OPM will forego FEVS in 2025, despite law requiring it

The Office of Personnel Management this week confirmed that the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey has been canceled, raising questions regarding the federal government’s legal obligation to conduct the annual poll of federal employee engagement and morale, and the reliability of data in future years.

OPM first announced its decision in an email to agency chief human capital officers Friday afternoon, as first reported by Federal News Network. In a statement, OPM Director Scott Kupor said his agency needed more time to remove diversity-related questions from the survey, necessitating its cancellation.

“A transformed workforce requires a transformed Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey,” Kupor said. “We are revising FEVS to remove questions added by the Biden-Harris administration and to refocus on core administration priorities: to restore a high-performance, high-efficiency, and merit-based civil service. FEVS will be back next year, new and improved.”

But observers say any initiative to remove the survey’s questions on diversity, equity and inclusion could have taken “an hour,” and federal law requires that the FEVS be administered to the workforce every year. The 16 questions at the core of the survey are prescribed in federal regulations.

OPM did not respond to questions regarding how it or other federal agencies will fulfill their legal obligation to survey the federal workforce this year, nor did it provide a copy of the memo to CHCOs.

Jason Briefel, a partner and the director of government and public affairs at Shaw Bransford & Roth, said that if the plan is to decentralize survey administration across agencies, it will be a difficult endeavor, given how HR offices have been “decimated” by the administration’s various efforts to offload federal employees, including via the deferred resignation program, probationary employee purges and reductions in force.

“It actively sends a signal to people, given all of the other actions the administration has taken, that it is not going to make the federal workforce a welcoming place in the way that we see the OPM director talking about,” he said. “[It’s] one of those things where, you know, in the long run it might create space for some innovation, but we’re going to wait a whole year for that? It just doesn’t seem to make sense.”

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, whose organization publishes annual rankings of the Best Places to Work in government based on FEVS’ results, called the decision “deeply disappointing.”

“Many agency leaders have used the invaluable data they gather from the FEVS to create remarkable change in employee engagement and agency performance,” he said. “By making this decision, the administration is depriving itself of the ability to make data-driven leadership decisions that can help government better deliver for the people.”

For Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy, the announcement is of a kind with President Trump’s ouster of Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer.

“There’s an increasing unwillingness on the part of this administration to collect data that might prove embarrassing or might undercut the policies on which they’ve already decided,” Kettl said. “The easiest way to deal with issues that may materialize is just not to be confronted with the information to begin with.”

Kettl warned that the FEVS is not just an oversight tool—it is a workforce management tool, but it only works if you maintain its annual cycle. And although survey responses are ostensibly anonymized, the data is granular enough to identify pockets of disaffected workers, particularly in smaller agencies and agency subcomponents, which could impact how and if federal workers respond.

“The loop is designed to be continuous: you collect the data, you study it and understand it, you act on it, and then you measure again—it’s a constant cycle,” he said. “If you break that cycle, you undercut the entire value of the process to begin with, and what we don’t know is if we could even restart it. What would it take? Or however long into the future, will we have to start from scratch?”