The Office of Personnel Management OPM

The assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a disappointed office seeker gave Congress the push to end the spoils system. The Pendleton Act of 1883 created the Civil Service Commission and required that a growing share of federal jobs be filled by competitive examination rather than political loyalty. For nearly a century the commission both managed the workforce and protected it from abuse, a combination critics said it did poorly. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 split those jobs: the Office of Personnel Management, which opened January 1, 1979, took management, while the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Labor Relations Authority took adjudication.

OPM writes the rules under which federal agencies hire, classify, pay, promote, and discipline employees. It administers the General Schedule pay system, the Senior Executive Service, and the hiring authorities that let agencies bypass competitive rules in specific cases. It runs the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the largest employer-sponsored health plan in the country, covering about 8 million people, along with federal life insurance and the retirement system that pays annuities to about 2.7 million retirees and survivors. Its USAJOBS website is the front door for nearly all federal job openings.

The agency's Director is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and serves as the President's chief adviser on the federal workforce. OPM itself has about 2,500 employees, plus more in its retirement processing center in a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, where paper files were handled by hand for decades. In 2015 hackers linked to China stole background investigation records on 21.5 million people from OPM systems, one of the most damaging breaches in government history, after which investigations moved to the Defense Department.

In 2025 OPM became the engine of the administration's effort to shrink and reshape the federal workforce. It sent the Fork in the Road email offering deferred resignation, which about 154,000 employees accepted, directed agencies to dismiss probationary workers, and wrote the rules creating a new category, Schedule Policy and Career, that removes civil service protections from employees in policy-influencing roles. Supporters said the changes made the bureaucracy accountable to elected leadership. Federal unions and civil service advocates said they revived the spoils system the agency was created to end, and challenged them in court.