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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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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.

But it came up mostly empty-handed.

Though OPM, GSA and Office of Management and Budget leadership did form working groups and met frequently to discuss the proposed merger, the plans, business cases and cost analyses they developed contained few actionable details, GAO said this week in a new report on the administration’s reorganization initiatives.

The review has been nearly a year in the making after GAO testified at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the OPM-GSA merger back in May 2019.

GAO at the time said neither OPM nor GSA had satisfied the best practices and planning requirements auditors usually look for when evaluating the viability of a major reorganization effort like this one.

One year later, the administration still hadn’t satisfied the vast majority of those best practices, GAO said.

OPM and GSA general counsel offices never provided a description of the legal authorities they believed they already had or needed to carry out pieces of the merger.

The two agencies did, according to GAO, consider the upfront costs that might be associated with the merger. But the agencies did not finalize specific metrics and targets associated with the moves.

“Major change initiatives should be based on either a clearly presented business case or analysis of costs and benefits grounded in accurate and reliable data, both of which can show stakeholders why a particular initiative is being considered and the range of alternatives considered,” GAO said. “While OPM officials had some information on the costs and benefits they planned to achieve by merging functions with other agencies, they did not have an analysis or underlying data supporting their conclusions.”

OPM did give GAO a description of its financial challenges, a qualitative business case and a list of other states and foreign countries that had an integrated administrative agency, as well as an estimate of the potential cost savings for the merger.

But the documents didn’t have specific, quantitative outcomes or metrics, GAO said.

Efforts to engage OPM employees and other stakeholders in reorganization planning also came up short.

“We found that OPM’s early outreach efforts to employees and stakeholders were insufficient, the agency did not have a plan for incorporating employee and stakeholder feedback, and it did not share relevant implementation details that may have affected employees and stakeholders,” GAO said.

OPM later provided GAO with a list of the calls, meetings and townhall discussions agency leaders held with employees, Congress and other stakeholders, but the events all began months after the merger plan had been related to the public.

Agency leaders were concerned about employee engagement, and then-acting OPM Director Margaret Weichert launched an internal survey to gauge morale. She shared the results of the survey and held listening sessions to discuss them with the workforce, GAO said.

“However, OPM officials did not determine how they planned to use these communications to sustain and strengthen employee engagement,” GAO said. “In November 2019, OMB staff told us that because they were still in the planning stages of the reorganization, the proposed reform had not yet involved major changes for employees, so they put employee engagement efforts on hold.”

Current and former OPM employees have previously told Federal News Network the merger proposal created uncertainty and fostered low morale within the agency.

In addition, none of the agencies ever explained how the merger would resolve longstanding management challenges — or why GSA was better equipped to handle OPM’s high-risk IT systems, GAO said.

“In November 2019, OMB staff told us that, because the proposed merger was a long-term effort and plans were still under development, they had not yet determined how our high-risk and other management challenges would be addressed,” the report reads.

Agency officials gave a similar response to explain why they hadn’t yet finalized a top-to-bottom implementation plan for the merger or a comprehensive plan for the OPM and GSA workforces.

GAO offered no specific recommendations for OPM, GSA or OMB, instead acknowledging the year-long, congressionally-mandated study the National Academy of Public Administration will conduct.

NAPA and OPM signed a contract back in mid-March, and the academy has chosen five fellows to serve on the study panel.

Security clearance transfer earns relatively high marks

GAO’s assessment of OPM’s transfer of the National Background Investigations Bureau to the Pentagon was significantly more positive.

The Pentagon stood up a Personnel Vetting Transformation Office (PVTO), which was initially designed to oversee and implement the change management activities associated with the security clearance transfer. The office today is managing future changes to the broader clearance process.

“The PVTO director also showed us a detailed implementation plan organized around the nine functional areas identified in the broader joint transfer plan,” GAO said. “The implementation plan tracked thousands of activities and provided a detailed timeline for completion. The director also provided us a dashboard that his team used to track implementation progress. The director told us that his office used the dashboard to manage and monitor the transfer daily. The dashboard allowed the implementation team to identify areas where attention was needed using red, yellow, and green stoplight indicators signaling the status of major objectives.”

OPM and DoD managed to meet nearly all of GAO’s best practices for reorganization,

Some 2,979 NBIB employees successfully transferred to DoD’s pay and personnel system at the Oct. 1 deadline; 17 employees chose to retire.

NBIB officials told GAO they began townhall meetings with their employees as early as July 2017, when proposals to move portions of the bureau to the Pentagon were still under consideration in Congress.

OPM surveyed NBIB employees last April, ahead of the upcoming transfer to DoD in October. The goal, GAO said, was to collect information on employees’ perceptions of the transition to the Pentagon, their work experiences, job satisfaction and whether they intended to leave their positions.

Two-thirds of the NBIB workforce said they felt extremely informed to somewhat informed about the upcoming transfer. Another one-third said they didn’t feel informed at all.

“When asked about satisfaction with involvement with decisions that affect their work, 38% of respondents were positive, 34% were neutral, and 28% were negative,” GAO said.

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A highly-anticipated study of the Office of Personnel Management can officially begin, now that the National Academy of Public Administration and the agency have finalized a year-long contract.

Both parties finalized the contract in mid-March. It runs through March 17, 2021, giving NAPA exactly one year to conduct a congressionally-mandated review of OPM and its statutory functions, as well as its other roles, responsibilities and challenges.

The contract, which Federal News Network obtained, is worth $807,280.

The academy will provide Congress a report next March with its findings, as well as its recommendations for addressing OPM’s challenges. OPM has another six months to respond to NAPA’s report to Congress.

The contract stemmed from a provision in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which temporarily blocked the transfer, transition, merger or consolidation of OPM statutory functions to the General Services Administration or Office of Management and Budget — at least until NAPA can finish a formal study of the agency and its mission.

It’s ultimately up to Congress whether it uses NAPA’s recommendations and OPM’s responses to draft potential legislation.

“With our report, Congress could begin to think about any kind of legislation or actions that they want to take, and they would finalize those based on any responses that OPM would provide,” Terry Gerton, NAPA president and CEO, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “Our expectation would be that if any of this generates a move for legislative changes that would be in place for the [20]22 cycle.”

The NDAA language initially gave both the academy and the agency 30 days to finalize a contract, but discussions over the cost of the OPM study delayed the final award, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

Though OPM did receive more appropriated dollars in 2020 than it has in previous years, the agency is still grappling with the financial shortfall created by the transfer of the National Background Investigations Bureau to the Defense Department.

Read more OPM news

“Every study is different, and the negotiation process varies from study to study and client to client,” Gerton said of the contract negotiations. “We’re now at an agreed level support that is going to allow us to do the work that Congress has set forth.”

The academy, which has a long history of conducting congressionally-directed reviews of federal agencies, will follow the same procedures it has in the past to form and staff a new OPM study panel, Gerton said.

The academy issued a call to its fellows shortly after the OPM contract was signed. Fellows interested in participating had until March 26 to send their names, credentials and experience potentially relevant to the panel.

A “study team” made up of full-time NAPA staff, including a project director, senior adviser and other analysts, will take on much of the daily work.

“They’re already beginning background research, developing the work plan and thinking about how we’re going to proceed through the course of the one-year study,” Gerton said.

NAPA staff will review submissions from the fellows and recommend panelists to the academy’s chairman, who will approve participants for the panel.

The panelists are there to provide guidance and support to the academy’s full-time study team, Gerton said.

“Obviously we’re going to want folks who understand in some detail the internal operations of the Office of Personnel Management,” she said. “We’re going to need folks who understand the federal budget process and the reimbursable work process, because those are very clearly called out in the legislative language. We have a responsibility to look at the application and implementation of information technology within OPM, so we’re going to be looking for fellows who have experience there. Obviously folks who’ve had experience in large-scale government transformation projects and folks who understand the relationships between cabinet agencies and Congress, all of those are clearly set forth in the tasks that Congress gave us in the language.”

Read more Workforce news

The panel will meet three-to-four times throughout the course of the year. For now, those meetings will be virtual, Gerton said, but the panelists will be engaged with the NAPA study team and subject matter experts from OPM throughout the year.

Regardless of NAPA’s findings, the OPM study has and likely will continue to generate a great amount of interest in the federal community.

Federal employee groups who pushed for the NDAA provision have said they view the NAPA study as a way to strategically pause the Trump administration’s controversial plan to merge OPM with GSA.

And even as the administration has acknowledged NAPA’s role, there are signs the White House is still pursuing the merger.

The administration included a $70 million request to cover the costs of the OPM-GSA merger in its 2021 budget request. Meetings to discuss the merger have also continued.

But for NAPA, the OPM study gives the academy an opportunity to gather a wide variety of stakeholders, including other federal agencies that use OPM services, employee unions and other groups.

“We think that is one of the strengths of the academy, our ability to convene a variety of groups in non-attribution ways [and] in ways that really help us get after their concerns and their issues,” she said. “That is absolutely part of the work plan that we are developing, lots and lots of listening sessions and focus groups. [We’re] really trying to make sure that we touch all of the stakeholders and advocacy groups, because we realize that the world of folks who care about what happens to OPM is really wide.”

The plan may be technically on hold, but the White House is asking for $70 million in no-year appropriated funding to cover the costs of its proposed merger of the Office of Personnel Management with the General Services Administration.

The request, which was part of a joint 2021 budget submission from GSA and OPM, acknowledges recent law prohibiting the move of OPM’s statutory functions to other agencies and an upcoming study by the National Academy of Public Administration. NAPA is supposed to review and recommend options for OPM and its future.

But if and when the merger does move forward — and Congress grants the agencies the appropriate statutory authorities needed to reorganize — OPM and GSA need to invest “significant time and resources” to ensure a seamless transition, the 2021 budget request reads.

The funding will be used to buy new IT equipment, integrate OPM business processes and systems into GSA’s networks and move and transition staff, according to the 2021 request.

“Transition costs are primarily driven by the IT-related remediation and transformation work necessary to ensure OPM IT systems are securely integrated into GSA’s network, a complex effort that must be appropriately resourced given the mounting technical debt and challenges OPM has faced in modernizing and securing its IT infrastructure and will continue to deepen if not aggressively addressed,” the request reads.

Though the proposal to merge OPM with GSA has largely lacked detail so far, this isn’t the first time the administration has positioned a specific dollar amount behind the merger. Last year’s budget request included $50 million to support the OPM-GSA merger, which Congress ignored.

The administration anticipated it will cost another $1 million to merge OPM’s inspector general functions with GSA’s OIG, according to the budget request.

Like last year’s submission, the joint OPM-GSA budget request still largely reflects the existence of two separate entities. The 2021 request, for example, doesn’t explain the transition of specific OPM organizations to GSA.

Read more Budget news

But unlike the previous year’s request, the budget submission for the Office of Management and Budget doesn’t mention the creation of a new federal workforce policy office, which was a key tenet of the administration’s plan to reorganize OPM.

The 2021 budget, however, does shed more light on OPM’s financial situation, which changed drastically when the National Background Investigations Bureau, nearly 2,700 NBIB employees and $1 billion in revenue from the governmentwide security clearance business transferred to the Pentagon as part of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency back in October.

As it did for part of 2019, the Defense Department will continue to “buy back” $35 million in OPM services, including existing NBIB security clearance systems, hardware, infrastructure, procurement support and facilities, through at least fiscal 2021, according to the request.

Still, OPM anticipates a $60 million shortfall due to the NBIB loss, though it did ask for additional $25 million to mitigate the funding gap.

The agency received an additional $34.5 million in 2020 to alleviate the impacts of the common services shortfall, a solution that OPM described as unsustainable and not “appropriately geared toward the success of its long-term mission.”

The request for $70 million is a “no-year” appropriation, meaning GSA wouldn’t be obligated to spend all of it in 2021. Instead, the funding could be used as needed, which wouldn’t likely occur until NAPA completes its study and Congress grants OPM and GSA necessary legal authorities. The NAPA study is expected to take at least one year to finish.

Margaret Weichert, the outgoing deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, acknowledged the joint OPM-GSA budget request in speaking with reporters last week.

“We in no way, shape or form will be bucking either the spirit or the mechanics of what was included in the NDAA language about the study associated with OPM and GSA,” she said.

Instead, Weichert said she was confident the NAPA study, whenever it’s finished, would prove the need to integrate federal management services, like those of OPM and GSA.

Higher rent for OPM?

The NBIB transfer to the Pentagon appears to have posed still further uncertainties for OPM.

Because NBIB — now a component of DCSA — still occupies space within OPM’s Theodore Roosevelt Building (TRB) in Washington, the agency is now technically managing a multi-tenant space.

But that will soon change.

GSA told OPM last July it planned to revoke the agency’s existing delegation for the operations and maintenance of the TRB, a GSA spokesperson told Federal News Network.

The delegation of authority was rescinded at the request of the then-acting OPM director, the GSA spokesperson said. Weichert was the agency’s acting director in July, when GSA informed OPM it would take over management of the building.

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

Read more OPM news

“The GSA administrator has statutory authority to operate and maintain the building, or to delegate those responsibilities to occupant agencies,” the GSA spokesperson wrote in an email to Federal News Network. “Also, the Theodore Roosevelt Building recently became a multi-tenant building, and GSA rarely allows the operation and maintenance of multi-tenant buildings to be delegated.”

But on the other hand, the revocation will cost OPM $2 million in higher rent costs, according to the agencies’ joint budget submission, and the timing of the decision may raise further questions about the administration’s intentions for its proposed merger.

Discussions over the management of the OPM building have been ongoing for several months. Weichert, in describing ways the administration could advance the merger administratively, has previously suggested OPM could outsource  some of its functions and assets, including its office space, for GSA to manage.

GSA is already helping OPM modernize several of its legacy IT systems through the agency’s Centers of Excellence initiative.

Though having GSA manage the OPM building may have little to no visible impact on the agency’s employees who work there, it’s unclear — at least at this point — what immediate benefits, cost efficiencies or savings the change would bring to OPM or government in general.

GSA is currently conducting a housing study of the building to determine how OPM could better utilize its existing space and whether other agencies could eventually occupy the vacant parts of the TRB.

“GSA and OPM will know more about potential savings when the study is completed,” the spokesperson said. “If the results are similar to studies GSA had conducted for other agencies, better space utilization could result in significant annual savings for OPM and also for the federal government by moving other agencies out of private sector leased space into federally-owned space.”

GSA will assume authority of the OPM building in October 2020, the agency spokesperson said.

The president’s request includes some $20 billion in agency program reductions and $28 billion in  program eliminations.

It’s unclear how these proposed eliminations and cuts will fare in Congress, which has largely ignored them during previous years, but the president’s priorities for a few of the largest civilian agencies are undeniably clear. As in previous years, this time around Congress will likely turn a blind eye to many of these cuts and eliminations. But the White House request reflects the president’s priorities in his final year of his first term in office.

The Department of Veterans Affairs was the big winner among civilian agencies, with VA submitting another record-high budget request for 2021. VA’s $105 billion request includes investments in both department and community care health programs, as well as a significant funding bump for its major electronic health records modernization program. The president also requested $94.2 billion in advanced VA appropriations for future years, most of which would fund the department’s community care programs.

Depending on the outcome of a reorganization proposal, the Department of Homeland Security may also see a relatively small budget boost in 2021. Notably, the president has proposed transferring the Secret Service from DHS back to the Treasury Department. The Secret Service had been a part of Treasury since its inception in 1865. Congress moved the agency in 2003 with the establishment of DHS.

If the Secret Service does in fact move back to Treasury, DHS would see a 2% decrease from the previous year’s budget. But if the agency stays, DHS would experience a 3.2% budget increase.

Several modernization initiatives are driving a budget boost at the IRS, which would receive $300 million to continue needed IT upgrades and several projects aimed at digitizing the agency’s interactions with taxpayers.

In addition, the 2021 budget also proposes $15 billion in investments to improve IRS tax enforcement, which the White House estimated would generate $64 billion in net savings over 10 years.

Several other civilian agencies, however, don’t fare as well under the president’s 2021 budget request.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, would see a 15.2% budget cut from the previous year, while funding for the Department of Health and Human Services would drop by 10%.

For a further agency-by-agency breakdown of the president’s 2021 budget request for civilian agencies, click here.

The president also recommended eliminating more than a dozen small agencies, which included the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, among others.

Trump has made a similar request since his first year in office, when he proposed the elimination of funding for 19 small, independent agencies.

Like in previous years, the president’s 2021 budget recommends an elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness. As the name implies, the PSLF program forgives the remaining balance on student loans for individuals employed in government or non-profit organizations after a certain number of payments.

The 2021 request again includes funding to support the president’s proposed merger of the Office Personnel Management with the General Services Administration, despite recent defense policy language calling for a temporarily pause with that plan. Still, the president requested $70 million to support the OPM-GSA transition, more than the $50 million the administration asked for last year. The Trump administration has acknowledged Congress will need to authorize a merger of this sort.

Jory Heckman and Jason Miller contributed to this report.

Weichert said she will leave for Accenture next month, where she’ll join the company’s commercial practice.

As deputy director for management, Weichert lead the creation and subsequent implementation of the President’s Management Agenda.

“I’ve been incredibly impressed by the team I’ve gotten to work with and the amount we’ve been able to accomplish,” she said in a brief interview. “We are at [a] perfect pivot point to institutionalize this change. I came and asked different questions about how we might do things differently in government. Are we thinking big enough? Those questions haven’t been answered 100%, but we’ve made huge progress in implementing against those ideas. The relay race of change is long and we have great people in place to take it next length of the journey.”

It’s unclear who the president may nominate as her replacement. But based on OMB’s order of succession, Michael Wooten, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, may be the likely acting deputy director for management.

After the DDM, the federal chief financial officer is the third most-senior official at OMB, but the position has been vacant since the beginning of the Trump administration in 2017.

Weichert came to OMB from Ernst & Young in 2018.

She served concurrently for nearly a year as the acting director for the Office of Personnel Management, replacing Jeff Pon in October 2018. Pon was reportedly fired for failing to support the administration’s proposed OPM merger with the General Services Administration, an idea that Weichert initiated and largely spearheaded.

The OPM-GSA merger faced some tough criticism from members of Congress, federal employee organizations and some employees themselves. Today, the merger has been temporarily paused pending a top-to-bottom-review of OPM, its mission and functions by the National Academy of Public Administration.

Weichert left the acting role at OPM in September, once the Senate confirmed Dale Cabaniss to the permanent director’s position.

During her time in government, Weichert helped roll out the federal data strategy, started the administration’s efforts to train employees under the Federal Cybersecurity Reskilling Academy and launched the Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center.

She was also a firm advocate for a more agile and responsive civil service system, which she often said failed to the meet the needs of a modern federal workforce.

“I’m most proud of the fact that we have transformed cynicism about the management agenda,” she said. “I think people believe change is possible, and we are asking tough questions about what that change looks like.”

Russell Vought, OMB’s acting director, thanked Weichert for service.

“She’s been leading the charge to re-think how the federal government can better serve the American people,” he said in a statement. “Through her leadership in developing and executing the President’s Management Agenda and her key insights into transforming organizations, Margaret has put forward solutions that will build a stronger America. On behalf of the entire Office of Management and Budget, I want to express my deepest gratitude for Margaret and wish her all the best in this next chapter.”

Several members of Congress also joined Vought in thanking Weichert for the ideas and direction she brought to government.

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) called Weichert a “trusted partner” in Congress’ efforts to modernize the security clearance process.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), ranking member of the Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations called her an “outstanding agent change within Washington, utilizing her business experience to help transform the federal government to better serve the American people.”

The Senior Executives Association credited Weichert for starting “necessary conversations” about the functioning of government and the federal workforce and urged others to pick up the debate where she left off.

“Individuals across government would be wise to continue these essential conversations, which are critical to ensuring the effective deliverance of services to the American public,” Bill Valdez, SEA president, said in a statement. “Improving the functioning of government cannot be done by one person, one department, or one congressional committee. Congress and the executive branch must dedicate significant time, resources and attention to reviewing government operations and advancing the capacity of the federal workforce.”