By Noah Peters, Senior Advisor, OPM

On July 2, 1881, a jobseeker convinced that his campaign support had earned him a diplomatic post shot President James A. Garfield in a Washington train station. Out of that assassination came the Pendleton Act of 1883. The law’s core command was that federal jobs be filled through open, competitive examinations, administered by a new Civil Service Commission. The requirement for competitive testing was the central feature of the Pendleton Act, and its main mechanism to shift from a spoils system to a federal workforce based on merit.

The idea of a single civil service exam that measures general competence remains a compelling one, because it goes to the heart of our larger goal of restoring merit to federal hiring. It’s why since January 20, 2025, we at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) (the successor agency to the Civil Service Commission) have been tearing out self-assessments, requiring real technical assessments, and rebuilding qualification standards around skills instead of degree proxies. We’ve made real progress—and to understand why requires reviewing a bit of history.

The exam that hired one in twenty

This is not the federal government’s first rodeo.

In fact, we had civil service exams from 1955 to 1982 – the Federal Service Entrance Examination (FSEE) and its successor, the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) – that were intended to allow an applicant to earn their desk by out-scoring the competition in a proctored exam hall. In practice, however, relatively few civil servants were hired through the FSEE or PACE exam.

In FY1978, the government hired 152,771 people into the competitive service. Only 7,587 were hired via PACE. That is 4.97 percent. That’s not a typo, nor an off year: OPM’s own records show 8,254 PACE hires in FY1976 and 8,521 in FY1977. Go back further to the FSEE era and the numbers are the same order of magnitude: the FSEE was administered to roughly 150,000 applicants a year and used to fill about 10,000 positions annually — roughly five to seven percent of register-based hires.

And how were the other 95 percent hired? Mostly through what the Civil Service Commission called “unassembled examinations” — which is another way of saying no exam at all. An examiner rated your education, training, and experience from your application paperwork and placed you on a register. The Accountant-Auditor register? Unassembled. Social Workers? Unassembled.

Even within the 118 occupations PACE actually covered, only about half of incumbents entered through PACE or the FSEE. The other half came through internal promotions, reinstatements, veterans readjustment appointments, co-op conversions, and similar side doors — and OPM estimated at the time that about two-thirds of career positions were filled each year by people who already worked for the government.

None of this means the FSEE and PACE were bad instruments—quite the opposite. The FSEE and PACE were rigorously developed, predictive assessments that measured constructs long established as strong predictors of job performance. In other words, applicants who scored higher on the exam performed better on the job.

PACE was killed in 1981 by the Luevano consent decree, an eleventh-hour settlement agreed to in the final days of the Carter administration, which permanently enjoined a professionally developed examination not because it failed to identify capable employees, but because of the racial statistics of its results. The decree then went further: any replacement assessment had to be vetted for “adverse impact” against two specified racial groups — and only those two — before it could be used, with no sunset clause and no endpoint.

OPM tried a half dozen successor exams in the decade that followed; each one died under the decree's restrictions. That is how the federal government ended up defaulting to resume reviews and self-assessments as its “examinations” — not because anyone believed they measured merit better, but because a settlement made rigorous testing legally radioactive for 44 years.

Last year, at OPM's request, the court vacated the Luevano decree. And in June, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel concluded that disparate-impact liability as the EEOC has long interpreted it is unconstitutional: aptitude tests and similar selection procedures are presumptively job-related, and imposing liability on statistical outcomes alone — divorced from any inference of intentional discrimination — functions as a racial-proportionality mandate that pressures employers into the very race-based decision making the law forbids.

How we got a better exam (the hard way)

The natural follow-up to all this history is: so, what replaced the PACE exam? The honest answer is that for four decades, nothing really did. Under the consent decree, OPM spent nine years developing the court-contemplated replacement, the Administrative Careers with America (ACWA) examination, introduced in 1990. ACWA came in two flavors: a written cognitive test, and a 157-item self-rating schedule on which applicants reported their life and work experience. The written test was effectively shelved by late 1994 — a casualty of downsizing, agencies’ distaste for centralized testing, and, tellingly, their fear that any written test would simply be sued into oblivion the way PACE had been — and no agency is known to have used it since 2008. The self-rating schedule limped along for three more decades: it asked entry-level candidates to grade their own experience — a population that, by definition, doesn’t have much. (This February OPM formally retired the last ACWA instruments).

What actually filled the vacuum was worse. The decree permitted a supposedly temporary Outstanding Scholar authority — direct, no-competition appointment for anyone with a 3.5 GPA or top-ten-percent class rank — and it became the single largest pipeline into former PACE jobs, supplying between a third and nearly half of those hires every year from 1993 to 1997. This, despite the fact the predictive validity of its GPA criterion was around .20, meaning it explained perhaps four percent of the variance in job performance. The authority wasn’t even accomplishing its stated remedial purpose: roughly three-quarters of Outstanding Scholar appointees in 1997 were white, and the program ranked dead last among the six hiring routes for Hispanic hiring. Despite a recommendation in 2000 from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) that the decree be terminated outright, these sub-par practices lingered for twenty-five years.

That is, until OPM finally acted on it – first by terminating the Luevano decree and then by creating a comprehensive civil service exam that actually works.

Today, USA Hire offers validated batteries across more than 400 occupational series and most grade levels, measures a range of job-analyzed competencies rather than a single score, returns results almost instantaneously, scales to applicant volumes the old Civil Service Commission could not have imagined, and — under the Chance to Compete Act and the Merit Hiring Plan — sits inside a requirement that every competitive hire above GS-4 be rated and ranked with a real technical assessment. That last part is the point.

Merit, measured

Here is what we’ve actually done, for readers keeping score. Under President Trump's Executive Order 14170 and OPM’s Merit Hiring Plan issued in May 2025: self-assessments can no longer be used to rate and rank candidates — the era of "rate yourself an expert, get referred" is over. Competitive hires face technical assessments, with validated USA Hire batteries available across more than 400 occupational series and more in development.

These actions are working. In June 2025, USA Hire issued approximately 26,000 assessments. By June 2026, that number had increased tenfold, to approximately 262,000. For FY 2026, OPM is projecting record-breaking assessment usage — more than 2.1 million assessments on USA Hire alone.

OPM is not stopping with assessments. We’re rewriting qualification standards occupation by occupation to run on demonstrated skills rather than degree and tenure proxies, starting with the IT workforce. These new standards put the focus where it belongs: on what a candidate can actually do. And coupled with expanded pooled hiring and shared certificates, one strong assessment can now feed many agencies’ hires instead of forcing every applicant through duplicative processes.

By any honest accounting, a larger share of federal hires today passes through a validated, professionally developed assessment than at any point in the storied age of the entrance exam. The way to honor what the Pendleton Act was trying to accomplish is to use the best measurement science we have to produce exams that can accommodate the vast scale of the federal workforce and the variety of skillsets we need to run an effective and efficient government that delivers for the American people.