This is a fascinating interview with many reasonable points, but if you go and talk to any random federal employee about this year, they'll say it's been a dystopian nightmare with agency-level dysfunction at an all-time high. I understand Kupor has to defend his colleague, but uh, yeah, come on. The admin fired all the probationary employees at many agencies earlier this year, which means they specifically fired people hired through special hiring mechanisms (honors-type programs), new employees (younger), or newly promoted (high-performing). No well-functioning organization would do something like this.
A lot of the details don't even make sense and reflect the narrow focus of a former tech executive. Fair enough, the government could really use talented tech executives. But how would FDA food inspectors rotate in and out of the private sector every couple of years? FBI agents? Does it make sense to move to this type of model given the current compensation structure for a federal employee?
Without congressional approval, literally none of the changes Kupor is proposing provide meaningful upside to becoming a federal employee in this environment. Making it easier to hire/fire in government sounds great, but then you remember this administration engages in politically-motivated firings. "Not aligned with this administration" is a euphemism for believing things like "the FBI should follow the law when investigating people" or "the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks."
Similarly, providing 60% of the bonus pool to highest-performing SES sounds like a dramatic change to reward talent, but there's a reason Kupor describes the action as percentage of the pool rather than nominal dollar amounts. The actual dollar amounts are laughable for senior-level executives and capped by statute, to say nothing of GS employees. It would be great if you could ask Kupor to do a blog post on performance-based compensation and the actual dollar amounts involved, but the empirical analyses I've seen show performance-based compensation amount to only several percent of annual salary at most for "high performers" in the federal government. Reshuffling the bonus pool won't fix this if the total pool remains a meaningless amount of compensation. If post was titled "99.8% of federal employees receive between zero and three percent of their annual salary as a bonus," it might also help unpack why ratings are inflated relative to private sector organizations.
I wish Kupor the best of luck recruiting technical talent to join this administration. It seems like a great place to work.
I really appreciate your work Santi, but this episode was frustrating to listen to as someone working in federal HR. Many claims went largely unchallenged, despite how destructive this year has been inside agencies and how many high performers have been pushed out or have opted to leave.
Much of what Scott frames as voluntary attrition was coercive in practice, and cutting staff before redefining work led (very predictably) to rehiring at many agencies. That's not an unavoidable byproduct of organizational scale, as Scott implies. It's the result of making cuts without a real plan, and agencies are paying for that in lost capacity, morale, and public trust.
The performance management discussion was also painful to hear. Forced distribution ratings (which agency leaders are being told not to call 'forced' despite clear evidence to the contrary) are not improving accountability. They're backfiring on high performers in already strained teams, creating counterproductive incentives, eroding trust, and pushing good people out.
More broadly, Scott seems to treat the federal workforce like a startup that just needs disruption and new blood. He misses the point that many “inefficiencies” are essential to democratic governance. I agree processes need improvement and that being less risk averse could help, but disregarding civil service rules and institutional knowledge leads to chaos when change is rushed. Move fast and break things does not work well for a 2+ million person government, especially when the people breaking the things don't have a good understanding of them to begin with.
I do think that merit hiring and classification reform (which have been in the works for years) are genuinely promising. But the way these changes have been executed so far this year has caused serious human and institutional damage, and that deserved far more pushback than it received. The discussion also ignored the new required essay questions that effectively screen for alignment with the administration. Pretending this is merit-based reform rather than a loyalty test is disingenuous and glosses over just how major a departure it is from long-standing civil service norms designed to keep federal civilian work apolitical.
Terrific interview. I was not aware of Director Kupor's blog on the OPM website - it is terrific. As a former DAS at the Dept of Transportation who was responsible for performance reviews of our Public Affairs shop (Bush 41), there was tremendous pressure from the top to give our career employees top ratings (and many of them deserved them), so "ratings inflation" has been a bipartisan problem for a very long time. I'm impressed to find out that the Trump Administration, in less than a year, has reduced headcount by more than 10 percent. Has anyone noticed, outside of Northern Virginia and DC suburban realtors?
Huh, it's fascinating to see the messaging here. I really would have expected more of a retreat from DOGE, given the failures and failure of the project (as you've detailed). Thank you for the interview!
This episode helps Scott Kapur sane-wash, rationalize, and attempt to make regular awful personnel management practices by the Trump administration. To allow Kapur to state mostly unchallenged that fired federal employees needed to be rehired because "none of us gets it right the first time" is callous and uncaring for the staff and the public who depend on the services those staff provided. Where was the administration's plan?
Kapur was not asked to comment on many first-person accounts by federal staff who were summarily fired or forced to resign. For example the involuntary resignation of former SSA Chief Data Officer Charles Borges. His publicly available resignation letter stated in part that his "involuntary resignation is the result of SSA's actions against me, which make my duties impossible to perform legally and ethically...after reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data."
Also unchallenged, Kapur's unbelievable statement that he doesn't have the "context" to comment in December on DOGE's actions in February 2025 when DOGE spent the "weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper" subverting Congress, summarily firing almost all of their staff, and causing harm around the word. And how asking about the firing without cause women and people of color in Dept. of Defense executive positions?
If culture eats policy, how can an HR culture damaged by these actions and others improve anything or even survive? How can Kapor think the Trump administration will attract people to federal service who have reasonable alternatives? It appears the administration continues to carry-out OMB head Russell Vought's stated intent to terrorize federal workers, cast them as villains, and make them not to want to go to their federal jobs, totally undercutting Kapur's statements.
Santi, almost every day we learn of new reasons to believe we're in perilous times. It makes things worse to ignore the extensive evidence of this administration destroying, not improving the federal service.
This is a fascinating interview with many reasonable points, but if you go and talk to any random federal employee about this year, they'll say it's been a dystopian nightmare with agency-level dysfunction at an all-time high. I understand Kupor has to defend his colleague, but uh, yeah, come on. The admin fired all the probationary employees at many agencies earlier this year, which means they specifically fired people hired through special hiring mechanisms (honors-type programs), new employees (younger), or newly promoted (high-performing). No well-functioning organization would do something like this.
A lot of the details don't even make sense and reflect the narrow focus of a former tech executive. Fair enough, the government could really use talented tech executives. But how would FDA food inspectors rotate in and out of the private sector every couple of years? FBI agents? Does it make sense to move to this type of model given the current compensation structure for a federal employee?
Without congressional approval, literally none of the changes Kupor is proposing provide meaningful upside to becoming a federal employee in this environment. Making it easier to hire/fire in government sounds great, but then you remember this administration engages in politically-motivated firings. "Not aligned with this administration" is a euphemism for believing things like "the FBI should follow the law when investigating people" or "the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks."
Similarly, providing 60% of the bonus pool to highest-performing SES sounds like a dramatic change to reward talent, but there's a reason Kupor describes the action as percentage of the pool rather than nominal dollar amounts. The actual dollar amounts are laughable for senior-level executives and capped by statute, to say nothing of GS employees. It would be great if you could ask Kupor to do a blog post on performance-based compensation and the actual dollar amounts involved, but the empirical analyses I've seen show performance-based compensation amount to only several percent of annual salary at most for "high performers" in the federal government. Reshuffling the bonus pool won't fix this if the total pool remains a meaningless amount of compensation. If post was titled "99.8% of federal employees receive between zero and three percent of their annual salary as a bonus," it might also help unpack why ratings are inflated relative to private sector organizations.
I wish Kupor the best of luck recruiting technical talent to join this administration. It seems like a great place to work.
I really appreciate your work Santi, but this episode was frustrating to listen to as someone working in federal HR. Many claims went largely unchallenged, despite how destructive this year has been inside agencies and how many high performers have been pushed out or have opted to leave.
Much of what Scott frames as voluntary attrition was coercive in practice, and cutting staff before redefining work led (very predictably) to rehiring at many agencies. That's not an unavoidable byproduct of organizational scale, as Scott implies. It's the result of making cuts without a real plan, and agencies are paying for that in lost capacity, morale, and public trust.
The performance management discussion was also painful to hear. Forced distribution ratings (which agency leaders are being told not to call 'forced' despite clear evidence to the contrary) are not improving accountability. They're backfiring on high performers in already strained teams, creating counterproductive incentives, eroding trust, and pushing good people out.
More broadly, Scott seems to treat the federal workforce like a startup that just needs disruption and new blood. He misses the point that many “inefficiencies” are essential to democratic governance. I agree processes need improvement and that being less risk averse could help, but disregarding civil service rules and institutional knowledge leads to chaos when change is rushed. Move fast and break things does not work well for a 2+ million person government, especially when the people breaking the things don't have a good understanding of them to begin with.
I do think that merit hiring and classification reform (which have been in the works for years) are genuinely promising. But the way these changes have been executed so far this year has caused serious human and institutional damage, and that deserved far more pushback than it received. The discussion also ignored the new required essay questions that effectively screen for alignment with the administration. Pretending this is merit-based reform rather than a loyalty test is disingenuous and glosses over just how major a departure it is from long-standing civil service norms designed to keep federal civilian work apolitical.
Terrific interview. I was not aware of Director Kupor's blog on the OPM website - it is terrific. As a former DAS at the Dept of Transportation who was responsible for performance reviews of our Public Affairs shop (Bush 41), there was tremendous pressure from the top to give our career employees top ratings (and many of them deserved them), so "ratings inflation" has been a bipartisan problem for a very long time. I'm impressed to find out that the Trump Administration, in less than a year, has reduced headcount by more than 10 percent. Has anyone noticed, outside of Northern Virginia and DC suburban realtors?
I am a local government employee and I really enjoyed this interview. Thank you both.
Huh, it's fascinating to see the messaging here. I really would have expected more of a retreat from DOGE, given the failures and failure of the project (as you've detailed). Thank you for the interview!
Edit to add: Susie Wiles is much more honest about how DOGE went, in my parse: https://x.com/alexbward/status/2000911294711652629.
The project of understanding the administration continues.
This episode helps Scott Kapur sane-wash, rationalize, and attempt to make regular awful personnel management practices by the Trump administration. To allow Kapur to state mostly unchallenged that fired federal employees needed to be rehired because "none of us gets it right the first time" is callous and uncaring for the staff and the public who depend on the services those staff provided. Where was the administration's plan?
Kapur was not asked to comment on many first-person accounts by federal staff who were summarily fired or forced to resign. For example the involuntary resignation of former SSA Chief Data Officer Charles Borges. His publicly available resignation letter stated in part that his "involuntary resignation is the result of SSA's actions against me, which make my duties impossible to perform legally and ethically...after reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data."
Also unchallenged, Kapur's unbelievable statement that he doesn't have the "context" to comment in December on DOGE's actions in February 2025 when DOGE spent the "weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper" subverting Congress, summarily firing almost all of their staff, and causing harm around the word. And how asking about the firing without cause women and people of color in Dept. of Defense executive positions?
If culture eats policy, how can an HR culture damaged by these actions and others improve anything or even survive? How can Kapor think the Trump administration will attract people to federal service who have reasonable alternatives? It appears the administration continues to carry-out OMB head Russell Vought's stated intent to terrorize federal workers, cast them as villains, and make them not to want to go to their federal jobs, totally undercutting Kapur's statements.
Santi, almost every day we learn of new reasons to believe we're in perilous times. It makes things worse to ignore the extensive evidence of this administration destroying, not improving the federal service.