This week, the Partnership for Public Service published an analysis claiming that agencies paid employees to leave through the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and then quietly hired their replacements. This is a claim that has surfaced frequently in the media in the past year: that the DRP reductions were not real because of backfills.

The Partnership’s own analysis, however, confirms that these claims have no merit.

According to OPM’s workforce data, 139,928 employees participated in the DRP. The Partnership identifies 20,557 subsequent hires that it considers “backfills.” Even accepting that figure at face value – the Partnership is using broad job classifications that can often encompass hundreds of actual jobs as a very imperfect proxy that likely significantly overstates actual backfills – it amounts to 14.7 percent of DRP participants.

Thus, more than 85 percent of employees who took the program are not matched to any subsequent hire. That’s pretty good for a program that was rolled out government-wide. Simply put, 85% of the reductions were real and lasting.

And it shows that our guidance to agencies worked. The DRP was never offered indiscriminately. From the outset, positions related to national security, immigration enforcement, and public safety were excluded. Beyond those governmentwide exclusions, every agency head retained authority to exempt any additional position deemed critical to the agency’s mission. Agencies exercised that authority extensively, in some cases excluding entire components from participation. We at OPM also utilized this flexibility.

That design matters. The workforce reductions produced by DRP came from positions that agencies themselves determined appropriate for cuts. Agency leadership—not OPM—made those mission judgments. We do not pretend to know enough about the day-to-day needs of any agency to dictate otherwise.

Nor did DRP, or the 2025 hiring freeze, require the government to stop hiring altogether. Agencies continued to face retirements, ordinary attrition, new statutory responsibilities, and changing operational demands, and President Trump’s 2025 Hiring Freeze memoranda had exceptions for “positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety,” while allowing OPM to grant addition exceptions In fact, as the data show, a total of more than 300,000 employees left government in 2025, only half of which were through the DRP program. Selective hiring in line with the overall priorities of the Administration is entirely consistent with reducing the overall size of the workforce.

The Partnership may not like the word “reshaping” but that is precisely what the federal government has done. First, stop spending money in areas that are not legislatively required andthat do not add value to the public. Second, when we do spend money, we should focus on areas that are core priorities and that drive real value for the American people. And, third, any moniesspent should be done in a way that is maximally efficient and that honors our obligation to be stewards of taxpayer dollars.

​The Partnership also bemoans the fact that 63 percent of the “backfills” came from outside of government and were hired at “grade” levels (meaning compensation levels) about 1.4 lower than those who left. As if to suggest that a government job can only be done by someone who has previously worked in government, and that those jobs can only be done by higher-graded individuals. In contrast, we are big believers that diversity of experience – whether in government, non-profits or the private sector – can be beneficial to any organization. And we also believe that organizations can also benefit from bringing in new talent – even with lesser experience – and finding ways to train and promote them to become future leaders. That’s particularly true in the federal government where 44 percent of employees are over the age of 50; we don’t have a long-term sustainable organization without developing new talent.Through Tech Force and other public-private partnerships (such as for investment professionals), along with enhanced Early Career recruitment, we are trying to bring in new skillsets and end the perception across government that only long-tenured government employees can effectively do the public’s work.

The Partnership is, of course, entitled to criticize particular hiring decisions or argue that agencies should have reduced staffing even further (or reduced much less). What its analysis does not establish, however, is that agencies broadly reversed the effects of the DRP. Their false narrative simply holds no water.

The Deferred Resignation Program was designed to reduce the size of the federal workforce while allowing agencies to focus their efforts on high value, mission-critical objectives and to tailor any new hiring to areas of genuine operational needs. And that is precisely what it accomplished.