# OPM The **Office of Personnel Management** is the federal government's personnel department: it writes the hiring, classification, pay and retirement rules for the roughly 2.1–2.2 million civilian employees, runs the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, and processes every federal retirement. It was created by the [[Civil Service Reform Act of 1978]], which split the old Civil Service Commission into three — OPM to manage the workforce for the President, the [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] to hear employee appeals, and the [[Federal Labor Relations Authority]] to police union relations. The design was deliberate: management and adjudication were separated so that the agency serving the President could not also judge the President's personnel decisions. That separation is the reason OPM matters here. Because it administers the [[Competitive Service]], the [[Excepted Service]] and the [[Senior Executive Service]], it is the instrument through which the civil service can be reclassified — the mechanism the [[Federal Workforce Structure Tree]] maps and the one that [[Schedule F]] depends on. ## 2025: the command node The second term's workforce campaign ran through OPM from the first week, mostly before it had a confirmed director (Charles Ezell, a career official, was acting director through the spring). **The Fork in the Road (January 28, 2025).** OPM sent a government-wide email offering every federal employee paid administrative leave through September 30 in exchange for resigning — the [[Deferred Resignation Program]]. A union suit produced a temporary restraining order from Judge George O'Toole on February 6; he lifted it February 12 on the ground that the unions lacked standing. Some 154,000 employees ultimately took the offer across its rounds, about 6.7% of the civilian workforce, paid through a continuing resolution that expired in March — the Antideficiency Act objection Democrats raised was never litigated to a ruling. The program's structural feature is that it produced departures without any adverse action for the MSPB to review. **The probationary terminations and the "five bullets" email.** OPM's guidance drove the February 2025 firing of probationary employees across agencies (see [[Probationary Period]]), and its February 22 "what did you do last week" email — five bullet points due by Monday, sent at [[DOGE]]'s instigation — was the moment the agency became visibly the operating base for the Musk operation rather than a neutral HR shop. Agencies split on whether to tell staff to answer it. **The numbers.** OPM set a goal of cutting 300,000 positions in 2025 and reported in November that about 317,000 employees had left against 68,000 hires, taking the workforce toward 2.1 million. OPM itself cut roughly a third of its own staff. ## Kupor and Schedule Policy/Career [[Scott Kupor]], a longtime [[Andreessen Horowitz]] managing partner, was confirmed **49–46 on July 9, 2025** (Murkowski the only Republican no) and sworn in July 14. His agency wrote the rule that revived [[Schedule F]] as "Schedule Policy/Career," and OPM is the body that receives agency petitions to move positions into it and recommends them to the President — the machinery behind [[Executive Order 14410]] in June 2026. Kupor's public defense is that the schedule "is really nothing new," and that it lets agencies remove people "effectively at-will" when personal views interfere with lawful directives. The three executive orders the vault tracks on the workforce — [[Executive Order 14251]], [[Executive Order 14343]] and [[Executive Order 14410]] — each run through OPM guidance. ## Why an "independent" agency did this OPM's independence was always nominal: its director is a presidential appointee with a four-year term, and its statutory job is to manage the workforce *for* the President. The 1978 architecture assumed that the safeguards would live next door, at the MSPB and the FLRA — and in February 2025 the President removed a Democratic member of each, the removals whose litigation ended in [[Trump v. Slaughter]]. [[How a Federal Agency Is Dismantled]] traces the sequence; the point for this page is that the HR department was never designed to be a check, and in 2025 it was the lever. ## See Also - [[Federal Workforce Structure Tree]] · [[How a Federal Agency Is Dismantled]] · [[DOGE and Government Dismantling Timeline]] - [[Schedule F]] · [[Deferred Resignation Program]] · [[Probationary Period]] · [[Reduction in Force]] - [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] · [[Federal Labor Relations Authority]] · [[Civil Service Reform Act of 1978]] · [[Pendleton Act of 1883]] - [[Scott Kupor]] · [[DOGE]] · [[Administrative State]] - [[Independent Executive Agencies Hub]] · [[Federal Agencies]]