Why It Matters
A new congressional report raises concerns that the Trump administration's restructuring of federal workforce management could undermine the government's ability to efficiently hire, oversee, and protect federal employees, leaving Congress to weigh the benefits of centralized oversight against the risk of overburdening a single agency.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) assumed responsibility on Sept. 2 for adjudicating certain reduction-in-force and probationary and trial-period appeals previously handled by the Merit Systems Protection Board, according to a new Congressional Research Service (CRS) report. The shift comes as OPM's staff has declined by 1,059 employees since Jan. 20, 2025, and its Salaries and Expenses appropriation fell 23.5% from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026, prompting the report to warn that those reductions "could raise questions about the agency's capacity to perform its responsibilities effectively."
The Big Picture
The Trump administration has driven a series of workforce changes that the report says may expand OPM's oversight and administrative workload. Executive Order 14170, issued Jan. 20, 2025, directed the development of a government-wide federal hiring plan. The resulting Merit Hiring Plan, issued May 29, 2025, outlined skills-based hiring and requirements to reduce hiring times. Executive Order 14356, issued Oct. 15, 2025, required each agency to submit annual staffing plans and quarterly updates to OPM for review.
Approximately 140,000 employees participated in the Deferred Resignation Program in 2025, and the report says the resulting separations created a backlog of retirement claims and delayed payments for former federal employees. The two appeals rules, covering probationary and trial-period appeals and reduction-in-force appeals, were published in the Federal Register on Aug. 3 and took effect Sept. 2. OPM argues the transfer of adjudicatory responsibility will streamline the appeals process.
The president's fiscal 2027 budget request of $145,973,000 for Salaries and Expenses would cut that account by a further $21,562,000. The report frames the central question for Congress as a trade-off between greater centralization within OPM, which may promote consistency but increase demands on the agency's resources, and broader delegation to individual agencies, which may provide flexibility but reduce uniformity across the federal workforce.
The Bottom Line
At the time of publication, OPM had not published an agency performance plan tied to its fiscal 2026-2030 strategic plan. The report says Congress may want to assess which workforce management functions OPM should centralize and which agencies should handle more effectively.
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