The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said Wednesday that hiring committees spearheaded by Trump administration political appointees must in be place within the next two weeks to oversee hiring processes for federal civilian agencies.
A memo from OPM outlines requirements for the “strategic hiring committees” that President Donald Trump called for in an executive order last month. Agencies must create these committees by Nov. 17, according to OPM.
The new directive falls amid a government shutdown, with thousands of federal workers furloughed or working without pay, and during a federal hiring pause that began on the first day of the second Trump administration in January.
Hiring committees detailed in OPM’s memo will approve the creation and filling of job vacancies to ensure “that agency hiring is consistent with the national interest, agency needs, and administration priorities,” as well as the merit hiring plan and the agency’s Annual Staffing Plan, as outlined in Trump’s order.
Each agency committee must include the deputy agency head and chief of staff – though with approval, these roles may be filled by another non-career official. Agencies may allow their internal components or subagencies to combine vacancy requests before submission to the main committee.
Hiring committees will report back to OPM and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on annual personnel management and hiring plans, personnel resources, critical hiring needs, opportunities to reduce spending, optimal mixes of full-time employees and contractors, and how accountability and enforcement is carried out within agencies.
Notably, as part of that process, OPM and OMB want to know how new technologies and other factors may create opportunities to improve agency efficiency.
“The goal of this exercise is not for OPM nor OMB to question the judgment of our very capable agency heads; without a doubt, the “CEOs” of these organizations know their agencies far better than do we,” wrote OPM Director Scott Kupor in a blog post.
“Rather, the goal is to provide a level of pan-government visibility across resourcing in furtherance of the key initiatives that the president has laid out. And, in doing so, we can look for ways to maximize efficiency and deliver the best possible set of services to the American people,” he added.
Agencies are required to provide quarterly progress reports on their personnel management and hiring goals, while being given “the appropriate flexibility needed so they can respond to potentially changing areas of priority,” according to Kupor.
Kupor wrote that the federal government currently employs more than 2 million civilian employees with “at least double that number of contractors,” saying that the federal government has “historically done no overall headcount and resource planning.”
In remarks earlier this week, the OPM director said that the federal government had approximately 2.4 million civilian employees in January and predicted that the year would end with about 2.1 million employees.