency.
Here is an example from a former OPM employee of what he is trying to eliminate.
I worked at OPM (formerly the Civil Service Commission) under President Carter. It was a good job.
Those of us who were labor relations trainers went into federal agencies and conducted seminars for supervisors throughout the government. There was immediate feedback from students and the ego satisfaction of doing a good job for the agency in front of hundreds of people who provided immediate feedback provided tremendous satisfaction for all of the trainers who were successful.
As OPM trainers, we often distributed a booklet on labor relations to class participants. It was a quick summary of supervisory responsibilites in federal labor relations.
I discovered most of the booklet had been copied from a copyrighted source. I rewrote the book on my own initiative to avoid the problem, worked with my two immediate supervisors for approval along with the reasons for the change, and it was subsequently sent into the OPM bureaucracy, where it disappeared from my view.
I never heard anything more about it until the new version eventually emerged and was made available to agencies that wanted to order copies. Apparently, about 500,000 were distributed shortly after it became available.
After it was published, while riding in the OPM elevator, I found myself standing beside a senior manager. I doubted he knew who I was but he asked if I was the person who had written the labor relations booklet that had caused him so many problems. I confirmed I wrote the booklet, but was unaware of any problem, as it has been well received from everything I had heard.
The problem was that at least one senior manager had not been involved in the approval process, voiced dissatisfaction with other agency leaders, and the book was quietly pulled. The problem, I learned in the short elevator discussion, was that subtle legal nuances had not been explained, and it should have been rewritten by agency lawyers to provide greater context and missing legal citations. I had apparently embarrassed one or more people who had not been fully briefed during the process. The book was quickly pulled from distribution, and I never heard anything more about it.
While I was never told anything else, including any actual problems other than it had not been approved by someone in the chain of command, the personal embarrassment eventually receded.
I left OPM and rewrote the entire book—again with easy-to-understand examples and without legal citations that most supervisors were not inclined to pursue in their daily work.
Macintosh computers were a new tool that had become available. I quickly mastered the new machine and to published The Supervisor’s Guide to Federal Labor Relations and later versions with more comprehensive information (then co-authored by my talented business partner at the time, Dennis Reischl) on federal human resources. The later edition was entitled Managing for Uncle Sam.
Over a period of years, the company sold over 800,000 copies. The company thrived and grew beyond anything I had initially imagined possible. That possible future was unknown when I was chided for undertaking an initiative correcting a problem with the existing booklet.
I learned from the experience. I learned to keep my head down, avoided engaging in any public initiative attracting favorable attention that could embarrass senior managers not receiving public credit, and to avoid making that same management mistake when running a company several years later. I hired energetic, smart people with good ideas to help the company expand.
That is an obscure example, but it is probably repeated many times over in federal agencies. It appears that is the type of culture the administration is trying to correct.
Others have also tried these types of initiatives without lasting success. It may be different this time around. The reality is that there are many strong incentives in large, inherently political organizations that go against creating such an organization as that described by Mr. Kupor where reasonable risk-taking is accepted and seniority is often the highest priority.
His experience at OPM and working with agencies throughout the government will be challenging, educational, and possibly even uplifting and satisfying.
