Musk Team Gutted Unit That Tracks Federal Staff Hiring, Firing

The Trump administration’s efforts to drastically reduce headcount across the federal government includes gutting a team that could have helped them do it: Its job was to track hiring and firing.

Nearly all the half-dozen analysts and statisticians who compiled HR data for 2.3 million federal employees have been laid off or took resignation incentives to leave the Office of Personnel Management, according to three staffers who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.

For decades, OPM has provided Congress, executive agencies, and researchers with accurate data that helped shape policies, funding, and staffing decisions. OPM released those statistics on a website known as FedScope.

Without anyone corralling and verifying that data, those groups will now be in the dark, said Peter Bonner, an HR executive that worked at OPM during the Biden administration.

They’ll be “flying blind,” Bonner said.

The departures were part of broader cuts that occurred as President Donald Trump‘s administration transformed OPM, a little-noticed agency that serves as the federal HR office, into its launching pad to dramatically downsize and reshape the government.

Almost as soon as he was inaugurated, the Trump administration installed loyalists from billionaire Elon Musk’s companies and Silicon Valley to run the 3,300-person agency. Since then, OPM’s government-wide memos have sowed chaos across federal agencies, including those directing Cabinet agencies to terminate new hires and ordering employees to snitch on colleagues.

A spokeswoman for Acting OPM Director Chuck Ezell declined to comment on the HR data specialists.

It remains unclear if or how the Trump administration is tracking its downsizing efforts or will make them public. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has created a public website where it claims to list savings its cuts have achieved, but the site lacks details and has been assailed for errors. Many of the staff reductions have trickled out by agency, from both official and unofficial sources.

The dismantling of the OPM data team is a footnote in the broader revamping of the agency’s purpose.

OPM “has grabbed a level of power in dictating to the agencies about how they manage their workforce in a way that they haven’t done in the past and is highly questionable,” said Rob Shriver, who led the agency during the last year of the Biden administration.

‘No Other Source’

The team’s work dates to the early 2000s, when President Bill Clinton gave OPM the power to require HR data aggregation across the government. OPM collects fees from agencies for managing their workers’ personnel files. Agencies often maintained their own workforce data—including details on employees’ location, occupation, seniority, and union membership information—sometimes with paper records.

OPM designed FedScope to maintain it all in one public database. OPM employees check the data, identify errors, and work with agencies to correct mistakes before publishing it on the FedScope website, according to former OPM employees.

The data has real-time benefits.

In one instance, the federal government used the data to help a developer build a clean energy transmission line from wind farms in eastern New Mexico to central Arizona. The project, mired in permitting debates, had been in the works for 15 years when President Joe Biden took office.

To get the US Army’s approval for the project, builders needed to stay away from the White Sands Missile Range. FedScope helped determine how many specialists the federal government employed in New Mexico and Arizona and could dispatch to help with the planning, said Christine Harada, who coordinated permitting for the Biden administration.

“Every time the government wants to do anything big, we’d constantly have to do data calls to agencies” if we didn’t have FedScope, Harada said.

Veterinary schools use OPM’s data to pinpoint demand for their graduates and decide how many applicants to admit, said Bernie Kluger, who worked at the agency during the Obama administration. The federal government is the nation’s largest employer of veterinarians outside private medical practices for house pets.

“There’s no other source” of data to fill that need, he said.

The value of FedScope data can’t be a surprise to OPM’s current leadership, staffers say.

Ezell, OPM’s acting director, worked on FedScope in his previous role as an IT manager based in OPM’s data center in Georgia, two former employees said.

Ezell is filling in while the Senate considers venture capitalist Scott Kupor for the role permanently.