As the Biden administration comes to an end, Rob Shriver, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, is hoping to leave behind a legacy of transformation for the federal workforce.

Reflecting on OPM’s efforts throughout the Biden administration, Shriver said he sees the current version OPM as one that’s vastly different from several years ago — at the time of a failed attempt at merging the agency with the General Services Administration, or even back to 2015 with the OPM data breach.

At the start of the Biden administration in January 2021, “we faced an organization that had been demoralized, that had had its budget slashed, that had had important tasks taken away from it and that had significant loss of talent — and we also happened to be in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Shriver told reporters during a press conference Tuesday.

But over the past few years, OPM aimed to turn the tides for the federal workforce — whether it was through continuing work toward skills-based federal hiring, chipping away at the retirement claims backlog, launching a new health insurance program for Postal workers, or reforming how agencies recruit and retain early-career employees. OPM detailed many of the efforts the agency made over the last few years in federal hiring, retirement, pay and benefits in a press release Tuesday.

Now with President-elect Donald Trump stepping into the White House next week, Shriver said it’s difficult to predict how things might change at OPM. But at the same time, Shriver said the changes OPM has made over the last several years should serve as a blueprint for the agency tasked with managing the federal workforce on the whole.

“This agency is in as strong a position as it has been in all of the years that I have been connected with OPM, which really goes back to the mid-90s,” Shriver said. “This version of OPM is really hitting on all cylinders, delivering across the board for the federal enterprise and ready to continue to do that for the incoming administration.”

The future of federal telework

In the transition to Trump’s second term, one of the biggest examples of how the tides could turn for the federal workforce is with the possibility of a large-scale return to the office.

After the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration shifted to requiring a roughly 50% in-the-office presence for telework-eligible federal employees. At this point, most agencies are reporting about a 60% in-office presence for federal employees who are able to telework, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget.

OMB also reported last summer that more than half of federal employees cannot telework at all due to the nature of their jobs. For those who can telework, the flexibility has become a large point of contention in Congress.

Already, Trump has shown his likely hand when it comes to federal telework. In December, he criticized the new telework agreement between the Social Security Administration and American Federation of Government Employees and threatened legal action. Early plans from the “Department of Government Efficiency” also include rolling back telework for the federal workforce in Trump’s second term.

Still, OPM’s Shriver said he views telework as an important flexibility for the federal workforce. He emphasized that telework options for feds existed years before the pandemic, making it an effective option to continue service delivery in 2020 and beyond.

“Lawmakers from both parties have long believed that telework would be an effective management tool for the federal government,” Shriver said. “Because we could telework, the federal government continued to function during a once-in-a-century pandemic.”

Shriver said figuring out the ideal hybrid work arrangements for federal employees is still a work in progress. The telework policy at any agency should always be open to adjustments, he said, but the policy should also not be one-size-fits-all.

“I think those determinations need to be made at the specific job level,” Shriver said. “In-person time is a critical component that helps build relationships, helps build an agency’s or a work unit’s culture … But I also think there are entire occupations who, whether you’re in government, in the private sector or somewhere else, mostly work from home. And I think that applying a one-size-fits-all approach will result in dramatically bad effects on those occupations.”

Schedule F’s possible return

On top of the future of telework, the revival of Schedule F is another likely plan for the incoming administration. The now-rescinded policy from the end of Trump’s first term aimed to reclassify tens of thousands of career federal employees in policy positions to remove their civil service protections and make them easier to fire.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to revive a policy similar to Schedule F early on in a second term. But in an attempt to block Schedule F from coming back, OPM used the regulatory process to finalize regulations that reinforce civil service protections for federal employees.

“If an administration that was coming in disagreed with the decisions that we made, the normal steps that would be followed under the Administrative Procedure Act would be for the new administration to follow the same public, transparent process that we followed to change the regulation,” Shriver said. “They’d also have to justify why their position was more grounded in the current laws.”

Some federal workforce experts, however, have said OPM’s final rule acts more as a roadblock rather than a full halt on the return of Schedule F.

“I can’t predict what the new administration will do when it comes in, whether it will reimplement Schedule F, and what that will look like,” Shriver said. “But what I can say is the regulation that we have on the books is the strongest action that this administration could have taken in support of the policy that we believe in, which is that the career civil servants are essential to our democracy, and that decisions about federal hiring and firing should be based on merit, not partisan politics.”

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