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

September 8, 2025

Blame (or praise) President Ulysses S Grant for the “Rule of Three” (ROT).

Yes, we have to go back to the 1871 Civil Service Act, championed by our then 18^th president, to trace the origin of ROT, which remained a mainstay in federal hiring officially for about 135 years. It was a great idea – at the time. The ROT aimed to replace rampant spoils in federal hiring, whereby the selection process was mostly governed by who you knew rather than by whether you were qualified.

In place of a patronage system, the ROT aimed to introduce merit-based hiring principles into the federal workforce. Funny – not funny – that more than 150 years later we are still trying to make merit-hiring a fundamental principle of federal employment. Under the original rule, a hiring manager was permitted to select for employment only an individual who scored in the top three of results (typically of a civil service exam). By the way, “three” was a compromise from the original “one,” which was deemed too restrictive. If the top three candidates were ultimately deemed unsuitable, the hiring manager was essentially back to the drawing board and would restart the whole hiring process from scratch.

A good way to try to focus on merit, but with an element of rigidity that created inefficiencies.

Fast forward to the 2002 Chief Human Capital Officers Act and innovation abounds – we replace “three” with “categories”. Specifically, instead of stack ranking only the top three candidates, hiring managers are now permitted to “categorize” applicants into broader buckets – Best Qualified, Highly Qualified and Qualified. This expands the pool of candidates from which a hiring manager can choose – since they are no longer restricted to only the three highest ranking applicants – but introduces other challenges.

Notably, all candidates within a category are considered equally qualified. In other words, the categories are minimum hurdles for consideration, but they don’t distinguish between applicants within a category. For example, if a score of 80% is the minimum hurdle to qualify into the Best Qualified category, an applicant who scores 100% is treated no differently than one who scores 80%.

There is one notable exception to this – veterans’ preference. Coming out of the Civil War, the 1871 Civil Services Act instituted hiring preferences for Civil War veterans. The preference was expanded over time to include all honorably discharged veterans, codified in its modern form in the 1944 Veterans’ Preference Act. In practice, the preference either adds “points” to a veteran’s ranking, such that a veteran who, for example, scores 90% on the test will receive a plus-up in the rankings or, under category rating, is ranked above non-veterans within their quality category. A hiring manager is required to give preference to a higher ranked veteran, other than to the extent she requests an exception from the agency HR official or the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Today, the Trump Administration – via formal rulemaking from OPM– is making substantive changes to the hiring process. Consistent with President Trump’s merit hiring executive order, the new rule formalizes the “Rule of Many” that was originally introduced in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.

What is the “Rule of Many” (ROM) and how does it help ensure the most qualified applicants are hired in public service roles?

Simply put, the ROM allows a hiring manager to effectively stack rank the full slate of candidates – without regard to the Rule of Three and the categorization buckets that previously governed federal hiring. Coupled with the use of functional skills assessments – which OPM has now cleared agencies to use following the revocation of the Luevano consent decree – the ROM gives hiring managers the much-needed flexibility to distinguish candidates based on their demonstrated functional merit-based qualifications for the role in question.

American taxpayers deserve a civil service hiring process that attracts the most qualified applicants and gives hiring managers the opportunity to in fact hire on that basis. OPM’s introduction of the Rule of Many is a first step in that direction.