It’s the oldest challenge in government and business: How to make things easier for customers. In the digital age, customer service has evolved into something more ambitious: customer experience (CX). CX asks, among other things, how you get the idea of better service or experience down to the individual employee. To get some ideas, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin  spoke with Office of Personnel Management digital services expert Beth Martin.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin What is the latest thinking? What is OPM doing these days? There’s an executive order about a year ago on customer experience. It’s in the president’s management agenda. It’s in all of their management agendas, pretty much what’s going on these days.

Beth Martin We have two flagship activities that are undergoing. We have the OPM modernization. That’s OPM.gov, that’s also our intranet. And we even have a strategic goal speaking to that. So we are taking this very seriously, obviously. We also have another effort underway dealing with the Postal Service’s health benefits program, and that will be a really exciting development that we’ll finish up later this fall for the postal services workers and their annuity and some family members.

Tom Temin And just review for us what the goals of the OPM CX modernization are. That would be, presumably for federal employees writ large.

Beth Martin Yes. For federal employees who want to choose their health benefits, to choose their retirement benefits, for people who are considering coming into federal service, who want to see what’s available to them. All federal employees are our customers, and our federal retirees are our customers. And anyone who’s looking to have a federal job or do business with OPM or our customers.

Tom Temin And you mentioned intranet. It was the second phase in agencies and organizations putting their stuff out on the public internet. They said, well, we could do this internally also. But since all of this, there’s another development called artificial intelligence. Is that coming into this idea of understanding what a person is looking for and therefore revving up the intranet such that it can give more detailed information to that person, even though it may not be on a formal website. Does that make sense?

Beth Martin Yes. Are you thinking on the public side or on the intranet side?

Tom Temin Well, intranet side?

Beth Martin Well, there is an effort underway right now. It’s a pilot project and another colleague is heading that up. It’s a joint effort with the Air Force. So that is very exciting because that will be helping HR personnel. And so I think when we have more to share about that, that will be really exciting that we can talk more about that and how it can help streamline efforts.

Tom Temin Because if you look at the OPM website, it is extensive. Even just it’s coming in from the public as I do, just to see what do they exactly say about this day or that day type of thing. And there’s always documents linked and they in turn linked to other documents. Eventually you get to the statutes. It’s pretty deep what you offer, but it’s not all that easy to navigate or it might take a lot of time. I guess, is one of the gambits you’re thinking of, such that a natural language query could find all of those documents, assemble them for a person, and then maybe provide an answer that’s generated. It would be just for that question, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a page on an intranet.

Beth Martin Can we steal that idea? Tom? That’s a great idea.

Tom Temin It’s not original. I just heard it from somebody else. But well, tell us what you do plan right now. What’s the status of your own modernization?

Beth Martin I think in terms of modernizing it, going to the cloud, obviously we’re working hard on that to modernize legacy systems. And I don’t want to go too deep into that because that is not my area of expertise. I am just sharing what I am aware of. We want to do better by our customers, and so we’re working hard to understand what customers need so that we can provide that in a more streamlined manner. As AI matures and access to it becomes more commonplace, we obviously need to wait for those guardrails for AI. And what you mentioned would be very interesting. And there’s a long term impact which came about with search engines, not too recently where they talked about, I need everything on this topic and the AI scrapes from those websites and then you lose traffic on those websites. So I think those are down the road kinds of concerns. Who is the authoritative source of that information? Because the search engines can get it wrong.

Tom Temin Yes, indeed they can. We’ve all been down those rabbit holes. We’re speaking with Beth Martin. She’s digital services expert and customer experience designer at OPM. And tell us about the ways that you are making sure you understand what it is. It’s hard to say the customer because with a workforce of a couple of million, everybody’s unique, literally. And has unique situations. So what’s your best strategy for determining what the journey map should look like and all of these things. When you have 2 million people or if you’re a large business, you might have 20 million or 200 million.

Beth Martin That’s a really good question. The first thing we need to do is to understand what our agency mission is. Going back to basics and making sure that we are delivering on what we’re supposed to be doing. Government’s mandate is to serve. So we need to serve. And in order to do that, we need to know what our mission is. And everything that we do needs to be tied to that mission. And we have strategic plans with strategic goals and objectives, and we need to be aware of those so that we are delivering on those. In the case of OPM, as with any other agency, once we understand that perspective, that will be the North Star to help orient who do we serve? Who are the primary people who need these services? And we need to do some research. We need to do user research. We need to do user interviews and really get a very good understanding of the target audience that we are trying to reach out to and make sure that we are delivering what they need. We are delivering the top services. There are many things that agencies do, but we need to do the things that we are charged to do well and stay in our lane.

Tom Temin So the idea then behind this is CX has to be very specific to the agency, in the case of federal agencies, and there’s no one way to do it that fits everybody.

Beth Martin Right. Because we’re all serving different audiences and they will have different needs. You might have one agency who is serving people who have English language barrier, so that customer service need will be different than somebody who is providing internal services. So we really need to understand who our users are and their needs.

Tom Temin And you mentioned something else too. You serve individual federal employees. But really OPM also serves other agencies in official capacity, not individual capacity. And how does that complicate the CX  journey?

Beth Martin Well, agencies are people too. There are people who have those needs. So again, we need to make sure that we are serving up what that agency is connecting with us for what we deliver.

Tom Temin And tell us more about the Postal Service effort. It’s in their health care area. Is that something that could maybe translate later on to government wide for OPM? Because everybody does health care and everybody obtains it one way or another?

Beth Martin Yes. It’s a very complex process. When I first joined the OPM about 18 months ago, I was involved in a discovery effort where we were just looking at one aspect of several different processes for this larger effort of delivering service, and I really grew to appreciate it. I have family members who are involved in different aspects of the health care system, and I’ve worked at Health and Human Services and FDA, so I had some appreciation of what’s involved, but I had no clear understanding of the complexity of just this one aspect of it. So in this one particular case, the effort was for insurance carriers to offer up the three different health plans that they wanted to do that. And that is a contract, a bid process, and getting that information into a portal. And then OPM takes that and works that communicates with the health insurance company about negotiating, and then they award the contract. One I learned how that process went. And two, there were so many people involved in so many decisions. It really gives you an appreciation for how complex it is. And just mapping that whole journey was an astounding process. And doing that again for 5 or 6 more other major processes and getting all of those steps mapped and then looking at how can we streamline this? How could we make it easy for us? How can we make it easy for the insurance companies to come in and offer this? And by extension, how can we make this a better process for everybody involved? Because our customers in this case, are the insurance companies wanting to do business with us, which will ultimately help us give better service to the people who want the insurance plans.

Tom Temin Sure. So in trying to get to a better CX, you can also get to a better process.

Beth Martin Exactly.

The post What individual federal employees can do, to improve customer experience first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Personnel Management is asking agency leaders to take it up a notch to support federal employees’ mental health and wellness.

Every agency’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP) has a set of traditional offerings to help feds through personal and work-related issues — including mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment and financial and legal services. EAPs are voluntary programs that feds can opt into, when or if they’re looking for those services.

But now OPM is calling on agencies to revamp their EAPs and start including even more resources for feds, to create what the agency called Employee Wellness Programs (EWPs). New employee wellness guidance, which the agency published in May, expands on OPM’s EAP revitalization efforts.

Although OPM oversees the wellness programs governmentwide, each agency runs its own wellness program for internal employees.

“We noticed that some agencies are being leaders in this area and have adapted new programs that are creating a more comprehensive approach, which is what OPM is seeking to do with this guidance,” Jorday Taswell, a personnel research psychologist at OPM, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “We want to look at the mental, emotional and physical aspects of an employee’s health and wellness to really provide them with the most comprehensive arena of supports that are available.”

To design the new guidance and program, OPM considered what agencies that had successful programs were doing, then tried to replicate those strategies more broadly. OPM took examples from agencies that were adding more wellness services, beyond the scope of the traditional EAP model.

Some agencies, especially those already focused on health and wellness as part of their mission, such as the National Institutes of Health, offer even more services to their employees about specific challenges — relocation stress, peer-supervisor relations and work-life balance, just to name a few.

“They are trying to create a workplace culture that really values employee wellness and well-being,” Taswell said. “By speaking with their coordinators, we were able to highlight a couple of key components that we could adapt in this guidance to really make it comprehensive guidance for all federal employees.”

Following a series of focus groups and meetings with agency EAP coordinators, OPM developed its new guidance and program, building off of those additional services, to include more health and wellness options. For example, beyond the required options in the program, OPM said agencies should consider adding more resources wherever possible, including fitness classes, phone apps for wellness, health and wellness seminars, suicide prevention trainings and peer support programs.

Along with encouraging agencies to make more wellness resources available, one challenge is making sure employees know the resources are out there in the first place. Improving awareness, Taswell said, comes down to the work of agency managers and supervisors.

“Agency leaders are gifted with a unique opportunity to inspire inclusive work cultures, which prioritize employee wellness, and can really help set the standard for creating and maintaining an environment that normalizes conversations surrounding topics that may have historically had a bit of a negative stigma attached to them, such as mental health and mental health treatment,” Taswell said.

And beyond the actual services of the program, OPM said agencies should also focus on reducing negative stigmas around traditional EAPs.

“A lot of people tend to have an outdated understanding of EAPs, since they did traditionally originate as substance use treatment services with mental health counseling,” Taswell said. “However, today, they’ve really grown and evolved to encompass many more services and resources and sometimes employees are just not aware of these tools that are available to them.”

Again, much of the work to dispel myths about EAPs comes from the role of agency leaders. Many areas of the program, such as mental health wellness, have a traditionally negative stigma, so it’s up to agency leaders to set the stage, encourage a positive workplace culture and suggest employees take advantage of the resources when or if they need them.

The broadened EAP options OPM is pushing in its new guidance stem from a goal of the President’s Management Agenda, which includes the plan that “agencies will promote awareness of employee well-being and support initiatives that extend beyond the workplace.”

And it’s not just about mental health wellness — there’s a ripple effect, too. At the end of the day, employees with better mental health and wellness often feel more engaged and productive in their work, Taswell said.

“These employee wellness services can really help an employee to hone in on those areas and provide them with additional support, which can in turn lead to greater productivity, and help agency employees meet the mission of their agency,” Taswell said. “We encourage our agency leaders to promote these resources on a proactive rather than a reactive basis, so that employees can maintain their mental health on a consistent basis.”

The post OPM’s new employee wellness guidance focuses on being proactive first appeared on Federal News Network.

With many agencies’ return-to-office plans still uncertain, Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee want to take matters into their own hands.

GOP committee leaders changed their strategy for trying to get more federal telework data, now reaching out directly to agency heads. In a series of 25 letters, the lawmakers asked for up-to-date  numbers of teleworking federal employees, after saying the Biden administration was “not adequately tracking the specific levels of telework.”

The Biden administration “has not provided current data about the specific amount of telework occurring within federal agencies or across the entire federal workforce. Furthermore, it has provided no objective evidence concerning the impact of elevated telework on agency performance — including any deleterious impacts,” lawmakers said in the letters, published May 18.

The push for more data comes in a long line of frustrations from GOP lawmakers over federal telework. Earlier this year, Republican-led legislation called the SHOW UP Act urged the return of federal employees to pre-pandemic telework levels. The bill cleared the House in February, along party lines. Senate Republicans introduced companion legislation last week.

Republicans have said increased telework during and after the COVID-19 pandemic caused delays and backlogs in agencies’ public-facing services. But Democrats, advocacy groups and federal unions have said those challenges are largely due to understaffing and underfunding, and emphasized that telework remains a critical tool for federal recruitment and retention.

In preparation for the planned end of the national public health emergency, the Biden administration pushed agencies to start increasing “meaningful” in-person work. The Office of Management and Budget, in an April memo to agency leaders, told agencies to measure productivity and strike a balance between adding in-person work where necessary, particularly at agency headquarters, while still maintaining telework flexibilities.

But even with the administration’s call to increase in-office work, Republicans maintained that OMB’s memo did not go far enough.

“Even though the pandemic is over, the Biden administration is allowing telework levels far above those that existed pre-pandemic. This is occurring in an apparently indiscriminate, unaccountable manner, without oversight from the White House or the Office of Personnel Management,” Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a press statement. “Federal workers must show up to work in-person and the Oversight Committee will hold agencies accountable when their employees do not show up to work for the American people.”

OMB declined to comment on the Oversight Committee’s letters to agencies.

What telework data is out there?

For more than a decade, OPM has collected telework data annually from federal agencies. Each year, OPM asks agencies to share how many employees are teleworking, how their telework program operates and the outcomes of implementing it. The information eventually goes into an annual report to Congress from OPM.

The most recent report publicly available, published in December 2022, covers telework data from fiscal 2021. In the report, OPM said 47% of the federal workforce overall teleworked during that year.

The report, a requirement under the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, includes annual data that agencies submit to OPM on telework eligibility, participation and frequency, as well as their goal setting, cost savings and management efforts to promote telework and promising practices. The 2021 telework data call went to 91 agencies and OPM received responses from 84 of them.

There are some gaps in the report data, though — for instance, some agencies did not, or could not, provide details to OPM on their exact numbers of teleworking employees.

“Agencies that did not have values for employee population, eligibility, participation or frequency were asked to provide this information,” OPM said in the report. “In most cases, they were able to do so, but a few agencies were unable to provide information due to the classified nature of their work or because accurate records were not available.”

Getting a completely accurate portrait of telework is also complicated by the variability in how many days federal employees report to the office. Even one individual may go into the office a different number of days each week, depending on the week.

Federal News Network, in a survey of about 4,700 federal employees, found that in May, about 30% of feds were working entirely remotely, 62% were working in a hybrid environment and 8% were working entirely in person. For employees working on a hybrid schedule, most were working remotely four out of five days a week.

More details on federal telework are on the horizon, too. The 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act, passed last March, required OPM to additionally include “telework successes, best practices and lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as recommendations and guidance for remote work post-pandemic, within its annual telework report.”

Due to the timeline, OPM said the information was not included in the fiscal 2021 report, but that the agency plans to include it in the fiscal 2022 report, which will be published later this calendar year. OPM plans to ask agencies for details on lessons learned and best practices for employee re-entry into the workplace, as well as analysis of telework and remote work’s impact on productivity and performance.

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which OPM administers to individual federal employees, also details teleworking figures. The survey typically receives a response rate around 35%. For the 2022 FEVS, 42% of federal employees said they teleworked between one and three days per week. About 14% were working remotely.

But in the letters to agency heads, Republican committee members said OPM’s report data, outdated by the time OPM publishes it, and the self-reported nature of the information from FEVS, does not provide enough clarity or a real-time picture of telework at agencies.

The Oversight Committee’s letters build on a March hearing about OPM’s programs and operations, which partly focused on questions around telework data.

“The OPM director failed to provide up-to-date information on federal agency telework at the committee’s hearing in March, and an OMB workforce policy memo issued last month failed to ask agencies for the data,” an Oversight Committee spokesperson said in an email to Federal News Network. “That means the Oversight Committee needs to do the asking, so the American people can see what is going on with the federal workforce that ultimately reports to them.”

What’s next for federal telework?

More telework changes are still trickling in after OPM removed the COVID-19 operating status on May 15, as part of the Biden administration’s planned end to the national public health emergency. Agencies’ initial work environment plans, an ask from OMB in its memo, were due last week. OMB is still in the process of reviewing agencies’ submissions.

Some agencies have already started announcing changes to their telework policies, with plans to increase in-person work in the coming months. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for one, announced an upcoming increase in its in-person requirements. Starting this fall, telework-eligible VA employees will have to come into the office five days, or half of the time, per pay period.

OPM has also said it is planning to collect more data from agencies about telework and remote work programs. OPM plans to soon add new requirements for agencies’ reporting of participation in telework and remote work.

“These new data elements will provide deeper and improved granularity into understanding the workforce characteristics,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a March 7 memo. “Once implemented, they have the potential to improve governmentwide reporting of federal employee participation in remote work, telework and mobile work, as well as allow OPM to evaluate trends and determine how such work arrangements might advance the accomplishment of mission-critical requirements and organizational effectiveness.”

So far, OPM does not have a set implementation date for these plans.

Beyond OPM’s data collection, keycard data can offer another view into how often employees go to the office. Kastle Systems, a building security company, publishes weekly data on the number of employees nationwide who are using keycards to swipe into buildings. As of May 22, the average office occupancy of the top 10 U.S. cities was 49.5%.

But for the federal government, keycards do not provide a wholly accurate portrait. Not all government buildings use keycards for access, and some may operate through different security companies. Many agencies, for instance, instead use Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards.

GOP lawmakers said they want up-to-date details from individual agencies on how many employees are telework-eligible, how many of those employees are currently teleworking and how many days each employee teleworks in a week, as well as the occupancy rates of federal government offices in the Washington, D.C. area. The committee members also brought up questions around locality pay, federal office holdings, cybersecurity, collective bargaining agreements and the use of annual and sick leave, as they relate to the role of telework for federal employees.

The Oversight Committee gave agencies until June 1 to respond to the questions.

The post Dissatisfied with OPM’s data, Republicans ask individual agencies for telework details first appeared on Federal News Network.

The third leg of the Office of Personnel Management’s strategy stool is about to drop.

OPM already issued an overall strategic plan that focused heavily on technology modernization. The second leg was the data strategy the agency released last month.

Guy Cavallo, the chief information officer for OPM, said the soon-to-be released IT strategy for fiscal 2023-2026 will complete the 18-month effort to remake the agency’s overall modernization plans.

“It’s not surprising that it’s going to focus on moving to the cloud, improving user experiences and complying with the cybersecurity directives,” Cavallo said in an interview with Federal News Network after speaking at the Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference sponsored by ACT-IAC. “To me, a lot of the executive orders that have been issued on cyber and customer experience are basically telling IT people to breathe. These are things that should be part of our DNA. We shouldn’t need an executive order to get people to totally change what they did, but it actually reinforces these things if they run into any resistance on why they’re doing it.”

Cavallo said he will post the IT strategy to OPM’s website when it’s finalized.

This will not be a typical IT strategy with goals to move to the cloud or rationalize applications. Rather, Cavallo said, it will build on the agency’s strategic plan released in 2022 and the data strategy released in March.

“We’ve listed out all of our IT strategies and directly tied them to what parts of the agency is reinventing itself. We really wanted to reinforce the business value that a particular modernization effort is bringing into a single application” he said. “It’s not just we’re going to the cloud because Guy wants us to get there. But this is the impact on retirees or this is the impact on citizens who want to get a federal job for the first time and don’t know where to start. I think when people see our IT strategy.”

As Cavallo highlighted, a key section of that IT strategy is fixing retirement services. This goal has been an albatross hanging around every OPM CIO and director’s neck over the past two decades.

OPM has tried time and again to improve the technology and processes around the retirement system, only to fall well short of expectations time and again.

Congress now is pressing OPM to address this long-standing problem.

Not fixing everything at once

Cavallo said he understands that past efforts have struggled, in part, because the agency tried a “big bang” approach to modernization. He said his strategy will be different.

“What I’m focused on is let’s get new retirees into a digital form so that we’re not trying to fix the entire past at the same time. Then, for the people that are already entered into the system, let’s bring that data into that same common customer experience so that our agents can find the status of a retiree in one place. Right now, they have to look in multiple places,” he said. “That’s not fixing everything at once. It’s starting to move toward a centralized common case management solution so that everyone has a case that can be looked up by the agent. Ideally, I’m hoping when we get to that point we’d be able to do is allow you to with the right, multi-factor authentication, have a bot look up your particular status.”

Cavallo added part of the initial goal is for current and future retirees to be able to look up their status easily, including how much money they will receive when the first check should be deposited after they retire and similar questions. Today, he said, those questions are too difficult to answer.

“The way I’ve been successful in my career is when you do something that’s a totally new process, you draw the line in the sand and say, ‘from this day forward, the next retiree is going to be in the new system.’ Because you’re still maintaining the legacy system, I’m trying to avoid the big bang of having to wait until all these various moving parts line up, and then throw a switch and hope it works,” he said. “I want to peel the onion and get the pieces to work separately. Then we’re not pulling the master switch at that point. We’re throwing a bunch of little switches in time, in order so that we can see the progress and make sure that we’re not jeopardizing anything. I think that’s what’s going to be different to my approach than what’s been done in the past.”

Part of the struggles of the past has been the technology wasn’t ready to handle the file sizes needed to process retirement claims. Cavallo said both the cloud and other advances in technology give OPM a new opportunity.

“If we’re going to build something new, I like to know if the product can handle if we have x million cases on it? Or is this going to break it?” he said. “The other thing I find that sometimes we don’t do well in government, is if you’re buying software-as a-service and you need licenses for each person, when the system is operational, you’re going to have X files and users using it, you better be figuring out what that cost is and planning for it in the future. I’ve seen too many people get sticker shock after an application has been built, and now they can’t afford the number of users.”

Chatbot, call center updates

In the short term, OPM has launched a chatbot and increased the number of call center agents to address the retirement backlog.

Cavallo said OPM is trying to improve the retiree experience sooner than how long it takes to launch new technology. He also moved the call center technology into the cloud to address too much downtime and frustrated retirees.

“What that has done is made it technology not be our point of contention, but how many agents do we have available to be able to answer a call in a decent period of time? One of the things I knew that we could do to help it is that we didn’t have a really good way to help retirees with questions and answers. Our website was difficult to follow. You had to read through a lot. So this is something that a chatbot should be able to answer when you type in a question. It could potentially relieve some amount of calls going into the call center,” he said. “We are working with the director to expand the number of call takers, but there’s a limit to how many times can you just keep increasing. We’re using the chatbot to see what type of questions are being asked that we don’t currently have an answer in the chatbot so that we can prioritize answering those questions.”

OPM will continue to add questions and answers to the chatbot over the course of the next few months as it better understands what questions users need answered.

“The most difficult part for us was you have people that have been at OPM 20-30-40 years that have great experiences, and sometimes we weren’t capturing the right person’s experience in the answer. If you talk to an agent, you might get a little different answer than the next one over. So something that I think has been very helpful out of this process as consolidating and giving everybody the single best answer to this question,” he said. “Then from there, we’re able to replicate that back to the call agents and in any of our training materials. It’s helping us retrain our call takers on better ways to answer questions than we’ve been answering it in the past.”

The post OPM’s new approach to modernizing retirement services is all about small bites first appeared on Federal News Network.

“Help yourself before helping others” — it’s a familiar adage, but it’s also advice the Government Accountability Office urges the federal government’s personnel shop to take.

The Office of Personnel Management is at “significant risk” of being unable to help agencies address governmentwide skills gaps, if it can’t first do a better job of addressing its internal skills gaps, GAO said in a report published last week.

Persistent internal skills gaps “could compromise OPM’s ability to implement its strategic objectives related to closing governmentwide skills gaps,” GAO said in the Feb. 27 report.

Although OPM has made progress in some areas of workforce management, such as creating an internal committee to hire and train new staff members, the agency is struggling to clearly identify and address several skills gaps within its own staff.

Skills gaps have a broad definition — they can be competency gaps, which are a lack of staff knowledge — or staffing gaps, which are a lack of employees in a certain field. Notably, OPM has reported that there are currently three significant governmentwide skills gaps, in cybersecurity, acquisition and human resources (HR), along with 37 agency-specific ones.

But before the agency can effectively help others address those challenges, GAO said OPM needs to find a way to deal with internal issues. For example, leadership development, data analytics and project management are key areas in which OPM needs to boost skills.

Adding to the issue, OPM doesn’t have a clear “action plan” to address specific skills gaps, GAO said. Although OPM has a draft action plan, it is missing key information, like a list of mission-critical occupations and where the skills gaps are, as well as a plan to measure progress toward closing the gaps.

GAO’s findings, most notably the lack of an action plan to address identified skills deficiencies, were “concerning” to officials at the Partnership for Public Service.

“OPM is charged with ensuring the federal government is prepared for and responsive to changes in the federal workforce and workplace,” James Christian Blockwood, the Partnership’s executive vice president, said in an email to Federal News Network. “This will require OPM’s commitment to identifying skills gaps and upskilling at other federal agencies, as well as its own workforce.”

OPM Chief Human Capital Office Carmen Garcia, though, said in a Feb. 10 letter to GAO that OPM is already taking steps to address skills gaps, including through using shared certificates, expanding the use of non-competitive hiring authorities to reach early-career employees and adding more positions that are eligible for remote work.

It is also notable that OPM has faced significant challenges in just the past several of years. Although OPM’s challenges are more long-term, the proposed merger of OPM with the General Services Administration during the Trump administration caused staff turnover. Efforts to rebuild the workforce afterward compounded with OPM’s ability to effectively address skills gaps.

“OPM is still recovering from the failed attempt by the previous administration to pull it apart and place its authorities in other agencies,” Dan Blair, former OPM deputy director, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The proposed shutdown took its toll in terms of employee morale, recruitment and retention. It should be of no surprise that GAO recommended that OPM analyze its own skills gaps and capacity if it is to carry out its governmentwide mission successfully.

Additionally, OPM lacked permanent leadership for two years, prior to the confirmation of current OPM Director Kiran Ahuja, which led to additional workforce challenges.

“Unfortunately, stable leadership at OPM had been an issue for some time,” Blockwood said. “A Senate-confirmed OPM director has not served a full four-year term since 2013 … This leadership void had a ripple effect across government.”

But GAO said there have been recent improvements for human capital, in part because it’s a top priority in the Biden administration’s President’s Management Agenda (PMA). Additionally, OPM has improved collaboration within the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council. There has also been OPM guidance to agencies on skills-based hiring, as well as a relatively new remote work filter on USA Jobs.

Even with these improvements, OPM’s current internal skills gaps lead to challenges with implementing some of the agency’s broader strategic objectives, GAO said.

“OPM did not list its skills gaps as a risk to implementing its strategic objectives, an essential element of enterprise risk management,” GAO said in the report. “Doing so would better position OPM to have the near- and long-term capacity to help other agencies close skills gaps across the federal government.”

Ron Sanders, former chairman of the Federal Salary Council and former associate director for HR policy at OPM, said the results of the GAO report were “unsurprising,” but that the reason behind the challenges may be difficult to measure.

“I think the skills gaps and have more to do with intangibles than they do with specific functional specializations,” Sanders, current president and CEO of Publica Virtu LLC, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “So much of this comes down to leadership.”

“If the leadership doesn’t make it a priority, then these things won’t happen,” Blair added. “It needs to have support, not just within the agency, but also across the board. The CHCO Council needs to be able to support and work on this.”

Notably, poor workforce management, along with low staffing and inadequate training, are some of GAO’s rationales for keeping strategic human capital management on its high-risk list, where it has remained since 2001. Issues with leadership continuity and succession planning additionally contribute to challenges with strategic human capital management.

OPM’s internal skills gaps also dovetail with growing challenges for human capital management governmentwide. For the report, GAO surveyed agency CHCOs to get a broader sense of federal HR issues.

Federal human capital leaders who participated in GAO’s forum last May said recruitment and workforce planning were the two biggest pain points when trying to close skills gaps. Many of the participants said OPM should offer more workplace flexibilities and streamline guidance to help reduce administrative burdens on staff.

Agency leaders added that generally, competition with the private sector, budget uncertainty and differences in compensation made it more difficult to try to close skills gaps. Special salary rates can help some agencies recruit and retain workforce for particular skills, but that could leave other agencies without those flexibilities with heightened challenges.

Many of the human capital changes that agencies currently make are specific to the individual agency, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber talent management system. But OPM is still positioned to target governmentwide reform, Sanders said.

“In my view, we passed an inflection point more than a decade ago, with the bulk of civil service reforms now taking place at an agency level. They’re not sweeping governmentwide reforms, and yet OPM is still geared for the latter,” Sanders said. “Agency-specific personnel flexibilities are going to be the wave of the future. Nobody is holding their breath for governmentwide reform.”

Adding to the difficulties, OPM’s workforce is very “insular,” Sanders said, meaning there is not a lot of understanding between the governmentwide HR agency, and the agencies that OPM is intended to support.

But there are ways to improve collaboration, that may not require additional resources or funding. Sanders recommended, for instance, that OPM should require candidates for management positions to have experience in another agency’s HR department, and on the flipside, those applying for agency CHCO positions should have prior experience working at OPM.

“OPM is in the process of running out of time,” Sanders said. “This would send a huge signal to everybody that they’re serious about this.”

To try to close skills gaps, GAO recommended that OPM create an “action plan,” which the agency has agreed to do. In response to the initial GAO report, OPM said it plans to conduct a “human capital review” this spring.

“OPM will develop and implement an action plan to address our agency-specific skills and competency gaps via selected human capital strategies,” OPM’s CHCO Garcia told GAO.

But beyond creating the action plan, Sanders said it will be equally important, if not more so, to look at the actual execution of it.

“You can make your pronouncements tomorrow,” he said. “Then execution may take some time. But the action plan needs both [policy and execution].”

Much of that action plan should also consider emerging skills gaps. Blair said beyond closing current skills gaps, it’s important for OPM to plan for what may appear several years in the future, then try to mitigate potential gaps before they appear.

“It’s about looking in the crystal ball and trying to predict what might be happening in the future,” he said. “If you don’t prepare for future problems, then they arise. At least this way, you can get a little bit ahead of the curve.”

GAO additionally recommended that OPM document and monitor progress for addressing the risks that skills gaps create.

“Until OPM documents risks to its strategic objectives posed by skills gaps and identifies risk responses, OPM may not be making fully informed budgetary, operational and other trade-off decisions or best positioning itself to have the near- and long-term capacity to help other agencies close skills gaps across the federal government,” GAO said.

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee will hold a hearing Thursday to examine OPM’s administration of federal human capital policy, as well as OPM’s plans to strengthen the merit-based civil service system.

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The National Academy of Public Administration recently offered up a 114-page roadmap for the Office of Personnel Management, detailing years of leadership instability, funding obstacles and conflicting attitudes on the agency’s mission and role.

Past OPM directors and executives, as well as federal employee groups, are pleased NAPA focused on empowering the agency as the federal government’s human capital leader and laid out a path to achieve that broad goal.

But getting there is an incredibly complex feat, and it’ll take time, funding and attention to untangle the actions of several administrations that put OPM on its current footing.

Those ingredients are all in short supply today, and those with a long memory of past civil service changes worry the academy’s recommendations will sit on a shelf and collect dust — as many past reform efforts have.

“It’s déjà vu all over all again. It’s not just déjà vu all over again once, twice or three times — we have been down this path innumerable times,” said Ron Sanders, a former Federal Salary Council chairman, OPM executive and intelligence community chief human capital officer. “One has to wonder will this make any difference? That’s the question I have.”

Sanders now leads the Florida Center for Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida.

The report stemmed from the Trump administration’s proposal to merge part of OPM with the General Services Administration and the Office of Management and Budget, but NAPA’s focus was much broader.

It offered up 23 recommendations for Congress and the new administration. They range from clarifying OPM’s mission in statute and eliminating the agency’s fee-for-service model to setting up a new IT working capital fund.

“OPM is going to need partners to move forward,” said Janice Lachance, a former OPM director during the Clinton administration. “First of all, any kind of recommendation such as improving technology or improving the way you give advice to agencies and not expecting reimbursement, that’s going to cost money. You need friends within the administration that you’re operating in, but you also need very, very strong partners on Capitol Hill who are willing to advocate and speak up for OPM.”

The National Active and Retired Federal Employees (NARFE) Association is reviewing the NAPA report and determining which recommendations the administration could accomplish on its own and which ones need help from Congress.

“There are a number of recommendations that would require the support of Congress through funding, a bit less that require revision of current laws, and even several that OPM can do on its own right now,” said John Hatton, NARFE’s legislative and political affairs director. “But I worry that the charge of a big report like this is too much to take on at once, and after a short review, the report is filed away and forgotten.”

OPM’s funding challenges top the priority list

Hatton and others said they hoped OPM and the Biden administration focused first on building congressional support for additional funding.

Moving the National Background Investigations Bureau and the governmentwide security clearance, as OPM quietly warned years ago, created a significant funding shortfall for the agency in recent years.

For 2021, OPM covered the funding shortfall through a buyback services agreement with the Defense Department, a bump in appropriations and a series of operational cost cutting measures, according to the NAPA report.

OPM mostly relies on appropriations and fees, which it collects by providing certain HR services and training to other agencies. And while the Trump administration did secure more appropriated funding for OPM during the last two years, the agency needs sustained resources to modernize and keep operations afloat, NAPA said.

Additional funding is especially critical if, as the academy suggested, OPM wants to make real progress on longstanding IT modernization efforts and offer more HR services to other agencies at no cost.

Lachance, the Clinton-era OPM director, sees the budget as a good starting point for the Biden administration and the new director. The president nominated Kiran Ahuja, a former chief of staff for the agency, for the role.

“The new director has a tremendous opportunity to go in there, do a very effective assessment of the situation and make a reasonable request that covers all of the things that need to be done — and that we want to do,” said Lachance, who currently serves as an executive vice president for the American Geophysical Union. “The NAPA report is very aspirational. What is it going to take to get OPM from where it is today to this desired state that’s articulated in the NAPA report over how many years?”

The new director, Lachance added, will need to make the case why an empowered OPM will help resolve the federal government’s talent problems.

“There’s no doubt there are needs across the government when it comes to staffing and bringing expertise into help with these very serious issues that we’re contending with today like the pandemic, the economic fallout and climate change,” she said. “We have all of these priorities. Is the federal workforce prepared and does it have the people on board to starting working on those issues?”

Does Congress have the time and attention span to focus on OPM?

Some are more optimistic than others that OPM has willing partners ready to devote time and attention to the agency’s funding challenges, not to mention the statutory changes that, for example, might reaffirm the agency’s mission or give it more authority over all federal personnel systems.

Several former OPM executives said Congress lacks the bandwidth and drive to focus on civil service issues, especially when headlines on the pandemic, economy and border drive the agenda.

Dan Blair, a former OPM deputy director, said the current congressional committee structure isn’t designed to take on a big project like the one NAPA mapped out in its recommendations. When Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act back in 1978, it had a dedicated panel — the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee — ready to conduct hearings and mark up legislation to send to the House floor.

Today, the NAPA report naturally falls to the House Oversight and Reform Government Operations Subcommittee, which has broad jurisdiction and a full plate of oversight activities.

Many former OPM executives pointed to past attempts in Congress at civil service change, like the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which they argue was never fully realized, or the National Security Personnel System — repealed after a few years — that were especially long and grueling initiatives on the Hill.

“That fatigue has morphed into a malaise,” said Blair, who also worked for the former Post Office and Civil Service Committee. “How do you address this malaise? How do you reinvigorate Congress and the administration to say we think this is extremely important, understanding that such an undertaking requires a significant commitment of staff and members’ time, resources and energy to address the reforms recommended in the report?”

OPM itself rarely appears before Congress in a public forum, NAPA said. The agency testified once before Congress in recent years on the former administration’s proposed merger with GSA.

“We see the most action from Congress when we’re in a crisis,” said Jessica Klement, NARFE’s staff vice president for policy and programs. “Unless we can get the point across that federal human capital is in crisis, which GAO has been saying for the last two decades, it’s never going to be addressed. Everyone agrees this is a problem, but no one seems to agree it’s a problem enough to fix it.”

Culture change needed inside and out of OPM

Even if it does manage to collect enough support, attention and focus from partners in the administration and Congress, former agency executives say the new director will need to make a concerted effort to transform OPM into an innovative, data-driven, strategic leader on human capital issues as NAPA suggested.

For Sanders, it’ll take more than new legislation and extra funding to meet those goals. OPM needs to demonstrate leadership, and the departments need to build or reestablish trust with the federal government’s human capital agency.

Sanders said building that trust will become especially critical if Congress changes the law so that OPM oversees all federal personnel systems, not just Title 5.

“As a person that oversaw a major subset of that, the personnel systems that cover the intelligence community, I would be fighting that tooth and nail,” he said. “OPM has to earn that trust. Right now they’re met with suspicion by agencies. The culture needs to change. If you change the culture then agencies are going to be more willing to look to OPM for leadership, but you can’t put the cart before the horse and try to mandate that leadership by law.”

Mark Robbins, a former agency general counsel, said OPM has shown organizational flexibility on multiple occasions, once when Congress tasked it with providing security clearances back in the mid-2000s and again today as the Pentagon has taken the business back. The agency has gone through other transitions before, including its initial transformation from the Civil Service Commission to OPM back in 1979.

“OPM is quite capable of shifting on a dime when it comes to culture change,” said Robbins, who also served on the Merit Systems Protection Board for seven years. “It needs the money to do that, and I just don’t think they’ve got it.”

OPM will struggle to transform, however, if the agency is hamstrung by OMB, Robbins and others said.

The Civil Service Reform Act set the OPM director as the president’s top adviser on federal human capital, but the position’s status has become “diluted over the years,” with the creation of the deputy director for management position within OMB.

OPM and OMB officials in the Biden administration have said on multiple occasions they’re working together, though neither agency has top leadership confirmed yet.

Three acting OPM directors also served as deputy director for management during the Trump and Obama administrations. Those dual-hatted arrangements hindered OPM and its independence, and over time, the agency director became more of a subordinate to the OMB deputy director for management, NAPA said.

“A dual monarchy didn’t work for Austria and Hungary, and here it was dumb and short-cited,” Robbins said.

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Two weeks into the Biden administration, many of President Donald Trump’s signature workforce changes that stirred up debate and news coverage are gone.

President Joe Biden eliminated them with a few strokes of his pen, all within his first three days in office.

He rescinded the 2018 executive orders that limited collective bargaining, cut official time and emphasized employee discipline and firing.

He did the same with the executive order that canceled certain types of diversity and inclusion training for federal employees and contractors. The order that allowed agencies to reclassify certain career policy jobs to a new class of quasi-political appointees known as Schedule F is gone too.

Like many before it, the Trump administration had ambitious plans to modernize the civil service. It created a new President’s Management Agenda (PMA), which set specific goals aimed at modernizing IT, improving data transparency and building a 21st century federal workforce.

But over time, another agenda emerged.

This agenda challenged the traditions of the decades-old merit system, said Don Kettl, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. It was the product of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and it ultimately “squeezed out” the strategy set in the PMA, he said.

“This was a management agenda from folks who were trying to make the agencies more productive,” Terry Gerton, president of the National Academy of Public Administration, said of the PMA. “Periodically they got side-swiped by executive orders. But there was attention [on that agenda]. They improved the assessment process through pilot programs for hiring. They really started to address the backlog in security clearances and make that less of an obstacle to get people on board. There were ongoing, persistent activities in the PMA and in the cross-agency priority goals around HR, and that made the HR process better. Then they would kind of get in their own way with the executive orders.”

With many of Trump’s big-ticket, often controversial policies gone, what remains of the previous administration’s workforce agenda?

Experts in the federal community see room for the Biden administration to build on some of the quiet, persistent work agencies have started over the last four years to reskill their workforces, embrace employee engagement initiatives and start a needed conversation about the role of the Office of Personnel Management and the merit system.

Reskilling, workarounds to a lengthy federal hiring process

Reskilling was never a new concept for the federal government, but the Trump administration did attempt to socialize it more broadly to employees.

It created the Cybersecurity Reskilling Academy, which attracted wide interest from federal employees and graduated several dozen people. Few graduates, however, had an easy time finding a new job within the federal government where they could put those skills to good use.

Other agencies launched their own pilots. The Office of Management and Budget created an all-virtual data science reskilling academy.

“The numbers were never large enough to make a dent, and it never really was taken to scale,” Ron Sanders, the staff director for the University of South Florida’s Center for Cybersecurity, said of the administration’s reskilling programs.

The Trump administration also focused on other administrative changes it could make without input from Congress to the federal hiring process.

It launched a pilot program designed to involve subject matter experts in the hiring process. Trump signed an executive order that pushed agencies to use skills-based assessments more frequently.

Sanders served as the chairman of the Federal Salary Council until he resigned last fall over Trump’s Schedule F executive order. He described the reskilling pilots and hiring order as “incremental changes,” ones that were often symbolic or reiterated messages agency HR experts already knew.

“There’s the big stuff and the little stuff,” Sanders said. “The incremental changes is about what we got from the Trump administration … and its predecessor. My hope is the Biden administration will do something grander.”

A different approach to employee engagement

Agencies have long used the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to measure the engagement of their workforces for years, but for the first time, the Trump administration set specific, quantifiable goals aimed at improving the lowest performing organizations by 20% by 2020.

It’s unclear whether many low-performing agencies actually met that specific goal over the last few years. But in its work with several agencies on the topic, NAPA saw agencies approach employee engagement with more urgency than perhaps they had previously.

The goal forced agencies to put some extra work into engaging their employees and then institutionalize and embed some of those practices into their organizational cultures, Gerton said.

A few agencies, including the Transportation Security Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs, examined engagement and customer service data in search of meaningful correlations.

“Way below the surface of the controversial wavetops, there’s been a persistent focus on [engagement] and improving it,” Gerton said. “Agencies are really starting to get committed to the idea that somebody has to be in the bottom 20%, but it’s not going to be us.”

OPM-GSA merger sets the stage for further debate

The prospect of the proposed merger of the Office of Personnel Management with the General Services Administration hung over the Trump administration for more than half of Trump’s tenure, creating uncertainty for the agency and its employees and forcing some long-time executives to retire or leave.

The Trump administration, facing bipartisan criticism and a lack of interest from Congress, formally shelved the merger proposal late last fall.

Sanders said the proposal was a distraction and left little room for OPM to focus on civil service modernization efforts, which the administration initially expressed interest in tackling. Trump’s first permanent OPM director had an ambitious agenda aimed at overhauling everything from federal retirement to veterans preference, but the administration fired him after a few months when he expressed resistance to the proposed merger.

“Reorganizing OPM was a diversion. It took a lot of time, effort and attention. It got lots of people wringing their hands, as it should have,” Sanders said. “The merger sidetracked a lot of people from the big stuff.”

Despite the distraction, others are hopeful the merger illustrated how complex an organization OPM is — and perhaps forced a greater understanding among lawmakers of the agency’s long-simmering challenges.

“What the conflict pointed out was that OPM had been unattended to for a long time, and consequently it didn’t seem that important until you tried to take it apart,” Gerton said. “Now we have the opportunity to think about how to structure it and position it as a strategic asset for the future.”

NAPA is currently reviewing OPM and its statutory functions, per a congressional mandate. The academy is expected to submit a series of recommendations to Congress next month.

“It’ll be really interesting and hopefully start a number of conversations to think through where ultimately this organization can be the most impactful and settle on what the role of OPM should be,” said Brenna Isman, NAPA’s director of academy studies.

Gerton sees the question of OPM and its mission, function and organization as crucial for the Biden administration’s success. The new administration has an extensive list of priorities, including a health and economic crisis to respond to.

“If it doesn’t have an effective civilian workforce it’s not going to be as productive in addressing those challenges as it might otherwise be,” she said. “Having an OPM and a civil service and the rules around it that are functional and that promote this strategic approach to getting the best and brightest into the federal government is going to be really important going forward.”

Though Schedule F and the OPM-GSA merger may have fallen by the wayside, Kettl said the conversations those policies ignited may be worth having in the new administration.

“It would be tempting for the new administration to put these issues aside because it has its hands full with COVID — and because, having taken Schedule F away, they might be tempted to declare victory, at least for a while,” he said. “But without bringing the leadership of the federal workforce back in sync with national priorities, it’s going to be tough for the Biden team to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. The workforce isn’t one more thing to be done — it’s the way to do everything.”

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The Office of Personnel Management has told its workforce it’s no longer actively pursuing the administration’s proposed merger with the General Services Administration.

In an email to staff, which covered everything from flu shots for employees to the status of reopening agency facilities, acting OPM Director Michael Rigas said Thursday he wanted to provide an update about the administration’s proposed GSA merger.

“As Congress has not acted on the administration’s legislative proposal, we are no longer devoting time and energy to the merger and are focused on ensuring OPM can function as a standalone personnel agency for the federal government,” Rigas said in the email, which Federal News Network obtained. “We are also conducting an independent analysis of the agency to help inform how OPM can best carry out its mission and meet the needs of the American people.”

A senior OPM official told Federal News Network the agency was looking at other options, especially now that the governmentwide security clearance business had moved to the Defense Department.

Congress already prohibited the transfer of OPM’s statutory functions to GSA or the Office of Management and Budget in last year’s annual defense authorization bill. The law also mandated a year-long study of OPM and its functions by the National Academy of Public Administration. NAPA is expected to submit recommendations to Congress in March.

But the administration continued to pursue pieces of the OPM-GSA merger anyway. The president’s 2021 budget proposal included a request for $70 million for the reorganization, and OPM’s inspector general has pointed to his own concerns about plans to transfer the management of the agency’s buildings to GSA.

Both agencies continued to discuss those plans through 2019 and into this year but eventually agreed to have OPM continue managing two of its major properties through at least the end of fiscal 2021.

Some members of Congress are treating the latest statement from Rigas with kid gloves, and skeptics wonder whether it’s a distraction from bigger worries.

“The administration is continuing to pursue activities that seem to be aimed at dismantling OPM,” a Senate aide told Federal News Network.

The White House Office of Presidential Personnel has taken on active role in the last year to fill political appointee roles across the administration.

And though it’s not necessarily uncommon to bring in new political appointees near the end of a term, multiple sources familiar with OPM say the agency has onboarded a few dozen new Schedule C appointees since March.

These include George Nesterczuk, the president’s original pick to lead OPM, and Dennis Kirk, who’s nomination before the Merit Systems Protection Board has been pending before the Senate for at least two years. Kirk leads a key personnel policy shop with OPM.

Don Devine, a former OPM director from President Ronald Reagan’s administration, also has a part-time role within the agency.

“Don Devine is a special government employee and a part-time adviser to the acting director on various policy and programmatic topics because of his deep experience in the government and understanding the community,” the senior OPM official said. “In this role, he is part time and the work that he is part of is limited.”

Hill and other observers say even though the administration is no longer actively pursuing the OPM-GSA merger, they worry about these and other actions that may do more damage to the agency.

“OPM has wasted time and resources on this quixotic mission that clearly had no support from Congress, no legal grounding and made no sense,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations, said Friday in a statement to Federal News Network. “Despite this victory, Congress cannot lose focus on OPM’s proposed Schedule F change, which is an assault on the civil service and should join the OPM merger in the trash bin.”

Connolly was one of three House Democrats who introduced legislation earlier this week intended to nullify the president’s recent executive order.

The EO, which the White House released last week, designed to reclassify a portion of the career federal workforce as at-will appointees in the excepted service has overtaken much of Congress’ attention.

Other members of Congress have echoed Connolly’s concerns about OPM and its future.

In a briefing to lawmakers about the executive order, agency officials described a process where agencies will prepare a list of positions to reclassify for submission to OPM for approval, a congressional aide said. Employees currently in positions that are up for reclassification won’t have an opportunity to appeal those decisions. They can choose to move with their reclassified position or leave.

House Democrats, employee groups and others say they fear the president’s Schedule F executive order could be used to burrow in political appointees from the current administration to the next, especially to vacant positions.

“This is a transparent attempt to burrow political operatives into the ranks of career civil service well after President Trump leaves office,” the Federal Workers Alliance, a coalition of employee unions, said Thursday in a letter to Democratic appropriators.

Unions are asking Congress to include language in the next temporary stopgap or permanent budget bill formally blocking the Schedule F EO.

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“OPM’s budgetary issues are affecting its ability to fund projects that are needed to improve and modernize OPM’s IT platform, the processing of retirement claims and the management and delivery of federal employee benefits, such as the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program,” Norbert Vint, the deputy inspector general performing the duties of the agency’s IG, said in his annual report identifying OPM’s top management challenges.

The agency itself declined to comment on the IG’s report and its recommendations.

The funding shortfall stems from the decision Congress and the administration made to move the governmentwide security clearance business — which brought in more than $2.2 billion in revenue to OPM in fiscal 2019 — from the agency to the Defense Department.

OPM managed to bridge a $70 million funding gap this year by securing additional appropriations from Congress and negotiating a buyback of its IT security clearance services with the Pentagon.

But the DoD buyback arrangement will conclude at the end of 2021, and OPM needs to secure additional funding from Congress for the next year and into the future, the IG said.

The administration’s desired OPM merger with the General Services Administration continues to evolve — even as the moves are technically on hold pending a congressionally-mandated review. That uncertainty still looms over the agency and raises questions for OPM’s future, including the management of its own buildings, the IG said.

Five-week sprint improved retirement customer services, to an extent

Vint offered a candid assessment of OPM’s long-standing efforts to modernize the legacy systems that power the agency’s retirement services.

The agency has recently implemented short-term fixes to address retirement customer service challenges. OPM contracted with McKinsey and Company, which helped the agency with a five-week sprint to address some of the problems.

OPM, for example, upgraded telecommunications circuits, call center infrastructure and automated call distribution software, which should cut back on downtime and help customer service agents deal with call volume.

It also added a new interactive voice feature, allowing the agency to more effectively route calls. Callers can also request a callback without losing their place in line, according to the IG. These activities helped, Vint said, but they’re not enough.

“While OPM has enhanced Retirement Services call center operations, fundamental change will require an investment of time and resources and improved business processes,” Vint wrote. “The technology and infrastructure is not optimized for true call center operations. OPM is considering a cloud-based call center solution as a potential future support platform.”

OPM has a ‘compelling’ IT vision but needs millions to execute it

Beyond some recent successes with OPM’s call center, the agency needs a long-term plan to modernize key systems.

According to the IG, OPM’s chief information officer detailed a “compelling vision” for IT modernization at the agency over time — if the plan has funding, staff and support.

OPM again commissioned a consulting firm to develop a path forward for the CIO’s IT modernization vision and estimate what resources it would take to achieve it.

“This study resulted in recommendations for a phased approach that starts with modernizing and stabilizing core IT systems and processes, and building an effective organizational structure within the agency’s OCIO to implement the modernization initiatives,” Vint wrote. “OPM’s chief information officer has often described an IT deficit at OPM that has resulted from years of deferred IT maintenance and inadequate technology funding. The focus of phase one will be to build the foundation for a mature, stable and consistently implemented IT program that is on par with industry standards.”

But OPM and its CIO face several challenges in achieving that phased vision. The CIO shop is “severely understaffed,” according to the IG. And because the CIO hasn’t always been able to deliver the IT services OPM’s program offices have wanted, the OCIO still lacks influence throughout the agency.

Still, achieving a successful “phase one” modernization hinges on OPM’s ability to secure enough financial resources, the IG said.

McKinsey and Company estimated OPM will need an additional $205-to-234 million more in funding over the next three years to achieve its IT modernization goals, plus $55 million each year after to properly maintain the enhanced environment.

In addition, OPM needs more IT funding to cover the shortfall left by the transfer of its security clearance business. OPM’s National Background Investigations Bureau contributed $18 million more in IT services than it consumed in 2019, meaning the security clearance business “essentially subsidized IT services” for other agency program offices, according to the IG.

Even with those challenges, OPM and its CIO have potential, the IG said.

“The agency’s challenge is to take advantage of this opportunity, seek appropriate funding and start on its modernization journey,” Vint said. “It will also have to minimize the voices of the self-interested naysayers, and start to change the agency culture to an enterprise-wide mindset that values the role of the federal chief information officer as a strategic business partner who is critical in reaching organizational goals.”

Funding woes inhibit potential FEHBP improvements

OPM’s financial uncertainty has also hindered its ability to effectively administer the FEHBP, improve the program and weed out waste, fraud and abuse, according to the IG.

For example, OPM currently relies on FEHBP enrollees to self-certify their family members or other dependents are eligible for coverage, and there are no requirements for them to submit proof verifying their identity.

About 1 to 3% of spouses and 4 to 12% of children are actually ineligible for the FEHBP, according to OPM estimates, and the agency may lose up to $3 billion a year by allowing these dependents improper health coverage, the IG said.

“Again, this is an issue that OPM recognizes and is trying to address through the development of a central enrollment portal,” Vint wrote. “However, OPM has not been able to sufficiently fund this project and therefore the timeline to fully develop and implement this needed system is still unknown.”

In addition, competing budget demands mean OPM hasn’t been able to conduct an extensive and independent review of the FEHBP’s prescription drug benefits, a study that the agency agreed it needed to pursue, the IG said. OPM last conducted a similar study back in 2010.

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A financially-strapped Office of Personnel Management would incur millions of dollars more in rent and contract fees if the General Services Administration had moved forward with its original plans to take over the management of OPM’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C.

That warning came from OPM’s inspector general, who issued stark words of caution in an “alert” to agency management earlier this week.

As Federal News Network reported earlier this year, GSA told OPM last July it planned to revoke the agency’s existing delegation for the operations and maintenance of the Theodore Roosevelt Building  (TRB) in Washington.

OPM has operated and maintained the TRB for more than 30 years, according to the agency’s IG.

“It is vital that OPM pursue the return of the delegation to operate and maintain the TRB from GSA,” Norbert Vint, the deputy inspector general performing the duties of OPM’s IG, said. “A preliminary analysis completed by OPM shows that allowing GSA to resume operation and maintenance of the TRB would increase OPM’s rent costs by approximately $4.2 million annually.”

And since OPM’s current operation and maintenance contracts would no longer be needed under GSA’s management, OPM could also incur an additional $10.2 million in termination fees, the IG said.

“Continuing to pursue the return of operation and maintenance of the TRB to GSA, without a complete understanding of the costs associated with such a move, is fiscally irresponsible and places an additional burden on a financially strapped agency as well as the American taxpayer,” Vint said.

The delegation of authority for the TRB was rescinded at the request of then-acting OPM Director Margaret Weichert, GSA told Federal News Network.

In making her case for the merger, Weichert said she saw an opportunity for GSA to take over the management of the OPM building as a way to reduce financial burdens on the agency, which suffered a $70 million funding shortfall with the loss the security clearance business. Facility management isn’t part of OPM’s core mission either, she argued.

The agency was initially scheduled to take over management of OPM headquarters starting this October, GSA had said.

But in its response to Vint’s management alert and his subsequent recommendations, the plan appears to have changed.

GSA agreed earlier this summer to allow OPM to continue the operation and management of the TRB, OPM said. Its current delegation of authority will remain in place until Sept. 30, 2021.

“OPM intends to use this time to work with GSA to gather the information necessary to maximize the cost effectiveness of OPM’s space allocation,” the agency said in response to its inspector general.

Still, the IG sees problems with this approach, citing the National Academy of Public Administration’s ongoing, congressionally mandated study on OPM, its statutory authorities and its future.

NAPA is expected to finish its study and recommendations for OPM some time in March 2021. OPM then has six months to respond and offer up its own ideas on the best path forward for the agency.

“Even then a determination of the path forward is not completely known as Congress needs to review and make its decision on any potential legislation,” Vint said of the NAPA study. “The timelines of the NAPA study, OPM’s review and report, and the transition of the operation and maintenance of the TRB back to GSA all collide in the latter half of fiscal 2021. This will pull OPM’s limited resources in many directions and leaves little time to adequately assess the costs and impact on OPM. The delegation to operate and maintain the TRB should remain with OPM until the path forward and the needs of OPM are clear and the costs and impact of changes can be adequately determined.”

OPM’s authority for Federal Executive Institute, revoked and then returned

At one point, plans were in the works for GSA to take over the operation and maintenance of the Federal Executive Institute (FEI), an OPM residential facility in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Senior executives who attend classes and training courses at the FEI spend weeks at a time at there, but GSA has no experience operating or maintaining a residential facility, the OPM IG said. The Federal Executive Institute is operational  24/7, 340 days a year.

GSA spent the better half of 2019 procuring maintenance and operation services for the FEI, the IG said. Those services were based on the Charlottesville facility being open 10 hours a day, five days a week — a lower standard than current FEI hours of operation.

“GSA purported that the total cost, including the cost to provide services above GSA’s standard level, would not exceed OPM’s current operational expense,” the IG said. “However, a sufficient comprehensive analysis of the costs to operate and maintain the FEI was not provided to support GSA’s claim that the cost would not increase. In fact, OPM estimated that the cost would increase approximately $400,000 per year for the level of operation and maintenance service equivalent to what is currently provided.”

GSA asked OPM in January if wanted the delegation of authority to maintain the FEI back. OPM agreed, and the agency received the authority back in July.

Still, the exercise of revoking OPM’s authority to operate the FEI and then taking it back was a waste of time and resources, the IG said.

“Nearly a year’s worth of time and resources were spent, by both OPM and GSA, and a realized increase in cost for diminished security services occurred because a proper analysis of the costs and the impact of the changes was not completed.”

On one hand, revoking of OPM’s delegation of authority over its buildings isn’t especially new or groundbreaking.

The GSA administrator has statutory authority to both operate and maintain government buildings like the TRB or delegate those responsibilities to occupant agencies.

And with the transfer of the National Background Investigations Bureau from OPM to the Pentagon’s Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) last fall, the Theodore Roosevelt Building is now technically multi-tenant space.

DCSA still has offices within the OPM building, and “GSA rarely allows the operation and maintenance of multi-tenant buildings to be delegated,” the agency told Federal News Network back in February.

Yet according to its IG, OPM still occupies more than 90% of the space within the TRB.

Critics of the OPM building changes have said the proposed moves are yet another sign of the Trump administration’s persistence in pursuing the GSA merger — despite provisions in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that explicitly prohibit the transfer of any OPM functions to other agencies.

The House included a similar prohibition in its version of a 2021 appropriations package.

Vint suggested OPM and GSA delay a feasibility study for the TRB moves altogether until NAPA completed its study and Congress took appropriate action.

OPM, however, disagreed. A feasibility study, as well as the NAPA report, would “support a space needs decision that is in the best interest of OPM and the taxpayers,” the agency said.

“The premise that activities and staff would be consolidated into GSA is in direct conflict with the limitations to the proposed merger set forth in the fiscal 2020 NDAA,” the IG said. “It is also unclear whether the objectives of the feasibility study have been updated to reflect the current environment, including what adaptations to office space will need to be made in light of COVID-19.”

Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations, took the criticism a step further.

“This administration continues its discredited attempts to attack the beating heart of our federal government — the agency that serves our dedicated federal employees—at a potential cost to American taxpayers of more than $14 million,” he said.  “Leaders at the Office of Management and Budget, GSA and OPM once again failed to consider how their actions would affect their agencies, the federal workforce, the government, and the taxpayers.”

The post Updated: GSA management over OPM building would cost the agency millions, IG says first appeared on Federal News Network.

A recent string of reorganizations and the launch of a new human capital data group within the Office of Personnel Management are drawing skepticism among employees and its union.

OPM officially reorganized a few dozen of its employees earlier this week into a new Human Capital Data Management and Modernization Directorate, which the agency announced Tuesday afternoon.

But the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents parts of the OPM workforce, said it sees these moves as a back-door effort to advance the Trump administration’s desired merger with the General Services Administration — and slowly strip away more responsibilities from the human resources agency.

OPM merged its federal data solutions group, a former component of the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, to the HR Line of Business, which it renamed as the new Human Capital Data Management and Modernization Directorate.

Some functions within OPM’s Office of Strategy and Innovation, which is perhaps most known for administering the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, were also redistributed. The office’s data analysis group, for example, moved to the new human capital data directorate.

The agency said the new directororate will allow OPM to better manage federal human capital data and “facilitate insightful decision-making” across the workforce.

“Standing up the Human Capital Data Management and Modernization Directorate provides agencies with greatly improved access to the human capital management data needed to support their missions for the American people by promoting IT modernization, data accountability and transparency and the workforce of the future,” Michael Rigas, OPM’s acting director, said Tuesday in a press release.

A separate data strategic analysis group within the Office of Strategy and Innovation will move to the agency’s employee services and strategic workforce planning office, according to OPM’s notice to the union.

The reorganizations were effective Aug. 2.

In its July 24 notice to AFGE, the agency gave several reasons for the realignments.

Redistributing these functions, OPM said, will “consolidate critical technology needs,” and “leverage federal and contractor support to the most critical needed areas related to federal employee data.”

The moves will also “eliminate the need for OCIO to serve as a human capital/HR policy expert regarding federal employee data,” and instead shift those responsibilities to one group, which will handle all policy, standard setting, collection and analysis activities for OPM’s federal employee datasets, a system known as the Enterprise Human Resources Integration-Statistical Data Mart (EHRI-SDM).

Before, those functions were scattered across three OPM groups embedded within two agency support offices.

In its notice to the union, OPM said these reorganizations should have little direct impact on employees.

“The reorganization will not result in a change of conditions of employment for bargaining unit employees and to the extent to which there is a change, any such change will be de minimis,” Anne Mortensen, an OPM employee and labor relations manager, said in the July 24 memo to the union. “Employees will remain on the same position descriptions and under the same performance standards. As the new organizations commence their work, employees may receive some new assignments consistent with their current duties and consistent with their performance standards and position descriptions.”

AFGE, however, said these moves will have an impact on the employees and their daily work. The union said some employees will be placed in a working group with employees from the General Services Administration. Marlo Bryant-Cunningham, president of AFGE Local 32, said the employees may be working with the General Services Administration on the agency’s New Pay initiative.

A GSA data strategist who spent part of his career at OPM may supervise the working group, Bryant-Cunningham said.

OPM declined to answer specific questions about the realigned employees and their new roles, responsibilities and any potential interaction with GSA. Its communication to the union is consistent with the terms of the OPM-AFGE collective bargaining agreement, the agency said.

“All organizational changes are internal within OPM,” an agency spokesperson said in an email to Federal News Network. “No OPM federal employees will be reporting to GSA or other external officials.”

The reorganization affects at least 22 OPM bargaining unit employees, according to the agency’s July 24 notice to the union.

But Bryant-Cunningham said the agency’s count doesn’t include the vacant positions in these units. She estimated one of the impacted units had 10-to-12 open positions, though it’s unclear if or when the agency will fill them, she said.

The union submitted a demand to bargain on July 28, and the agency rejected it three days later. In denying AFGE’s demand, OPM said it doesn’t need to bargain because the parties’ collective bargaining agreement addressed reorganization issues.

“Changes in organizational affiliation and supervisory structure alone do not constitute changes to conditions of employment for the purpose of generating a duty to bargain,” Mortensen wrote in OPM’s response to the union. “Likewise, individual supervisory decisions relating to subjects such as work assignments, work schedules and telework are not subject to bargaining and are not proper subjects for union involvement.”

Union says recent realignments are part of broader merger effort

At the very least, recent employee realignments have prompted confusion and concern in the workforce, Bryant-Cunningham said.

She said impacted employees learned of the reorganization from AFGE, not the agency. Employees called and texted her on Monday to express confusion about their work assignments and bewilderment as to why they were receiving emails from their co-workers claiming to be their new acting supervisors.

Many of the employees who have been reorganized are Black GS-13s and 14s who are close to retirement age, Bryant-Cunningham said. Some are considering retiring early, she said.

“You see you’re being pushed out,” she said of the realignments. “We’re supposed to be leading the federal government in how human resources are done, and it’s not happening at OPM. Everything is political.”

The sheer uncertainty of the OPM-GSA merger has also driven some career employees and executives to retire or leave for other agencies.

Employees see political appointees scooping up leadership positions that previously went to career executives, Bryant-Cunningham said. Federal News Network reported on two such moves earlier this year. Sara Ratcliff, a former CHCO Council executive director, now leads OPM’s HR Solutions shop, and Dennis Kirk, the president’s pick to lead the Merit Systems Protection Board, is in charge of a key policy office.

Kirk’s nomination before the MSPB has been pending for more than a year.

Though AFGE believes the latest realignments are part of a piecemeal effort to shift more work and responsibility out of the agency, the impacted employees are still part of OPM, not GSA.

The realignments differ from the transfer of a few OPM employees to the General Services Administration, which the agencies carried out back in December. Those employees supported the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, which GSA now operates.

Still, Bryant-Cunningham said employees see the realignments as another way to force them out.

“OPM employees can’t get a fair shake,” she said. “We can’t get help from OPM. We can’t get help from Congress, even though we did get some help from Congress.”

The OPM-GSA merger is technically on hold, pending a congressionally-mandated study of OPM and its statutory functions from the National Academy of Public Administration.

The administration has continued to express a desire to see the merger move forward. It included a $70 million request for the merger in the president’s 2021 budget request.

As Federal News Network previously reported, GSA is planning to take over the management of at least one of OPM’s buildings, following a request last summer from Margaret Weichert, then acting director and deputy director for management at OMB.

And in a statement expressing its intention to veto a House-passed minibus of 2021 spending bills, the Trump administration said it opposed the provisions designed to both prohibit the OPM-GSA merger and prevent inter-agency agreements between the agencies.

“The administration continues to stress the need for structural and organizational reform at OPM, and strongly opposes the inclusion of language in sections … of the bill,” the statement reads. “Legislative and administrative reforms are needed to better align resources with the agency’s mission and create long-term stability, sustainability and increased operational excellence.”

The post Recent employee reorganizations raise questions about OPM-GSA merger, union says first appeared on Federal News Network.

Some of their recommendations, which were detailed in a 120-page report spearheaded by the Senior Executives Association and the Center for Organizational Excellence, are familiar.

Others, especially those covering the organization and leadership structure of the Office of Personnel Management, offer perhaps a different take on past proposals.

“My goal is to bring people to the table that can collectively work together,” Steve Goodrich, CEO of the Center for Organizational Excellence and one of the report’s study chairs, told reporters Tuesday. “There are very few members of Congress who spend their time focused on workforce issues but complain about it when they’re not being addressed. It’s time for all of us to come together, in a facilitated way, to start that dialogue and move that forward.”

But circumstances around the report and recent feedback about its recommendations illustrate just how difficult “coming together” will be.

The document itself has sparked a debate between the authors and at least one federal employee group, who believes its brief participation in civil service discussions was mischaracterized and creates a false impression that it supports and endorses the report’s 16 recommendations for OPM and the civil service.

The report lists seven people as study committee members and contributors. It also lists about 20 other “contributors,” who include representatives from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, the National Academy of Public Administration, private sector organizations, former federal and state human capital leaders and two federal employee unions.

But Richard Loeb, the senior policy counsel who was listed as a “contributor” from the American Federation of Government Employees, said the word doesn’t describe his involvement with the report.

In a July 27 letter to SEA and the Center for Organizational Excellence, Loeb said he represented AFGE at a daylong session in January to discuss “ideas on improving HR management.”

Loeb heard from the session’s organizers once in February and again in May, who described an effort to conduct further research and solicit more feedback. But the report’s organizers didn’t solicit more input from AFGE, he said.

“You and your contractor patrons are certainly entitled to publish your views regarding the federal civil service,” Loeb said. “But this report has been falsely advertised as reflecting the views of a broad range of individuals and organizations who do not support its recommendations. Spending one day with 20 people talking about the future of the civil service and then using that day as a pretext for writing a report to justify the dismantlement of the basic structures of the civil service is dishonest.”

Loeb has asked that SEA and the Center for Organizational Excellence remove his name and AFGE’s name from the report.

Goodrich said he would honor Loeb’s request. A future version of the report will refer to its “contributors” as “participants,” he added.

“They were there, and they were engaged,” Goodrich said of AFGE and its involvement in the January brainstorming session. “They were listened to.”

In a press call with reporters Tuesday, both Goodrich and SEA said it was never their intention to achieve consensus with all of their contributors and participants.

But beyond its objections with how the union was characterized in the report, AFGE has numerous criticisms of the recommendations themselves.

“It is nothing but a dishonest attempt to promote the administration’s effort to abolish OPM and politicize the career civil service, and simultaneously destroy the pay and benefits programs that protect the civil service from the corruption of politics and discrimination,” Loeb wrote in the letter.

AFGE’s letter surprised Goodrich, who said he ultimately thought both he and the union shared the same goals.

“Our position is that we need to honor this workforce,” he said in a brief interview with Federal News Network. “OPM should be a standalone agency with a term appointed leader.”

The report from Goodrich and SEA makes several recommendations about OPM and its structure. It proposes reorganizing OPM’s policy offices and creating new ones. It suggests lengthening the term of the OPM director from four years to a five or eight-year term.

OPM should have a different name, mission statement and leadership structure, human capital authors said.

They contemplate moving OPM’s retirement services and healthcare and insurances functions to a different agency or to the private sector.

But clearly, AFGE and the authors of the federal human capital report see these recommendations in drastically different ways.

For Goodrich and SEA, creating a five or eight-year term for the OPM director would bring some much-needed stability to a position that has seen a constant “revolving door” of leadership in recent years.

The Trump administration alone has nominated four different people in less than four years to lead OPM on a permanent basis.

But AFGE sees it differently.

“The OPM director position is already a four-year term appointment requiring presidential nomination and Senate confirmation,” AFGE wrote. “What possible advantage is gained from increasing the term of the appointment, other than to embed someone who may not reflect an administration’s policies? Given the tenure of recent appointees to this position, increasing the term of office seems quite irrelevant.”

The union took offense with the proposals to restructure OPM and possibly move the agency’s retirement and healthcare services. OPM’s healthcare and insurance division “does a good job negotiating prices and coverage” for the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, AFGE said.

Moving these entities out “would reduce OPM by over 1,700 positions, meaning the agency would be at least 61% smaller than it is today, which is already at a historic low,” the union said.

To be clear, SEA and the Center for Organizational Excellence don’t offer a firm proposal on where OPM health and retirement services should go. In an interview, Goodrich suggested employees with outsourced positions could transition to new, “higher value” jobs within the federal workforce.

SEA and the Center for Organizational Excellence also suggest a review of the responsibilities and authorities of the deputy director for management position at the Office of Management and Budget.

For AFGE, the proposal represents another attempt to make OPM a “mere vassal of OMB,” “vesting real authority in OMB, an arm of the White House,” the union said.

But SEA and the Center for Organizational Excellence argue those concerns demonstrate the need for a review of the OMB position.

“Since its creation, it’s been a kitchen sink for Congress, throwing responsibilities across a myriad of areas, including many areas of human capital policy,” Jason Briefel, SEA’s executive director, said of the DDM position. “No one knows what that means and how it’s impacting these interactions between OMB and OPM, and the concerns that it raises about the independence of OPM and decisions its making with regard to federal workforce policy.”

The report comes as the National Academy of Public Administration is currently conducting its own, congressionally-mandated review of OPM and its statutory functions, which SEA and the Center for Organizational Excellence plainly acknowledge in their own report.

Goodrich said NAPA has a copy of the human capital report, but the organization didn’t provide real input on the recommendations.

“We’ve tried to be real honest brokers in this,” he said. “We’re trying to reduce the amount of tension so we can talk about the real issues.”

The post New civil service report meant to bring people together has driven them apart first appeared on Federal News Network.

A new report, which was spearheaded by the Center for Organizational Excellence and the Senior Executives Association, reiterates many arguments that numerous good government groups and other organizations have, in some form or fashion, been making for years.

Current laws are outdated and fail to support a rapidly changing 21st century federal workforce. The executive branch doesn’t have the capacity or organizational bandwidth to develop or support a modern-day workforce that’s responsive to the American public.

And Congress, despite its role as an appropriator and authorizing body, hasn’t meaningfully bothered to address federal human capital management challenges through new legislation or proper oversight.

The report offers up five cases and 16 recommendations that, according to the report’s authors, would build up capacity in the executive and legislative branches to tackle persistent federal human capital challenges.

Recommendations are addressed to both Congress and the current administration. The report envisions both the executive and legislative branches taking action on these recommendations at the beginning of the next administration, with implementation spanning 10 years or longer.

“For too long federal workforce issues have been the domain of a select few champions,” the report reads. “Congress has lost sight of the value of maintaining the capability and skills of the federal workforce — the workforce that is responsible for the performance in execution of laws enacted by Congress and management of trillions of dollars on behalf of taxpayers.”

Many recommendations are familiar at this point. But others are new or offer a different twist. And many address an effort to overhaul the structure and organization of the Office of Personnel Management.

“OPM, which was created as part of the Civil Service Reform Act, was intended as the centrally-managed human capital management entity for the federal government, but for a variety of reasons, not necessarily its fault, has failed in this role,” human capital authors said.

To be clear, the report doesn’t recommend eliminating OPM or, as the Trump administration has proposed, merging portions of OPM with the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget.

But it does recommend a new name, a revised mission statement and an entirely new structure for the federal HR agency. And it does contemplate some of the actions the administration suggested in its merger proposal.

“As a compliance driven organization, OPM culture tends to be driven by regulations, when in reality the needs of customers — agencies, employees, hiring managers — should be the central focus,” experts said.

Complete overhaul of retirement process, technology

The report, for example, suggests sunsetting OPM’s fee-for-service HR Solutions shop. USAJobs, USA Staffing and similar OPM tools would move under a new technology services operations group within the agency. GSA would pick up administration of the Human Capital and Training (HCaTS) contract, as well as other procurement and facilities functions.

Like previous OPM directors have suggested for decades, the human capital report recommends a complete overhaul of the federal retirement process and technology. But the authors also contemplate whether retirement services should move out of OPM.

“OPM could determine and propose if this functional area would best be executed within OPM, from another federal agency, or outsourced,” the report reads. “If it is determined that outside execution is more effective, OPM should maintain policy oversight and [human capital] data ownership and control.”

OPM should also reassess its healthcare and insurance function to determine whether benefits administration can be outsourced, according to the human capital authors. Government already does this with its federal dental and vision program.

“The nation’s largest employers, such as Walmart, outsource their benefits administration, as do most private-sector organizations,” the report reads. “Once re-engineering is complete, service level agreement and transactional cost ratios should be established. OPM could then explore if it is an appropriate candidate for outsourcing.

To bring some consistency to OPM, the agency’s director should serve for a longer term, either five or eight years instead of the current four, human capital authors said.

Few OPM directors in recent years have served a full four-year term, as the agency has been plagued with near constant turnover during the Obama and Trump administrations. On Monday, the president nominated a fourth person in nearly as many years to lead OPM.

The report also recommends reorganizing OPM into four main offices to include strategic programs, human resources programs, federal employee benefits, and agency operations. A career deputy director would lead each new OPM office.

Beyond the four new offices and longer term for the OPM director, human capital authors recommend the creation of a Human Capital Business Board, modeled after the Defense Business Board.

Six “credible and non-conflicted experts in large scale government transformation, human capital, and related systems” would sit on the board and provide independent advice to the OPM director, according to the report

The authors also recommend strengthening the role of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council. The council should self-govern and serve as more of an advisory group to the OPM director, the report said.

OPM, the CHCO Council and the Human Capital Business Board should, together with Congress, develop more strategic visions for federal hiring, talent development reskilling and other workforce initiatives. Many human capital activities are too expensive and inefficient compared to the private sector, the authors argue.

The report comes as the National Academy of Public Administration is currently conducting its own, congressionally-mandated review of OPM and its statutory functions, which SEA and the Center for Organizational Excellence plainly acknowledge.

“While efficiencies can certainly be quantified and realized in OPM, we recommend that Congress take no action until after the NDAA-directed NAPA study is complete, but more importantly, until a clear plan for improving the efficiency, effectiveness and credibility of OPM and government-wide human capital management is complete,” the report reads. “It would make no sense to consider moving OPM without effecting a significant transformation first, so that a ‘lift and shift’ does not occur without significant strategic benefit, or to just realize a false sense of ‘job complete’ after the move.”

NAPA and its CEO, Terry Gerton, are listed as contributors or stakeholders involved in this human capital report, as well as the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, Society of Human Resources Management, Association of Government Accountants, Grant Thornton, the IBM Center for the Business of Government and several former agency officials.

Both the American Federation of Government Employees and National Treasury Employees Union have policy directors listed as contributors. Stakeholders didn’t see all drafts and iterations of the human capital report.

The post Federal human capital — including OPM — need a sweeping overhaul, affinity groups say first appeared on Federal News Network.

President Donald Trump on Monday announced his plans to nominate John Gibbs, a political appointee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to be the new permanent OPM director.

Gibbs has been at HUD for more than three years, where he currently serves as the acting assistant secretary for community planning and development. Gibbs oversees an $8 billion HUD budget for homelessness, community development and disaster relief programs.

According to the White House statement on his upcoming nomination, he “led the successful deployment of more than $9 billion in CARES Act funds in response to coronavirus.”

Before joining HUD, Gibbs was a software developer in Silicon Valley and led non-profit teams in Japan, according to the White House. It appears he has little direct federal personnel experience.

If confirmed, Gibbs will replace Michael Rigas, who’s currently juggling two positions as both the OPM acting director and the acting deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget.

Rigas took on the OPM role after Dale Cabaniss, OPM’s second permanent director, suddenly resigned back in March. Cabaniss was on the job for six short months, where she reportedly received poor treatment from White House staff. She also butted heads with the Office of Management and Budget over OPM’s role during the coronavirus pandemic and the administration’s proposed General Services Administration merger.

The administration has expressed a continued desire to see the OPM-GSA merger move forward, even though Congress has effectively put such moves on hold.

Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee are also investigating whether OPM political appointees misled Congress over the perceived legal authorities needed to implement the merger.

OPM, meanwhile, has witnessed a dizzying number of key personnel changes within the last three years. Gibbs, if confirmed, would be the third permanent director to lead the agency in as many years.

Trump’s first OPM nominee was George Nesterczuk, who never got a nomination hearing and withdrew his name from consideration because the vetting process took too long. He joined OPM earlier this year as a senior adviser in the director’s office.

The president’s second nominee, Jeff Pon, was confirmed back in March 2018. He too butted heads with the administration over the OPM-GSA merger and was fired after seven months as the agency’s director.

Other key OPM roles have seen a fair share of turnover within the last three years, as career executives have retired or left for other federal agencies.

Political appointees have recently filled a few of the positions that career executives left vacant.

Dennis Kirk, another Trump appointee, is heading up a key OPM policy shop. His nomination to lead the still-vacant Merit Systems Protection Board has been pending before the Senate for more than a year.

Sara Ratcliff, the former executive director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, returned to OPM earlier this year as the new associate director for HR Solutions.

The post Trump taps HUD appointee to be new OPM director first appeared on Federal News Network.

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• Two democratic regulators are requesting transcripts from a conference call involving of several members of the Trump administration regarding the elimination of the Office of Personnel Management. The Project on Government Oversight said it obtained notes from the call in which the Office of Legal Counsel advised the administration that it lacks the legal authority to eliminate OPM, Congressmen Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) want copies as well. (House Oversight and Reform Committee)

• The Pentagon’s inspector general is recommending the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) establish an AI governance framework to help secure AI data and promote DoD-wide collaborative efforts. A new report says while DoD has taken steps to improve AI governance, it still needs to address certain legal and privacy issues.

• A new list of frequently asked questions from the Labor Department aims to help protect workers from exposure to the coronavirus. The list from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration includes best practices to prevent the spread of infection, as well as workers’ rights to express concerns about workplace conditions.

The post Lawmakers want transcript of Trump administration call on eliminating OPM first appeared on Federal News Network.