OPM Cut 35% of Its Staff and Kept Adding Responsibilities

The federal government has apparently labeled OPM’s 35 percent workforce reduction “efficiency,” a word that entered the records room, looked around, and refused to identify the remaining personnel. According to a July 20 Government Accountability Office report, the Office of Personnel Management eliminated 10 offices while cutting its headcount. The package was delivered to the agency responsible for human resources after many of the humans had been removed from the premises.

GAO also found that 57 percent of departing OPM employees had at least 11 years of service. That is not merely a staffing change; that is institutional memory wheeling its suitcase toward the exit. These were the people who knew which form was obsolete, which process had three hidden steps, and which drawer contained the original drawer map.

Meanwhile, the report describes OPM contemplating additional responsibilities, including handling more employee appeals and expanding work involving artificial intelligence and information-technology modernization. The contradiction is not that modernization exists. Modernization is useful. The contradiction is asking a smaller workforce to carry a larger filing cabinet while describing the missing hands as a strategic improvement.

As Hugh Jass, I examined the paperwork under a lamp normally reserved for suspicious procurement documents. Exhibit A had a pulse: fewer employees, fewer offices, and a greater menu of assignments. No one should claim the report proves that these cuts directly caused a particular service failure. But it does document a capacity problem hiding in plain bureaucratic language. “Do more with less” is often just a management memo discovering arithmetic for the first time.

The missing personnel have now been filed under “strategic efficiency,” a classification broad enough to contain an empty desk, a delayed appeal, and an entire generation of procedural knowledge. Ordinary federal workers and the people waiting on those systems deserve better than a government that treats experience as clutter and responsibility as an expandable field. Somewhere in OPM, a form is still looking for the staff member who knows where to send it.