WASHINGTON, DC — US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor joined The Ingraham Angle to discuss the Trump Administration's efforts to restore merit-based hiring, strengthen accountability across the federal workforce, and modernize the civil service by rewarding high performers and addressing underperformance.

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On restoring accountability across the federal government:

"DOGE was a start, and DOGE did a great job. But what it takes really is continuous reform in order to do this. So we're doing everything from looking at how do we hire and, as you saw there obviously, we've eliminated DEI as a part of the hiring process. We've eliminated actually one of the most crazy things called self-attestation."

On strengthening accountability for federal employees:

"Yeah, this is a real problem, and more fundamentally, Laura, accountability is a problem. Let me give you a stat. So, 0.3% out of those 2.2 million employees were ranked below expectations in terms of their annual performance. And look, we all know in any big organization that's just not the case. The reason is because it's so hard for managers to actually get rid of underperforming employees that nobody bothers."

On reforming performance plan procedures:

"What we can do at OPM, which we've been working on, is change the rules. We're changing the rules through a proper regulatory process, making sure that if you have an underperforming person, you put them on a plan. If they don't succeed on the plan, you have to move them out of the organization. And by the way on the other hand, we actually have to make it easier to reward people who are doing a great job."

On creating a high-performance federal workforce:

"The problem is most of the rules require that people be in the job for a certain amount of time. Everything is very tenure-based. You pass a year, you get promoted. We're eliminating all those things as well. At the end of the day, we're trying to create a high-performance culture like you would have in any other environment, where people who are knocking the cover off the ball, let's promote them, let's pay them more, let's give them more responsibility. That's what we want to do."