Breaking Down the New Memos on Federal Hiring
On May 29, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published two memoranda that could substantially reshape federal hiring. The first–“Merit Hiring Plan”–issued with the White House Domestic Policy Council—implements Executive Order 14170. The second provides guidance on “Hiring and Talent Development for the Senior Executive Service”. Spanning 53 pages, the documents are written in dense HR jargon that can overwhelm even seasoned practitioners. To clarify their meaning and impact, the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists have teamed up to translate both memos for journalists, researchers, and the general public.
The Memos Generally: Lots To Like, Dangerous Partisanship, & A Long Road Ahead
The memos, at their core, attempt to address well-documented and long-existing challenges: federal hiring is too sluggish, procedural, and opaque. Both of our organizations have long argued for the need to move faster, hire better, and hold poor performing employees accountable while still adhering to the merit system principles. A high-performing, agile, and engaged federal workforce is essential if Americans are to trust if Americans are to trust that laws passed by Congress will be executed quickly, competently and efficiently.
These memos are the latest in a long line of efforts by Presidents of both parties to bring common sense to federal hiring and performance – speed up the hiring process, focus on the skills to do the job, evaluate those skills objectively, and share resources across agencies to economize on effort and investment. These memos push that agenda further than earlier efforts, delivering several long‑sought wins such as streamlined applications and résumés more in line with private‑sector norms.
They also venture further than any recent initiative in politicizing the civil service. Mandatory training and essay questions tied to the current Administration’s executive orders—and explicit political sign‑off on certain hiring actions—risk blurring the firewall between career professionals and partisan appointees. We have discussed the dangers associated with this type of partisan drift in other places, including in response to the recent OPM rulemaking on “Schedule Policy/Career”.
Implementing even the non-controversial portions will be daunting. Reforming the federal government–the largest employer in the country–requires sustained, years-long effort from OPM and OMB.
The memos themselves are only the starting gun. Notably absent is a realistic plan to resource this work: for example, OPM has fired or lost nearly all of its enterprise data analytics team, limiting its ability to supply the metrics needed for oversight and accountability. Additionally, the inclusion of extremely ideological and partisan goals politicizes the entire agenda and risks overshadowing the rest of the positive reform agenda, threatening its ability to succeed anywhere.
In evaluating these documents, we have to weigh each part of the Administration’s strategy separately and objectively – there is a lot to like in these documents, there are things that are deeply troubling, and there are things that desperately need leadership attention in implementation.
What We Like: Skills-Based Hiring, Resume Reform, Assessments, Sharing Across Agencies
The bulk of both memos represents a bold next step in long‑running federal hiring reforms—initiatives that agencies have piloted for years but often struggled to scale. We commend OPM for learning from past efforts and, in several critical areas, pushing further than any of its predecessors by:
- Recognizing the role of recruiting and sourcing talent – The plan highlights the importance of active recruiting in the hiring process.Agencies have long relied on USAJobs alone as a crutch, hoping the right kinds of talent will be scouring the job board every day and happen upon job postings – this works okay for some roles that are highly-specialized to government, but particularly as agencies have need for emerging talent it they cannot assume critical talent pools are even aware that the federal government wants to hire them.
- Focusing on skills and evaluating for those skills – The memo limits the use of self-assessments to minimum qualifications only and requires agencies to use some form of technical or alternative assessment for all postings, implementing 2024’s bipartisan Chance to Compete Act. This is a critical move forward from the reliance on applicant’s self-assessment,a status quo that disadvantages honesty and self-awareness.
- Implementing ‘Rule of Many’ ranking procedures – OPM will finalize its proposed ‘Rule of Many’ regulation from the last Administration, which empowers agencies to choose the various ways to “cut off” applicants after they are assessed. Finalizing ‘Rule of Many’ will enable agencies to set clear, objective criteria for which applicants it will consider based on test scores (e.g., considering the top 10% of scorers), a numerical approach (e.g., considering the top 50 applicants), and other mechanisms (e.g., clear pass/fail standards) that give hiring managers and HR specialists the flexibility they need to tailor hiring procedures to specific needs.
- Sharing resources and certifications of eligibles across agencies – This expands requirements for agencies to share candidates, position descriptions, and talent pools across agencies, including conducting pooled hiring actions where one candidate can apply once to many similar jobs across government. It builds on recent tremendous success agencies have with recruiting high-quality applicants across government through shared hiring actions, which enables agencies to surge talent in a specific field and advertise as one enterprise to potential applicants.
- Reducing size of referral resumes to two pages – OPM is finally attempting to move away from a “federal resume” format that needlessly burdens members of the public with overly-specific requirements. Previously, applicants that didn’t know to include things like the “average number of hours worked per week” or their complete salary history were unknowingly disqualifying themselves from federal employment and even those that knew better had to maintain two separate resumes, making it harder to jump between sectors.
- Simplifying Senior Executive applications – Applicants for Senior Executive Service roles will no longer be required to write multiple pages of essays describing their experience – a process so unique it has spawned a cottage industry of professional writers – and will be evaluated via resumes and structured interviews like their peers across the economy. This builds on a long history of successful pilots of new selection procedures focusing on resumes and structured interviews rather than the traditional essays.
- Removing unnecessary degree requirements – While efforts have been underway since the first Trump Administration to remove unnecessary degree requirements. The new memos solidify that trajectory, embracing a skills‑first hiring model that prizes demonstrated ability over paper credentials—a trend mirrored in state governments and the private sector. Yet dropping degree rules is only half the battle. To truly broaden the talent pool, agencies must replace résumé shortcuts (like “years of experience”) with rigorous, job‑relevant assessments that let candidates prove what they can actually do.
- Focusing on speed and responsiveness – The memo doesn’t ignore the aspect of the applicant experience that differs most from the private sector: speed and responsiveness, setting a government-wide target of 80 days for hiring actions and requiring timely updates to applicants on their status. This builds on years of work to wrestle down timelines for security clearances and recognizes that one of the biggest reasons the federal government loses amazing applicants is the length of the process, not the pay.
Finally, the memos contain a compendium of useful resources in Appendices that agencies that can use to improve their approach to hiring.
Potential Red Flags: Politicization, Red Tape, & Extra, Unfunded Mandates
While OPM is advancing important nonpartisan reforms, we are concerned that several explicitly ideological provisions could erode the civil service’s neutrality and jeopardize the very hiring‑efficiency agenda OPM seeks to champion:
- Requiring essay questions on political views–Despite reducing applicant burden in other areas, OPM also introduces a requirement for all applicants for jobs above GS-05 (98%+ of jobs) to draft responses to free-response essay questions that describe their views on the present administration, including identifying which of the current president’s Executive Orders are “significant” to them. At best, this is an additional requirement that will be irrelevant for most jobs – there shouldn’t be any impact of EOs on a seasonal wildland firefighter’s strategy for fighting fires, for instance. More realistically, this constitutes a partisan loyalty test for federal employees to evaluate their views on the current President. Federal employees swear their allegiance to the Constitution, not the current President and there are legitimate open questions about the constitutionality of many Executive Orders.
- Introducing extra layers of political approval in the hiring process–While the memo emphasizes time to hire, it also emphasizes that “agency leadership” must either personally approve or designate an official to approve all positions before they are posted and all selections prior to extension of an offer. It also requires that they do an “executive interview” with candidates and opens the door to obvious partisan abuse of the merit hiring process when paired with the free response essay questions. Even without that risk, however, this requirement adds tremendous amounts of friction into a process that is already too full of approvals and pulls the decision-making authority in the wrong direction: to leadership instead of to the line management that knows the needs of a given program best. We are already seeing the problems with this approach play out with a similar requirement for agency leadership to personally approve payments or contracts, leading to extreme slowdowns. Additionally, just as with OPM’s recent rulemaking on Schedule Policy/Career, the opportunity for abuse is extremely obvious: highly partisan agency leaders may see it as their right to disapprove of candidates for purely political reasons–like, for example, donations to opposing candidates.
- Prioritizes political training for the SES corps–While the Administration has closed down training programs like the Federal Executive Institute that were designed to train new generations of federal leaders, it is also adding ideological training to the SES that lacks a clear purpose or evidence that it will improve governing outcomes. Requiring Senior Executives to watch an “80-hour video-based program that provides training regarding President Trump’s Executive Orders” is both offensive to the principle of a nonpartisan civil service and a waste of time for the busiest, most senior leaders across the entire enterprise. While America’s most productive tech companies are trying to reduce the meeting load to free staff to get things done, torching 4% of our senior executives’ working years for ideological training is the opposite of efficient.
- No mention of resources to carry out these changes – As with past legislation, EOs, and memos requiring skills-based talent practices, no apparent financial or other resources come with these memos. This has hampered adoption for more than a decade. The Talent Teams at OPM and the agencies, the communications and education support, the changes to OPM and agency systems all need people, money, and IT support. The lack of committed resources will delay, and perhaps scuttle, implementation. We know this because it has happened before. In the Clinton Administration, for example, a major push to de-proceduralize federal hiring fell down because they underresourced agency HR offices to stick the landing. This will happen again on skills-based hiring without commensurate investment, a problem discussed at length in a recent paper from the Niskanen Center.
What’s Missing: A Scalable Implementation Strategy
Executing these reforms will be no small feat, and the toughest tasks are also the most crucial: getting good technical assessments in the hands of managers, conducting strategic workforce planning, changing the culture around hiring to empower managers and not HR, and letting line managers be managers. OPM’s memos are light on details about how they intend to resource and manage implementation, an omission that they have plenty of time to correct but one that needs some serious consideration if they are going to be successful:
- Changing entrenched oversight, HR, and hiring manager policies, practices, and culture – OPM and the agencies will need to focus on how to move decades-learned compliance and risk aversion behaviors embedded in the current hiring and performance management practices into a skills-based future. The change management and consistent leadership required here is a substantial undertaking. Because OPM has conditioned the federal HR profession to be incredibly risk-averse, it won’t immediately embrace these new mandates without coaching, training, and professional development. To facilitate this, OPM should re-submit its uncontroversial legislative proposal from last year to help professionalize and develop the federal HR workforce, and Congress should expeditiously pass it.
- Hiring is just one piece of the effective federal employee puzzle – Though the SES Memo addresses some aspects of performance management, the focus on hiring diminishes other parts of the management system that impact effectiveness and performance. Onboarding, the early job experience, consistent feedback, professional development, challenging assignments, and career paths all help to ensure employees are helping meet agency missions. Implementation needs to take the whole system into account if OPM and the agencies are going to impact effectiveness and accountability.
- An all-of-the-above approach for getting assessments into the hands of agencies – The memo focuses on USAHire but, as we’ve discussed, there are many third-party assessment vendors that offer validated assessments and tools to help lower the unit and marginal cost of using objective assessments. Emerging companies offer things like AI-proctored video interviews that could quickly surface the most promising candidates and are already in use by the private sector for high-volume roles. At the federal level, parts of the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have already experimented with some of these platforms. We want to see OPM think bigger about how to quickly bring assessments online and recognize that the private sector can play a role in accelerating this transformation.
- Focus on the candidate experience – Job candidates – users of the federal hiring system – complain that the experience of applying for a federal job is neither easy nor seamless, as it can be in the private sector. While the memos make some progress in reducing the burden on candidates (e.g., reducing resume and SES application requirements), the system is still rife with bureaucratic bloat. High-performing candidates have many options; they will go elsewhere if we do not reduce the friction.
- Public accountability & data – According to the hiring plan memo, agencies need to develop a data-driven plan for implementation and report frequently to OPM and OMB on their progress. With the practical dissolution of OPM’s human capital data team and a years-long problem with lagging human capital data releases via Fedscope, OPM should commit to releasing data publicly on their progress: how many people are hired, where they are hired, how many apply, how many pass technical assessments, etc. that will hold agencies accountable for getting this work done, give Congress the insight it needs to trust OPM, and provide the public with a window into progress.
- A plan to staff for success – In the best of times, OPM struggles with capacity for human capital policy work, and it will need every federal human capital expert it can get to pull off implementation of these memos. However, at the same time, OMB’s FY2026 budget proposal outlines a significant reduction in total headcount for OPM that locks in a 25%+ reduction in headcount across all parts of the agency, from policy to direct support for agencies. Given the technical complexity involved in many of these efforts–delivering validated assessments, for example, will likely require bringing in new expertise from outside government–OPM will need a plan to staff itself for success that is missing in these memos today.
In urgent circumstances, agencies have experimented with some of these practices and policies (e.g., cybersecurity hiring and intelligence community hiring, infrastructure and energy development). However, action on skills-based talent practices is far from pervasive. Together with outside experts, we continue to map the obstacles that keep skills‑first hiring from taking root: limited resources, hesitant leadership, and a pervasive fear of downside risk. Many of the opportunities and chokepoints highlighted in the memos came from this work, and we will keep collaborating with all stakeholders to craft practical fixes.
Most of the reforms in these memoranda set federal hiring on a promising trajectory, but their impact will hinge on disciplined execution. Some of them are deeply troubling attacks on the basis of the merit system. We will track OPM’s progress closely—amplifying best practices and calling out any drift from merit‑based, nonpartisan norms. These challenges are not new, yet they have become increasingly existential to building a government that works; OPM must keep that urgency front and center as implementation moves forward.
As the former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, I know first-hand how valuable and vulnerable our nation’s federal data assets are. Like many things in life, we’ve been taking our data for granted and will miss it terribly when it’s gone.
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