Connolly calls on OPM to reverse CIO classification change

The Trump administration’s direction to agencies to reconsider and possibly re-designate their chief information officer positions to general Senior Executive Service instead of career-reserve is coming under scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and co-author of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), is asking the Office of Personnel Management to “immediately revoke this memorandum and brief my staff on all plans regarding changes of policy regarding federal CIOs.”

“This redefinition of CIO responsibilities would be an unfortunate departure from the bipartisan work the committee has done on federal IT,” Connolly wrote in a letter obtained by Federal News Network. “The vast majority of the over 30 federal CIOs are career SES positions. The job of the CIO requires long-term planning as many IT modernization projects serve as long term investments that lead to billions in cost avoidance, sometimes crossing congresses and administrations. CIOs should not consider political winds, but rather focus solely on robust engineering principles and effective technology choices Congress has worked with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to ensure that CIOs have the budget authority to manage multi-year projects through working capital funds so that IT projects need not contend with inconsistent appropriations and continuing resolutions.”

Connolly is asking OPM for a briefing on their plans around reclassifying CIOs by March 11.

The letter comes about 21 days after OPM issued a memo telling agencies to send a list to them by Feb. 14 to redesignate CIO positions as general, which can be open to anyone inside or outside the government, versus career-reserve, which are open only to federal employees in career positions.

In the memo, OPM is only “recommending” the reclassification, not mandating it.

“Under the last administration, agency CIOs often had ‘responsibility for or substantial involvement in the determination or public advocacy of the major controversial policies of the Administration or agency.’ These policies involved such issues as cybersecurity; artificial intelligence and machine learning; digital infrastructure, including internet, cloud and privacy policy; government accountability and efficiency; digital access and communications; diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, and sustainability and innovation,” the memo stated. “Each of these items standing alone and all of them taken together amount to significant political issues over which CIOs exercise authority. When an agency CIO makes policy choices about which of these topics to prioritize and fund — and which should be deemphasized or defunded — the CIO determines government policy in important ways.”

Expanding SES reclassifications

OPM built on the CIO memo yesterday by telling agencies in new guidance to reconsider and revise SES positions labeled as career and consider making them general, especially if they include the word policy in the positions title or are assistant secretary or higher positions.

“To be sure, some positions throughout government are statutorily designated career reserved,” acting OPM Director Charles Ezell wrote in the memo. “However, OPM believes that many of the current career reserved positions across the federal government are not the sort of technical positions appropriate for career reserved status.”

The new guidance could impact thousands of current career SES members. As of August 2024 — the most recent data publicly available — there are 7,887 career SES members. The career SES workforce has grown over time, increasing by more than 800 over the last decade. The growth of the career SES workforce generally aligns with the broader growth of the civilian federal workforce as a whole.

OPM’s third memo focused on the SES told to revert any positions the Biden administration moved from “general” to “career reserve.”

Those three memos followed two executive orders from President Donald Trump that seeks to “improve the allocation of Senior Executive Service positions in the cabinet agencies…” and requiring the Office of Management and Budget and OPM to issue new SES performance plans.

While agencies, generally speaking, have wide latitude to flip positions back and forth between career reserve and general, Connolly said the role of an agency CIO is non-partisan and better technology management is not a partisan issue.

“The administration is advancing other substantial changes to the SES that we are concerned with politicizing the cadre of advanced professionals who run some of the most technical and important missions in our government,” Connolly wrote. “I am concerned that CIO leadership is the latest victim of the administration’s anti-diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility crusade and broader effort to replace career civil servants with individuals who are, first and foremost, loyal to the President and his political agenda.”

Over the course of the last three decades, agencies have routinely moved CIO positions in and out of political appointments. Some agencies, such as the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, have political CIOs because Congress wrote them into law. Other agencies, including the departments of Energy, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, have moved the CIO position from career reserve to general when it suited their needs for a specific hire.

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