OPM calls for quicker firings, more stringent performance standards

The Office of Personnel Management this week released new guidance calling on federal agencies to rate fewer employees as above average or outstanding and to discipline or fire federal workers more quickly.

Much like OPM’s hiring plan, a new memo from acting OPM Director Charles Ezell to agency heads makes overtures toward the nonpartisan issue of improving performance management in government, but introduces partisan elements that could threaten the effectiveness of those reforms, experts say.

“For many decades now, performance management across the federal workforce has fallen short of what the American people should expect,” Ezell wrote. “Too often, this has resulted in a lack of accountability and inflated performance ratings. Federal employee performance ratings should be normalized and reflect individual contributions to organizational results and outcomes.”

To alleviate this, OPM instructed agencies to revise the annual performance plans of federal workers to better delineate between the “fully successful,” “exceeds fully successful” and “outstanding” performance ratings, as well as link an individual’s responsibilities with agency mission delivery. But language in the memo also appears to allude to agencies exploring forced distribution of ratings, which OPM has already moved to adopt for members of the Senior Executive Service, while another provision mandates that performance plans be linked specifically to “Trump administration priorities.”

A former federal HR official told Government Executive that while they agreed with the need to address performance inflation, two of the primary causes of that phenomenon—low or no across-the-board federal pay raises, and the threat of reductions in force—show no sign of going away any time soon.

“We already tie bonuses to your ratings, and a lot of the time that’s the only way for a supervisor to give a little bit more money to staff members that they want to recognize and try and retain,” the official said. “Until [former President] Biden came into office and issued one decent pay raise, the prior 10 years were abysmal, starting with Obama in 2013 with sequestration.”

The memo also calls on agencies to make better use of firing and disciplinary authorities, as well as to shorten performance improvement plans to 30 days. But much of the reforms are rooted in improving training for supervisors and better communication between managers and frontline workers, and it remains to be seen how that would be paid for or administered, particularly after OPM shuttered the Federal Executive Institute in February.

“They talk about the importance of training, which is an excellent idea, but it’s not clear where it’s going to come from or who is going to pay for it,” said Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. “In the case of any downsizing in government, training is always the first to go. So is there going to be investment to try to make happen what they’re proposing?”

The former HR official said the plan to reduce performance improvement plans to 30 days belies the overall memo as a “red herring.”

“If you can’t articulate why someone’s failing and you only give them 30 days to show that they’re no longer failing, it becomes a procedural widget to sustain a termination,” they said. “[And] the Trump administration has done such a thorough job in the last five months cutting the balls off of unions—which is a mistake, because they help provide due process—and the Merit Systems Protection Board, the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] and [Office of Special Counsel], it’s going to be hard for current employees under these constraints to win anything.”

Kettl said that the running theme of the Trump administration’s workforce policy—proposing needed reforms along with politicization efforts that undermine them—seems rooted in a fundamental mistrust of career employees.

“There’s an old saying: ‘There are two ways that a civil servant can undermine a political appointee: One is to do nothing of what they say, and the other is to do everything that they say,’” he said. “The people who come in with ideas about what ought to happen and what policy ought to be always benefit from the expertise of those who have been doing it a long time, and you can see it reflected in this document. I can see what they’re trying to do, but it would benefit from the people who actually do the work giving it a once-over.”