Speaking to WTOP at the Office of Personnel Management’s headquarters, Scott Kupor discussed the rollout of the plan from President Donald Trump’s administration to shrink the federal workforce.
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New OPM Director details 300K federal job cuts, says no plans to relocate jobs from DC
After being confirmed in July, Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, has taken over the federal government human resources agency. Kupor comes to the position from the private sector, where he served as a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm.
“I feel like I have a decent handle on the team and kind of what we’re going to focus on and where things are going,” Kupor said.
Speaking to WTOP at OPM’s E Street headquarters, Kupor discussed the rollout of the plan from President Donald Trump’s administration for downsizing the federal work force.
Around 300,000 jobs are expected to be shed by the end of the year.
Kupor said the civilian federal workforce currently stands at 2.4 million, and by Dec. 31, he expects that number to shrink to 2.1 million.
He said roughly 75% to 80% of the workforce reductions come from federal workers choosing to accept the Deferred Resignation Program or buyouts, known as Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments.
“I think the team that designed those did as much as they could to be appropriately generous and give people as long of a runway as they could to go transition into something,” Kupor said.
According to recent numbers, 154,000 federal employees accepted the deferred resignation offer.
Kupor maintained reductions in force and layoffs of probationary workers will account for a minority of the separations. Official figures for how many probationary employees were let go and how many were released due to RIFs were not readily available.
The reduction of federal positions, Kupor said, should be mostly finished by year’s end, but he didn’t rule out future job cuts.
“Obviously, a lot of that will be determined by the president’s budget,” Kupor said. “They’re kind of soliciting feedback now from agencies, so there’s not a whole lot of definitive guidance on that yet.”
Impact on DC region
Kupor said the impact of the cuts would be greater here because of the percentage of the federal workforce that calls the D.C. region home.
“I think probably a little bit more than half of the government workers in total are in this region, and the rest are obviously in the field,” Kupor said. “And so, from everything I’ve seen, I would expect the reduction in numbers will basically mirror that distribution.”
Before taking office, Trump expressed a desire to potentially relocate tens of thousands of federal positions out of D.C. In July, the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture expressed a similar sentiment, saying 2,600 USDA jobs would be moved as part of a reorganization.
But Kupor said as of right now, there are no plans to relocate positions.
“I don’t think there’s any stated effort to kind of move jobs out of D.C. into other areas,” Kupor said.
They have, however, moved to put an end to remote work.
“What a lot of us went through earlier in the year was looking at people that we had in various field offices and figuring out ways where people were working from home to get them to return to a field office,” he said.
Kupor said the move away from remote work will be a boost to local restaurants and other businesses near federal offices.
Departing feds express frustration
Once federal layoffs began, WTOP started to hear from federal workers who were impacted. They expressed concerns about being able to reach OPM for information, seeing miscalculated severance payment and other issues.
Kupor said while he hasn’t heard many of those concerns himself, he said the goal is to make sure everyone is “treated fairly and has the information they need.”
“We put out a lot of guidance to agencies,” Kupor said. “It’s possible maybe that created confusion where people weren’t sure whether to go to OPM or go to their agencies, but I think we’ve resolved those issues.”
WTOP also heard from some federal workers who chose to retire, were directed to a new digital platform for applying, and they claimed that led to problems with completing the process.
Kupor said rolling out large-scale programs can come with complications, and added issues have been addressed quickly and it is working “very effectively.”
He said the goal of moving the retirement process to the digital realm is to improve efficiency and the user experience.
Addressing morale concerns in the workforce
Throughout this process, many federal workers have said they’ve felt vilified by high-ranking members of the Trump administration.
Kupor said his goal is to be firm, yet respectful of the fact that decisions being made in regard to the federal workforce impact lives.
“I recognize and understand we’re talking about very serious things,” he said. “Anytime we do layoffs or reductions, you know, that impacts people’s families, it impacts people’s friends, it impacts their ability to be contributing members to their community. And look, we need to recognize and understand that is a difficult thing for people to live through.”
His time in the private sector as a manager, he said, taught him that when an employee is let go, many times trust is lost between a manager and that person.
“Because you hired them and you told them all the wonderful things that you could do for their career by doing this,” Kupor said. “And now we’re saying, ‘Look, through no fault of your own, unfortunately, we have to eliminate this job,’ and so I think you can be both empathetic and also be firm and direct the organization in the right direction.”
Kupor plans to bring ‘cultural change’ to OPM
Kupor said he’s coming to the job as a “new observer,” but brings a new way of looking at things to OPM and comes to the job with a goal of creating a “cultural shift” that results in the agency operating more efficiently.
“The culture that I’m trying to affect here at OPM, that I hope we will be able to convey across the government, is everybody in every organization should always think about, like, ‘Could I do things differently? Could I do things better? Are there ways to use technology? Are there ways to change the organization? Are we working on the right things?’” he said.
He said he wants to change the belief within government agencies that budgets only get bigger.
“I think people get used to that, and what I want to change is I want people to think of themselves ultimately, as we are stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Kupor said.
He said he also hopes to bring some private sector principles to the job, including providing career development opportunities and allowing workers the chance to take “appropriate levels of risk.”
“I recognize, obviously, that, you know, times of change are unsettling, but I hope we’ll get through this and what will come out of it is, you know, a continuously robust workforce,” Kupor said.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
