By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
April 15, 2026

I was reading through the annual performance plans for the OPM executive team this weekend. No, this is not what I normally do for fun on weekends, but I was delinquent in reviewing them.

The plans are great – we are all focused on a lot of amazing things that are going to be great for the government and great for the American people. I’m really proud of all of the work everyone has done already, and we have a great foundation to continue on that trajectory.

Everything articulated in those plans is in service of a single goal. But sometimes when we have lots of things going on, it’s easy to lose the forest through the trees and forget about our North Star. So, I want to take a minute to reiterate that and offer some thoughts on how best to achieve it.

Let’s start with first principles: Our number 1 goal is to efficiently maximize customer satisfaction. That’s it - everything we do should in service of that goal. In doing so, we enable agencies to hire and retain the best talent in furtherance of their agency-specific objectives and in alignment with merit system principles (WPI, MSAC, CHCO Council, SuitEA, and HRS), we enable retirees to retire with dignity (RS) and we enable employees and retirees to get great health care coverage without bankrupting their future (H&I). The same goal applies to OCHCO, OGC, EEO,FSEM, and OCIO – we efficiently maximize customer satisfaction to enable our OPM teams to deliver on their missions.

Let’s unpack this a bit more.

First, “maximize customer satisfaction.” I don’t mean 75% customer satisfaction – or people saying: “Meh.” Our goal should be that 90+% of everyone who we interact with – whether internally or externally” says: “Wow! That was the most amazing, timely, high quality, responsive, customer-first interaction I’ve ever had.”

That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to agree with everything we do, but it does mean that we show up always with a customer-first mentality. It also means that we listen when people have feedback. If we are doing things that our customers tell us are negatively impacting their ability to achieve their objectives, we need to listen attentively and respond accordingly. Many times the answer may very well be: “Thanks for the feedback, but this is why we are doing it this way and why we are going to keep doing so.” But we want to create an environment that invites respectful and engaged feedback – regardless of the ultimate outcome.

What does “efficiently” mean in this context? As I’ve told you all before, “efficiently” does not mean just reducing headcount or arbitrarily cutting costs for the sake of doing so. What it does mean though is to ask for everything we do - why are we doing this; does it contribute to the goal of maximizing customer satisfaction; and, if not, why are we still doing it instead of investing somewhere else that will help us achieve the goal? And of course, for anything we do decide to do, we need to ask if we are doing it in the most efficient way – is there a process change, an organizational change or a technology change that would enable us to do more for less?

And, yes, there will be times where we may decide that investing in something else that helps us achieve the goal means that we in fact spend more money in that area than we were previously. Ultimately, we must deliver on the budget constraints that we have and our promises to the American people to be good stewards of their taxpayer dollars but investing in furtherance of delivering for Americans is a conversation worth having.

Sounds simple, but how do we actually do this?

I had a chance today to listen to a podcast that really got me thinking. [Truth be told, my wife was traveling on her own this weekend, so I had stayed in DC by myself and had nothing but time to enjoy the beautiful weather by walking around town with my earbuds! Yes, I live a very exciting life!] The podcast is about a new book coming out on the management style of Elon Musk.

Now before you think I’ve lost my mind, I know that none of us is Elon, none of us signed up to work for Elon, the government is not the private sector, and we absolutely, unequivocally should not run our teams the way that Elon runs Tesla, SpaceX, or xAI. And of course I know that many of you have very different views about Elon’s involvement with the federal workforce last year. That’s all fine; this is not a political post! However, I do think there are a lot of interesting gems in this podcast for us to think about.

One of the things that got my attention is Elon’s views on process vs automation. If you are interested in this topic you should listen for yourself as there is a lot of nuance to the topic. But the basic idea is to do the inverse of what most of us normally do.

Most of us automate things first. We look at our existing processes, and we try to identify how we might use technology to improve the efficiency of those processes. That’s all well and good – and sometimes is a required first step.

But Elon advocates for doing the opposite - why automate until you have asked the hard questions about why (and whether) a process should even exist? Maybe it’s just a remnant of history and shouldn’t be part of how the new world should look like. Elon argues that doing the opposite (automating first before looking at process changes) just means that you waste time automating things you don’t need - and worse, you may end up retaining processes that should have long been retired.

So, why am I telling you this and what does any of this have to do with our goal of efficiently maximizing customer satisfaction?

Because I think I have failed in providing clear enough direction to inform how we should each think about the future of OPM. That is, I think my guidance has been way too constrained - and as a result, I suspect I may have constrained the collective creativity of our teams.

So, I want to ask each of you to think creatively – of course, by sharing your ideas with your managers!! The only constraint to creativity is: Does it support our single, overarching goal of efficiently maximizing customer satisfaction? There are no sacred cows, there is no process that cannot be re-thought – nothing is out of bounds for discussion. What process is your team doing today that you think doesn’t contribute to our goal? What should we be doing instead?

By the way, I want to be 100% clear that nothing in this post is a review or criticism of what we have collectively done to date. Team OPM has done great work over the past year and accomplished great things.

In fact, the opposite is true – the great work that we have done has gotten us to the point where we now have the privilege to unleash our creativity like never before. And I do mean “privilege” - this is a gift to each us to make real, lasting changes that will set the course for the future of OPM.

Onward.