By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management

November 21, 2025

President Trump recently issued an executive order directing executive agency heads to submit annual headcount plans to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This is an important step in ensuring the government is working on behalf of the American people, focused on the most important objectives with maximum efficiency.

Why the latest executive order?

For most of this year, the government has been operating under a series of hiring initiatives. Most notably, the president set a target of four reductions for every one new hire into government. We exceeded this goal – the government hired roughly 68,000 people this year, while approximately 317,000 employees left the government.

The new executive order builds on that success to institutionalize the process of refocusing the federal workforce.

What are the goals of the annual headcount plans?

First, we want to make sure the government has the right talent focused on the key priorities of the administration and that we are eliminating wasteful taxpayer expenses in areas that are inefficient, no longer required, or in direct contradiction of administration priorities. Simply put, we want agencies to focus their headcount resources on the most critical objectives that deliver maximum value to the taxpayer.

Second, in addition to the roughly 2.1 million civilian full-time employees, the government has a huge external contractor infrastructure. We estimate there are at least two times the number of contractors employed as there are full-time employees (FTE) and that the government collectively spends about $750 billion annually on contractors (nearly three times what we pay for FTEs).

Contractors can indeed serve a very important purpose – e.g., where we need rapid temporary increases in labor to solve time-limited problems or where there are specialized skill sets that the government is not able to recruit as FTEs. Unfortunately, we have expanded our use of contractors well beyond that and have a permanent shadow class of FTEs essentially cloaked as contractors. The government should utilize the expertise of contractors in the right ways; not as a substitute for hiring well qualified employees working on behalf of the American people.

Third, hiring authority is highly distributed across government – we have nearly 300,000 hiring managers – and this has contributed to the default motion of hiring more people as the proposed solution to nearly all problems. Instead, we all know that there are organizational changes, process changes, and/or technological changes that could enable the federal government to deliver great services to the American people with greater efficiency. Each agency will create a Strategic Hiring Committee to help drive this behavior. In some cases, adding heads may be the appropriate path, but the Strategic Hiring Committee will ask the right questions of hiring managers: making sure that highly skilled people are being hired into the agency and ensuring that they are thinking about a broad set of solutions with efficiency in mind.

Fourth, hiring plans have historically been anchored to historical levels and/or budget. For example, taking the prior year’s headcount and growing it a fixed percent or hiring a bunch of folks because there is the budget to do so. With these staffing plans we are trying to change that default behavior. Instead, agencies will build bottom-up staffing plans that address the following: what are the functions my agency performs that are in line with presidential priorities or statutory obligations, how many people do I need to provide that service level, and how does that staffing level compare to our current headcount?

Fifth, consistent with the president’s executive order, merit hiring is a critical success objective of this administration. No longer will we hire employees based on a self-attestation of their skills but rather based on formal assessment of their qualifications. OPM is supporting these efforts with various tools, but we need the full engagement of all federal agencies to best serve the American people.

Additionally, the headcount planning submissions will enable us to have a pan-government view of hiring needs. To the extent there are job categories that are reflected across many agencies – e.g., collectively as a government, we are trying to hire 10,000 engineers – OPM will use this information to drive more efficiency by centralizing recruiting programs along with shared certificates. This will benefit applicants by making the application process more efficient, ensure compliance with the Merit Hiring Plan, and help agencies economize on their recruiting expenses.

Sixth, performance management across the government is broken – roughly 99.7% of employees receive a fully successful or higher ranking, with only 0.3% below expectations. OPM has promulgated a number of changes here – including forced ranking distributions for the most senior executives. But real reform here will take leadership from every agency. It requires ensuring first-line managers are truly supervising their employees, providing ongoing feedback, and holding people accountable to the work of the American people. We owe it to the American people to have a workforce that delivers for them.

As important as these goals are, it’s also important to highlight what is out-of-scope for these plans.

First, because the entire goal here is to better serve the American people with maximum efficiency, there are no prescribed reductions in headcount. Rather, we want to make sure we are prioritizing our resources appropriately and that we are incorporating efficiency as a first-class citizen in the planning process.  

Second, consistent with that, the goal is not to focus on the raw number of FTEs, but rather to focus on great service delivery with maximum efficiency. Thus, to the extent agencies can deliver a better service to the American people at lower cost by substituting FTEs for contractors. agencies have the flexibility to do so. Ultimately, we should all be focused on reducing the total dollar expense of service delivery, rather than the actual count of employees.

Third, once we complete this process, agencies will not need to come back to OPM to ask for permission on investments. Obviously, everyone is accountable to their overall budgets, but this exercise is not intended to impose an ongoing micro-management obligation on agencies. The opposite is the goal – for federal agencies to maintain compliance with their individualized staffing plans.

For those of you who have been in the private sector, much of this will seem like motherhood and apple pie. We are now inviting the federal government to join the planning party.