The Office of Personnel Management was something of a ground zero for the activities of the Department of Government Efficiency in the early days of the Trump administration. But just weeks into his tenure, freshly installed OPM Director Scott Kupor is signaling a new chapter for the federal workforce agency.
DOGE was “a catalyst” for making efficiency processes part of everyone’s “vernacular” in the federal government, Kupor told FedScoop in an interview. Now, he said, “we’re in that operational phase, which is, we got to make this stuff actually happen and operational.”
Lambert here: Oh.
Kupor, the former managing partner from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, was confirmed by the Senate 49-46 earlier this month — a near party-line vote. During his confirmation hearing, he indicated that reviewing data security and privacy were top-of-mind, given the agency’s history with a 2015 breach that compromised the personal information of roughly 22 million people. He also underscored the importance of communicating with employees during times of change, saying OPM should be a leader in being transparent about its decisions.
FedScoop: With the elimination of OPM’s Human Capital Data Management and Modernization office and some separations within Retirement Services, how are you approaching the FedScope and digital retirement projects? With potentially reduced staff in those areas, what does that look like for OPM?
Scott KuporDigital retirement, actually, we’re making tremendous progress on, and we’ll have some announcements here fairly shortly on that.
More broadly, I think of it more as a reorganization in terms of the elimination of that department [the Human Capital Data Management and Modernization office]. Every group needs to think about digital modernization as part of their deliverables of what they’re doing. So when we talk to retirement services, they have a big call center aspect. They’ve got to think about, ‘OK, what role does technology play in improving operational efficiency in the call center?’ We’ve got a whole group, we call it WPI [Workforce Policy Innovation], which basically writes rules and regulations that stem from executive memos. In an AI-first world, the types of work they do should be massively impacted in a positive way by being able to utilize AI for summarization or for research-related activity. We have a very big CIO office who’s got, obviously, all the technical resources, but I really want to drive technology adoption and modernization into the relevant business units. That’s really how I think about that organizational change, is to make sure that it just should be a first-class citizen in every organization’s activity, and not have some centralized group that’s doing strategic planning and things of that sort that are removed from the day-to-day of the actual operations of the business.
Lambert here: So AI, like any other liquid, finally reaches its own level: The Call Center. And won’t it be great when you can only reach a hallucinating chatbot, and never, ever a human!
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