A new data analysis has kicked off a real dispute between a prominent government watchdog group and OPM’s own director over what actually happened after last year’s DRP departures
What the Partnership for Public Service Found
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on federal workforce issues, published an analysis matching DRP departures to new hires by agency subcomponent and occupational series. Its finding: more than 20,600 employees have been hired into the same agency subcomponent and occupational series as someone who left under DRP, as of June 2026. In some specific occupations, including Forest Service forestry technicians and USPTO patent examiners, more people were hired than had actually departed.
The analysis also flagged a seniority gap. New hires in these backfilled positions came in at an average of 1.4 General Schedule grades lower than the employees they replaced, and in the FBI’s criminal investigation series specifically, the gap was 3.1 grades. The Partnership’s conclusion: “Many employees were paid to resign only to be replaced just months later, often at a more junior level,” representing a real loss of institutional knowledge and specialized expertise that’s difficult to fully quantify.
OPM’s Response
OPM Director Scott Kupor pushed back directly, framing the pattern as intentional rather than a failure of the program’s goals. His argument centers on the federal workforce’s age profile: 44 percent of federal employees are over 50, and he’s argued that bringing in less experienced talent and developing them into future leaders is a genuine organizational benefit, not evidence that the DRP’s savings were illusory.
A Third Voice Complicates the Picture
A separate commentary, published on the Substack “Secrets of OPM,” pushed back on the Partnership’s framing from a different angle. It pointed out that 139,928 employees participated in DRP in total, meaning the roughly 20,600 matched backfills the Partnership identified represent well under a fifth of total departures. Read that way, the data could just as easily support the opposite conclusion: that the large majority of DRP-related staffing reductions were not reversed.
Where This Leaves Things
Both sides are working from real numbers, and the disagreement isn’t really about the underlying data; it’s about what the data means. Is a 15 percent backfill rate evidence that agencies quietly walked back their own workforce reductions, or evidence that the DRP departures were, for the most part, real and lasting? Reasonable people looking at the same figures are reaching different conclusions, and this dispute is likely to continue as more complete data becomes available.
