The Office of Personnel Management is facing the Trump administration’s attempt to merge its functions into the White House, a move several members of the House Appropriations Committee oppose. Jeff Neal, senior vice president at ICF and former Chief Human Capital Officer at DHS, says that in order to restore OPM to its original functionality, it must be restructured via increased funding.
“As someone who is a Chief Human Capital Officer, I think they want a merit-based civil service that works. But you have to have a good foundation for it. Out of the 5,000 or so people that they have, very few are doing human resources work. They do a great job on insurance, they run great retirement programs, but the policy side is very, very lacking, and my colleagues and I would like to see strengthening of that,” Neal said. “You could call OPM and ask for advice and they’d give you great advice, but there’s nobody to call most of the time. They need that; the policy side needs to be strengthened pretty dramatically… The Appropriations Committee did get into the solutions and their work has proposed adding $43 million to OPM’s budget and plus up where they have these weaknesses.”
