With the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on track to lose one-third of its workforce by the end of the year, OPM Director Scott Kupor said on Tuesday that he’s looking to technology to help steady the agency during its ongoing restructuring.
Kupor, who the Senate confirmed as OPM director last month, said that his team is currently conducting a “reprioritization” effort to determine the top critical areas for the agency to focus on – and whether or not they need more headcount to get the job done.
Workforce Challenges
“There may be cases where maybe we actually are short people,” Kupor said during an Aug. 26 event hosted by Federal News Network.
“We’re not perfect, and I fully acknowledge that there just may be areas where we need to revisit. So, there will be, I’m sure, some places where we have cut deeper than was appropriate, and we’ll have to make some changes,” he said.
Some of those hiring efforts could target fresh talent, but Kupor said the agency may also look to rehire some employees who chose to participate in the deferred resignation program.
“There are people maybe who were part of deferred retirement program. Many of them have expressed an interest – if we have an interest – in potentially coming back to the organization, so we have the ability to do that, and we would if that were appropriate, if they had specific skills,” Kupor said.
Notably, Kupor said that OPM will have “a pretty significant” number of retirements come Sept. 30, when the retirements of those who opted to take part in the deferred resignation program become official.
The agency announced the full rollout of the federal government’s first-ever fully digital retirement application system in May. The system replaces OPM’s paper-based retirement system, a process that would normally take three to five months.
However, with the increased number of retirements, Kupor said the agency will need to parse through which ones can be handled by the newly launched system.
“What we’re going to do is we’re going to bifurcate things into, okay, what are the cases that we think actually can be handled through this new system, and do them that way, and then what are the cases that have additional complications?” Kupor explained.
An example of a complication, he said, would be if someone “worked at five different agencies over time” or borrowed money against their pension.
“Those are a little bit more complicated cases. We’re not quite ready to handle the volume of those things, but there’s also a significant number of people who have kind of a much easier employment file, basically,” Kupor said. “So, we’re just going to make sure that we get out ahead of this and bifurcate those so that we don’t find that, you know, come Sept. 30, we’re not able to complete all the things we need to do.”
OPM Turning to Data and AI
Beyond managing retirements, Kupor wants to change how the federal government measures itself.
Today, OPM relies heavily on “data calls” – requests to agencies for workforce information that he said often arrive outdated. Instead, Kupor said he wants to deploy dashboards with greater visibility into the federal workforce.
“One of the things that we’re working on, and we’re early on this, but I’m super excited we can get it to work, is I really want OPM to basically kind of build and develop a set of dashboards,” Kupor said.
“My goal would be like, every HR executive and every agency, or every director in every agency, or secretary, or even, quite frankly, the president, if he wants to do it, they should have a very simple dashboard on their desk,” he explained. “Or every congressional person who, as you probably know, sends us a request all the time for data. We should just expose all that stuff, and quite frankly, we should expose it to the American people.”
Kupor said that these dashboards could show data such as what percentage of people have returned to office by department or what percentage of people have received the highest scores in their performance reviews. He said it could also analyze whether federal agencies are implementing OPM’s Merit Hiring Plan or if they are using assessments.
“That’s what I want to do. Look, if I’m permitted to do so, I would just literally have that dashboard be available to every person in the U.S. as well,” he said. “There’s no greater way to create accountability than to shine light on things.”
Kupor also noted that he sees artificial intelligence as a big piece of OPM’s modernization and efficiency push. He pointed to opportunities ranging from sifting through tens of thousands of public comments on regulations to scanning resumes for hiring managers to review.
“We’re not going to do crazy things. We’re not going to, like, you know, turn the computers on, and all of us go home at the end of the day here,” Kupor said, adding, “But, I think we need to incrementally find small places where we can kind of find improvements.”
“If AI is as transformational, at least, as I believe it will be … I think it’s just going to get embedded into everything we do,” he said.