The Office of Personnel Management is housed inside a concrete and glass federal building three blocks west of White House. The agency’s name conjures images of dull and ordinary backend government work, but it’s arguably the most powerful human resources department in America. It holds detailed records on 2.1 million federal workers and millions more Americans who have applied for those jobs. It also has the email address for nearly every federal employee.
As President Trump and Elon Musk have waged war on the federal service and congressionally mandated spending over the last two weeks, much of those efforts have revolved around Musk and his allies harnessing government data in unprecedented, and perhaps legally questionable, ways. The executive suites on the fifth floor of OPM’s Washington headquarters are at the center of that effort.
For career officials at the OPM, the alarm bells started going off during transition meetings with incoming Trump officials. Such meetings usually involve handing off details from the outgoing administration about the status of major projects, the nuts and bolts of the organization’s structure, and how to onboard new hires.
But Trump’s team was unusually fixated on OPM’s computer systems, says a current OPM official. During those early meetings, Greg Hogan, who has since been installed as OPM’s new chief information officer, spent a lot of time asking about the computer systems, how they are accessed, what the security measures are in place and how security patches get installed. “My spidey sense was going off,” says the OPM official, who has been involved in briefing previous Presidential transition teams during changes of administrations. “The questions were all about IT.”
Federal workers came to quickly understand how much OPM was changing on Jan. 28, when most of them received an email from a new government-wide email system originating from within the agency. It offered them eight months’ pay in exchange for their resignation. (Shortly after those emails went out, employees at agencies like USDA and NOAA said their email accounts were inundated with spam.) The buyout offer is currently in limbo, after a U.S. district judge temporarily blocked it in response to a lawsuit by labor unions.
The blanket call for resignations was only the most visible way in which the new administration is harnessing OPM’s resources to advance Trump’s agenda. In the last two weeks, administration officials have moved to install Trump appointees into crucial technical jobs at OPM, many of which Congress intended to be filled by career officials whose work spans administrations of both parties. Musk allies are working to change that in virtually every agency, and they are using OPM’s role as the central hub for the government’s hiring practices to do it.
Read more: Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington
This week, Trump’s political appointees ousted OPM’s chief financial officer Erica Roach, a career official who was in charge of managing $1 trillion in deposits held by the Earned Benefits Trust Funds that include the retirement accounts and health benefit funds for most of the federal workforce. After Roach was informed she had been demoted she chose to resign, according to a current OPM official. The White House and OPM did not return requests for comment.
A few days before, the agency’s top technology officer, Melvin Brown, was reassigned to a different office, allowing Hogan, a Trump ally, to fill a position that normally goes to career civil servants. Charles Ezell, OPM’s acting director, intends for that switch to become a pattern across the federal government. On Tuesday, a little-noticed memo sent by Ezell to every cabinet department and agency jumpstarted what could be a radical change in how the federal government hires its top tech officers, also known as chief information officers or CIOs.
Currently, the CIOs at most agencies are considered “career reserved” positions, meaning those roles can only be filled from the existing ranks of the federal government senior executive service. Multiple administrations have followed that hiring practice for CIOs, judging that they are fitting the definition in current law that states a position is designated career reserved “if the filling of the position by a career appointee is necessary to ensure impartiality, or the public’s confidence in the impartiality, of the Government.”
But Trump’s new leadership at OPM is arguing that chief information officers in those roles shouldn’t be limited to career government officials because the decisions made by CIOs impact policy. “A modern agency CIO is not a mere engineer, scientist or technocrat,” Ezell wrote in his memo. “He does not spend his days writing complex lines of code, setting up secure networks, or performing other ‘highly technical’ tasks. Instead, he crafts and effectuates policy, and sets and deploys his budget, based on his Administration’s priorities.” Ezell gave agencies until Feb. 14 to request OPM strip the career federal service requirement from the CIO role. This administrative change would pave the way for political appointees running Trump’s agencies to recruit candidates from outside the career federal service for those positions.
Putting hand-picked candidates in those crucial IT roles across the government will give DOGE and the Trump White House more centralized access to massive troves of data about the federal workforce and government spending. That’s by design. But it has raised concerns that the administration will ignore typical safeguards in place to prioritize employee privacy and protect against foreign intelligence hacking.
OPM’s senior leadership has been overtaken with Musk allies, including senior advisor Brian Bjelde, who recently worked for Musk’s SpaceX as vice president of human resources; chief of staff Amanda Scales, who had previously worked for Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI; and senior adviser Anthony Armstrong, who worked as a banker on Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter. Another person who has been instrumental in pushing through the new actions is Andrew Kloster, OPM’s new general counsel, who worked in the White House during Trump’s first term and was recently former congressman Matt Gaetz’s general counsel.
Some senior career officials at OPM have already been locked out of key databases. There is concern that political appointees have access to systems, including the Enterprise Human Resources Integration, without standard safeguard procedures designed to keep information private. That system includes information like pay grades, length of service, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and home addresses.
On Friday, Jan. 31, Bjelde told career supervisors at the Office of Personnel Management that the “target” was to cut 70% of the agency’s staff, a move that a current OPM official predicted would hobble the teams responsible for overseeing health care benefits and retirement-planning for the federal workforce.
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