‘It’s The Price is Right’: How USCIS artificially deflated employee ratings under forced distribution mandate

This month, federal agencies began appraising the work of their nearly 2 million civilian workers for the first time since the Trump administration lifted a ban on forced distributions in the performance management process and capped above average ratings at 40%.

But for months, federal employees have reported that their agencies had already unofficially limited most workers to a 3 out of 5 rating, while such a practice was still unlawful and months before the Office of Personnel Management formally proposed authorizing it.

Documents obtained by Government Executive offer a glimpse into how the 2025 performance appraisal process worked when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services imposed a forced distribution requirement on its National Records Center.

A whistleblower within the agency, who previously unveiled a scheme in USCIS’ Freedom of Information Act office to arbitrarily reject the vast majority of requests it received, described a hurried process in which high-performing employees’ ratings were deflated to fit a curve, while supervisors were more likely to retain high marks—and consequently, bigger awards.

Government Executive reviewed emails, contemporaneous memos summarizing meetings and other verbal communications, as well as a spreadsheet cataloging the distribution of ratings among frontline employees and supervisors. USCIS did not respond to questions regarding the 2015 performance appraisal process or if changes have been made for this year’s reviews.

A ‘backwards’ process

Timothy Turner served as section chief for HR and training at USCIS’ National Records Center until he retired earlier this year. He said that while he and his colleagues had heard rumors it was coming, the mandate to institute a forced distribution did not come down until late November, at a time when HR officials were already scrambling in the wake of the recently ended 43-day government shutdown last year.

Initially, the need to limit the numbers of 5—achieved excellence—ratings was pitched as due to budgetary constraints.

“The award allocation for ‘achieved excellence’ must be limited in order to stay within budget,” wrote then-NRC Director M. David Arnold, who has since been detailed elsewhere in USCIS. “Expect further guidance on the exact distribution of awards in order to stay within budget; however, this model will mean that ratings of ‘achieved excellence’ will be very limited.”

But Turner said it quickly became clear that the process for 2025 performance appraisals was “backwards.” Ordinarily, supervisors would rate their subordinates, and then allocate awards based upon the available bonus pool.

But in the new process, agency leadership mandated the size of awards from the outset—5.5% of salary for supervisors who scored 5, 3.5% for supervisors who scored a 4, 4% for non-supervisors who scored a 5, and 2% for non-supervisors who scored a 4. A Nov. 26 email states that the NRC could “afford” between 60 and 70 “achieved excellence ratings, and that officials in USCIS’ Immigration Records and Identity Services directorate had mandated a “20-40-20” bell curve, with the plurality of employees receiving 4s.

The forced distribution—and a looming Dec. 5 deadline—led officials to implement an unusual system for figuring out who would receive the now-limited 5 ratings.

“My immediate need is for every supervisor to nominate a primary and an alternate of their ratees for ‘achieved excellence,’” Arnold wrote. “The primary will most definitely receive a ‘5’ rating. The alternates will be used to work with until we exhaust our funds.”

But without the calibration panels that have begun to proliferate throughout the federal government, officials needed a way to ensure employees who performed well on concrete performance metrics, such as FOIA officers’ processing quotas, did not receive a 5 rating if they were not nominated for it, a practice some within the agency described as “level-setting.”

“Based on how the rating calculator works, if an individual with production goals receives a 5 rating in their production goals, unless you intend for them to be rated a ‘5’ you will have to give them mainly ‘3s’ in the subjective areas,” Arnold wrote. “Any rating of a 4.5 or above is considered a ‘5.’ . . . I know this constitutes a major change and we have very little time to execute.”

At a Dec. 2 meeting, a deputy director within NRC stressed the need to “make the math work,” and compared the reverse engineering of overall scores as akin to a game show.  While traditionally, supervisors would file their performance reviews and then input the final scores into a spreadsheet for determining awards, under the forced distribution, the reverse is true.

“[The deputy director said] this is ‘The Price is Right,’ regarding having to change appraisal ratings to fit into the [performance appraisal and awards spreadsheet],” Turner wrote in a contemporaneous memo. “She stated that ‘you are agreeing whatever you are submitting for the PAAS is what you will rate them in [the employee performance management system]. Whatever we say is the score for awards is what we’ll put in EPM.”

‘More expedient than fair’

Turner told Government Executive that he raised concern with his supervisor that the new performance review process violated the federal regulations banning the use of forced distribution or stack ranking, which at the time described the practice as “incompatible with effective performance management.”

According to a memo memorializing the Dec. 1 conversation, the supervisor said he “gets” Turner’s concern, but said the “political reality” is that agency leadership has mandated the award sizes and that their office could not deviate from the framework.

Turner also proposed an alternative plan: if supervisors better calibrated their performance standards and limited the forced distribution only to supervisors, the NRC could still fall within the new bonus budget. That advice went unheeded.

“I also stated that this was largely an issue that does not need to exist, and that if we simply evaluated supervisors fairly and judiciously, particularly at the GS-13 and up level, most would be at a 3 (meets expectations),” Turner wrote in the Dec. 1 memo. “Additionally, if we applied that same level of rigor to non-supervisors, that would allow us to fairly assess each competency and performance goal in a way that ensured fairness and accountability.”

Ultimately, NRC saw 19% of its 414 employees receive a 3, 39% received a 4, and 24% received a 5. But there was a consequence of the two nominees per team strategy: as one ascends the organizational chart, teams get smaller. That meant supervisors got an outsized share of top ratings—37% of supervisors received an “achieved excellence” rating, compared to only 23% of non-supervisors.

That imbalance is aggravated by the fact that officials mandated USCIS offices to set aside 80% of their award budget for annual performance awards, with just 20% going to on-the-spot and other mid-year bonuses. In past years, the ratio has been more evenly split, typically with between 40% and 60% of the overall awards budget going toward mid-year bonuses.

Turner said that after performance reviews had been complete, he had a meeting with Arnold, who has since been detailed to USCIS’ field office directorate, to discuss his qualms with the new process. Per a Dec. 8 memo documenting the conversation, Arnold said that while leadership never mandated a forced distribution in an official capacity, he received “second and third order comments to that effect.”

“The director stated that ‘in a perfect world, I would have chaired meetings with [associate center directors]’ who laid out who 5s were, and made them justify ‘why this employee was better than the others,’ but they were ‘forced into a time bound deadline’ and conceded that they ‘did things more expedient than was fair, even though I hate the word fair,’” the memo states.

‘Creating the problem’

Turner told Government Executive that he came forward this fall out of concern for what federal workers across government face now that forced distributions are no longer banned and are, in fact, mandatory.

“Federal employees should be held accountable for their work,” he said. “Senior leaders should be held accountable for how they judge it. If a quota changed an employee’s rating, that employee deserves to know who ordered it and on what authority. Accountability cannot stop at the supervisor’s door.”

Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy, said the experience at USCIS shows the pitfalls of applying a forced distribution on a personnel system built around objective standards for performance.

“If you have a very large group of employees over which you’d expect to have a fair distribution of not so good and then superior members of the workforce, then this forced distribution could make some sense, though it makes for some rough targets,” he said. “But if you have an agency with very high levels of professionalism, you wouldn’t want to have people around who are at the low end of the bell curve. So the more you get away from just a large, normal distribution, the harder and more unfruitful it is to force them into that normal distribution. And the more you try to force people into that, the more likely it is that you’re creating the problem you’re ostensibly trying to solve.”

And Ray Limon, a former member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, said Turner’s allegations could constitute a prohibited personnel practice for those employees whose performance ratings were artificially deflated. The new process also threatens to have a long tail, as OPM has also recently changed its regulations to emphasize performance ratings over tenure in the reduction in force process.

“Reducing performance management to a forced distribution scale creates this disincentive to be further engaged as an employee,” he said. “You have less agency in defining your own career path, while also being more at risk for future RIF efforts. It’s just antithetical to why we do performance management to begin with.”