## Notes from 22 January 2026 [[2026-01-21|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-01-23|Next note →]] I've been following [[Ronald Sanders]]' commentaries in Government Executive ([here](https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/09/new-activist-opm-incrementally-reforming-civil-service-part-1/408297/), [here](https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/09/new-activist-opm-incrementally-reforming-civil-service-part-2/408423/), and [here](https://www.govexec.com/management/2026/01/how-institutionalize-opm-reforms/410770/?oref=ge-featured-river-top), in that order) about the reforms that the [[US Office of Personnel Management (OPM)]] has been implementing under [[Scott Kupor]] since Trump took office. Sanders is a rare figure in American administrative debate at the moment: someone with decades of hands-on experience at the top of federal HR who can evaluate policies on their technical merits without completely losing his mind over the political polarization of the moment. It's really easy to just be pissed off about the Trump administration—and there are plenty of reasons for that—but he reminds me of something fundamental about how governments actually work: there are always people pulling in multiple directions, some of those directions are terrible, others are destructive, but others aren't necessarily bad, and there are always people trying to do the right thing within the system, tolerating what others are doing so they can advance their own agenda. I don't judge those moral choices—everyone makes their own decisions. But considering this is a topic I care about, there's real value in following these developments with a relatively cold head, especially because apparently there are some genuinely interesting things happening amid the chaos. ## What Sanders identifies as good Sanders argues that despite all the inflammatory rhetoric and some terrible decisions, OPM under Kupor has been making reforms that were decades overdue. Streamlining the hiring and firing process for probationary employees, for example—historically, the probationary period was treated as a mere formality when it should be a genuine extension of the selection process. The attempt to reform the appeals and accountability system, eliminating purely pro forma appeals that clog the system, also gets praise. Sanders also mentions efforts to reduce the absurd number of personnel data systems the federal government maintains and to make performance ratings actually matter in retention and reduction-in-force decisions. Even the cancellation of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS)—the annual survey of federal employees—gets Sanders' support, though with caveats. The FEVS issue illustrates Sanders' approach well. He was at OPM when the survey was created under the Bush administration, and its original purpose was to assess agency progress implementing the President's Management Agenda, not to serve as a broad government morale thermometer. Over the years, FEVS morphed into something it was never designed to be, and Sanders argues it needs to be replaced with something more modern and actionable. My concern is that interrupting the historical data series seems to waste valuable information. Following OPM's decision to cancel the official 2025 survey, the [[Partnership for Public Service]] stepped in to fill the void by launching its own [Public Service Viewpoint Survey](https://ourpublicservice.org/public-service-viewpoint-survey/). Their goal is to ensure that federal employee feedback continues uninterrupted, specifically to sustain the **"[Best Places to Work in the Federal Government](https://bestplacestowork.org/)" ranking**, a high-profile annual report (largely based on survey data) that measures employee engagement and helps hold agency leaders accountable. Although the partnership is continuing its efforts to prevent a total blackout of information, a nonprofit initiative will inevitably have less reach and official legitimacy than a government-sponsored survey. ## What Sanders considers bad and "ugly" Not everything is praise. Sanders is particularly critical of some choices. The attempt to impose external quotas or limits on performance ratings for Senior Executive Service (SES) members is one example. Sanders acknowledges that ratings are inflated, but he argues that imposing arbitrary government-wide limits will simply create an informal "wait your turn" system, where executives receive high ratings by rotation every few years, regardless of actual performance. When Sanders was at OPM, he tried a different approach: linking individual ratings to the organizational performance of the agencies those executives lead, combining accountability for political appointees and career executives based on institutional performance. Another critical point is one of the four essay questions OPM now requires from all federal job applicants. Sanders supports the general idea of reforming hiring; however, he finds one specific question "excessively partisan." This question requires applicants to **identify specific executive orders or policy priorities of the current administration and explain how they would help implement them if hired.** Although OPM later clarified that these answers shouldn't be officially "scored," the questions remain a requirement. Sanders argues this creates a confusing political litmus test that violates the principle of a non-partisan civil service—especially since most of these roles have nothing to do with political policy. The attack on federal unions and collective bargaining is also criticized as unnecessary and inflammatory. Sanders acknowledges that unions can be difficult, but the law already offered mechanisms to contest union proposals. What the administration did, in his view, went beyond necessary and poisoned relationships that didn't need poisoning. Even worse is the dismissal of civil servants who simply implemented the previous administration's DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. But what Sanders calls "ugly" is the general attack on the civil service as an institution—the denigration and disrespect coming directly from the Oval Office. He emphasizes that none of this was necessary to achieve the administration's stated goals, like reducing the size of the federal workforce. This could have been done with a scalpel instead of a hatchet. ## Abandoning "one size fits all" Sanders' most important point is about abandoning the "one size fits all" approach that has characterized OPM HR management. The US federal government isn't a monolithic employer but a collection of dozens of departments and agencies, each with different missions and literally hundreds of distinct occupations. Sanders uses concrete examples to illustrate the absurdity of uniform rules. The standard probationary period is one year (two for some excepted service positions). But how can the State Department evaluate whether new Foreign Service Officers are capable of representing the country in embassies abroad if they spend most of that first year in a classroom at the Foreign Service Institute in Virginia? Similarly, the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community have occupations that don't exist anywhere else in the world and for which no academic institution offers prior preparation. Training needs to happen on the job, and frequently one or two years isn't sufficient to determine whether someone should receive protected career status. The solution Sanders proposes is allowing agencies to determine the probationary period based on reasonably objective occupational criteria—how long it takes to trust that the employee is sufficiently trained to deserve protection as a career civil servant. But this doesn't mean abandoning common principles that should govern the entire federal civil service. Sanders points to the Working for America Act (WoFA), proposed in the Bush administration in the mid-2000s, which followed the then-new Department of Homeland Security model. The idea was to declare certain parts of civil service law—like merit principles—as inviolable, providing a common government-wide framework, but allowing much more agency discretion in specific policies, subject to OPM oversight. It was a "both/and" approach instead of monolithic: common centralized framework combined with decentralized personnel policies tailored to individual missions. Sanders notes this decentralization is already happening in a disorderly way. According to the Government Accountability Office, hundreds of thousands of federal employees have already "seceded" from the government-wide monolith—their agencies went to Congress and asked to be taken out from under Title 5 (federal civil service law) and centralized OPM control, precisely because the one-size approach doesn't serve their needs. But because this happened randomly, without deliberate strategy, there's no government-wide glue to keep these agencies together on common principles. ## The institutionalization question: laws, regulations, or nothing? Sanders proposes two routes to institutionalize the good reforms that OPM is implementing before Republicans lose the House and nothing else will be approved in the legislature: legislation or comprehensive federal regulation. He argues legislation would be ideal—a second Civil Service Reform Act, almost 50 years after the first. This would force Republicans and Democrats in the Executive and Congress to talk to each other and, perhaps, arrive at a common core of civil service principles that everyone knows are necessary. He acknowledges this would mean the White House ceding some control over the debate and that Congress would add all sorts of things advocated by their constituencies, but argues it would still be worthwhile. And that it should be done NOW, before the 2026 midterm elections, when one or both houses of Congress might flip. As an alternative, Sanders suggests the regulatory route. Although regulations are "speed bumps" rather than stop signs (as they can be undone by the next administration, as Biden did with Trump's Schedule F and then issued regulations to impede its return)—they're better than nothing. OPM could gather all the "good" policy changes it has promulgated, publish them as a comprehensive regulatory package in the Federal Register, invite public comment, and then issue them as chapters in the Code of Federal Regulations. This is where I find Sanders' position simultaneously strategically smart and a bit... I don't know if naive is the right word, because he himself says openly that nobody in Congress really cares about civil service modernization. He even suggests creating a bipartisan, bicameral select committee of legislators who actually care, acknowledging that traditional committees are distracted with other priorities. But the inconvenient truth is: since when does law guarantee anything now? This administration has systematically destroyed laws. The Supreme Court is completely politicized. Members of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB)—the body that's supposed to protect career civil servants from arbitrary dismissals—were simply fired, something the law explicitly prohibits. The Supreme Court managed to say "ok, just don't do that at the Federal Reserve" without any explanation of what makes the Fed different from other independent agencies. So why does Sanders still propose legislation? Because he understands something important about how political systems work long-term. If the intelligent voices in the debate—people like Ron Sanders, who have technical credibility and real experience—don't keep advocating for proper institutionalization, then really nothing will get done. The fact that the current Republican Party clearly doesn't care about non-partisan civil service principles doesn't mean he should stop defending those principles. Someone needs to keep the debate alive, plant the seeds for when there's a political window. And there's another point: the strategy of reforming via infra-legal norms and around the edges, which is what OPM has been doing, has obvious tactical advantages—it's faster, doesn't depend on Congress, can be done administratively. But it also has the problem Sanders identifies: all of this can be undone the same way by the next administration. And considering Democrats have their own structural problem with federal employee unions—who will probably pressure to reverse everything—and that Congress is gridlocked, the probability of preserving even the good reforms is low.