Trump’s Top HR Official on Remaking the Federal Workforce: Q&A

Scott Kupor became the head of the Trump administration’s human resources office months after the government started laying off thousands of workers.

It’s now his job as director of the Office of Personnel Management to help President Donald Trump remake the federal workforce, a tall order for someone who has never before served in government. But since winning Senate confirmation in July, he has advanced the cost-cutting efforts started by Elon Musk and DOGE, albeit with less public antagonism.

Kupor, previously a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., discusses the federal workforce like a supply chain technocrat. During an interview with Bloomberg Law this week, he framed the administration’s plans as startup-style disruption: A mission to rid the government of outdated roles and rules that waste “Other People’s Money"—his unofficial name for the agency.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What will hiring for the government look like after Trump’s hiring freeze ends in a couple of weeks?

We want to hire in areas that are most relevant to the key initiatives for the president. To the extent there is hiring, we want to direct it to those areas—things like national security, public safety.

We continue to believe that active performance management is important for the government. You’ve probably heard me say these numbers a million times, but if you look at the ratings that people get annually, there are very few, if any, who actually get rated a one or two, which are the low ratings. It’s literally like a 0.3% or something.

To the extent you have people not delivering on what they need to do, are we taking the appropriate actions either to have a plan to help them be directed to the right area? If not, do we need to bring in new talent?

How do new classifications of employees fit in?

There’s a broader piece of rulemaking called Schedule PC, which used to be Schedule F. Schedule PCwill be career non-politicals that are in policymaking. Those don’t go through the Presidential Personnel Office—they are pure career-based hires. They’re not quite at-will, but it makes them closer to at-will.

If you have people who are in a policymaking position, then the executive should have the ability to direct their activities. If they’re not complying, there’s an easier way to make changes on that head count.

I did something a little different and told federal workers I was going to be interviewing you.

I saw that!

Commenters asked if you could discuss the additional cost of sending people back to the office. One fellow told me his employing agency is now paying about $300 a month in transit, and another $750 to give him a workspace.

RTO was not designed to be a cost-saving thing. We were starting with, on average, somewhere between a 10% and 15% in-office rate, basically. So literally 80-plus percent of people were not coming in on a regular basis.

In order to actually do the work of the American people, people need to be able to collaborate, talk to one another.

I’ve seen a GAO report that only about 10% of workers in 2024 were fully remote. It sounds like your data might tell a different story?

I can just tell you that the data we had shows that people who were supposed to be in the office, who were not granted some exception, the numbers were probably no better than one in five.

Tell me about the tech hiring initiative you mentioned earlier.

We have an early-career problem in the federal government. Today, 7% of employees in the federal government are under the age of 30, compared to about 23% or 24% in the non-federal workforce.

So we have a demographic that is not going to serve us well over time, because we have a lot of people who are going to retire.

Is something turning them off, or do they just not know?

I think they just don’t know. We have completely fumbled on telling people the right message about why government is exciting.

You’ve said before that it shouldn’t be about stability.

We have structural problems in the government that make it hard for early employees, because we have a very rigid system. We’ve got a college education requirement that may not need to be there.

We also have a tech problem. AI is going to continue to be very, very important, and we have a massive dearth of people who actually understand the technology.

Quite frankly, I’m perfectly happy if they come for two years or three years and they decide they want to go back to the private sector. That’s wonderful.

When will the tech program be up and running?

My goal is that we should be able to roll something out, a program that’s ready to get started up, in the next 30 to 60 days.