Right-Sizing with Purpose

July 25, 2025

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

When I first joined OPM, I made a commitment to transparency— with the public and with our dedicated federal workforce. As part of that commitment, this week I sat down with members of the press for an on-the-record conversation about the future of OPM. I also met with leaders across the Executive Branch to share our progress and align on a path forward for talent and workforce strategy.

Here’s what I told them: OPM is committed to becoming operationally efficient, by design.

Since January, our agency has undergone one of the most significant transformations in its history. By the end of this calendar year, OPM will have seen about 1,000 departures, roughly one-third of our workforce. But that number only tells part of the story.

Approximately 80 percent of these departures are voluntary, thanks to the success of the administration’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and other voluntary exit options. In fact, 760 employees opted into DRP, choosing to chart their next chapter on their own terms. Others took advantage of VERA/VSIP packages, retired independently, or pursued new opportunities across the federal landscape. We did also eliminate 129 positions through non-voluntary reductions in force (RIFs).

Eliminating jobs is not something that should be taken lightly. It is a fundamental breaking of trust between the leader of an organization and the employees – both those leaving and those staying.  Those impacted did exactly what the organization had asked them to do in performing their jobs. However, the changing needs of the organization – in this case, the need to put the U.S. government on a more sustainable fiscal path – required a different path.

Employees have families, friends, and communities who rely on them, and the disruption of needing to look for a new job is destabilizing to say the least. This is why the government offered the DRP – to try to reduce costs through mostly voluntary retirement and minimize the number of involuntary RIFs.

To those who have left the organization we owe them thanks and respect for their contributions; for those remaining, we need to re-align around the new goals and begin to rebuild trust.

To give you a bit more color on the process, here’s two examples of how OPM approached these changes.

In some cases, we had to make the hard decision that certain functions we were doing previously were no longer affordable. For example, OPM had a team that was focused on executive and leadership training for federal employees. The team was dedicated to their work and performed the function admirably, but we determined that in a world of constrained resources, we simply could not afford to support this activity anymore.

In other cases, we retained a function but determined that we could increase the operational efficiency of the team – through some combination of the use of technology, a reorganization of the team, or a re-prioritization of their objectives – and thus reduced headcount by a more modest amount.

For example, OPM has teams that help retirees process their retirement and pension paperwork and also provide ongoing customer support post-retirement. Traditionally, the retirement process has been complicated and thus requires significant manual intervention to complete. We have a team of engineers currently working to automate more of the process, and, as a result, expect to see greater operational efficiencies from this investment. And as a result of that, we did a more modest headcount reduction in this team to reflect the anticipated efficiency gains.

Ultimately, to be successful, we can’t just downsize; we need to optimize. We’re automating systems, modernizing platforms, and rethinking workflows to deliver faster, better service. As a result, we’re building a leaner, more agile OPM, one that’s laser-focused on outcomes and taxpayer value.

This week’s conversations all reinforced my fundamental view that operational efficiency is a continuous process. You don’t just reduce costs and move on. Rather, we have a lot of work ahead of us to re-prioritize, re-focus and, yes, re-energize to prove that government can adapt, improve, and lead by example.