Office of Personnel Management Makeover

For those following the health care debate -- and its impact on the Office of Personnel Management -- Kaiser Health News has an interesting forum of ten health care policy experts and their thoughts on the proposal to have OPM take over the so-called "public option" of health care reform. Their verdict? Anything from "it makes a lot of sense" to "it's a joke."

Robert Moffit, a Reagan-era OPM official currently with the Heritage Foundation, has an interesting point:

"[OPM's] philosophical approach is going to reflect the policy of the White House. These [legislators] don't realize it's kind of a two-edged sword. They have the Obama administration, but you may also have the Palin administration."

That gets to an issue that has been on my mind lately--what effect would this reform have on the politics and culture of OPM? Perhaps OPM is more political than Health and Human Services or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but it's also an agency generally geared towards wonky human resource-related challenges. It spends most of its time tending to federal employee needs, as well as drawing up personnel policies which normally hit bureaucratic walls. (When he first came to office, OPM Director John Berry jokingly referred to it as the "Office of Personnel Recommendations.") Is it ready to handle this type of intense political pressure?

In terms of administrative burden, it's hard to say -- OPM already handles about 250 health care plans with 8 million enrollees. Estimates vary, but it's unlikely this OPM-run public option replacement would have as many enrollees, or anywhere close to as many plans. There have been a lot of legitimate questions about whether or not OPM can handle the administrative burden of a new health care plan, with new rules and responsibilities. But when you look at the numbers, it's not outrageously larger than OPM's current mandate -- assuming that Congress includes some staffing and funding increases along with this new responsibility.

But what about the politics?

But when Berry comes down to Capital Hill these days, he's normally quizzed by lawmakers on personnel reforms, labor-management relations, the security clearance process, and occasionally hot-button issues like domestic partnership benefits. But if this proposal became law, it's hard to imagine that he would be asked about anything but health care. What chance would Berry have of following through with the ambitious goals -- re-thinking the General Schedule, cleaning up the convoluted hiring process, ushering in a new era of public service -- that he laid out when he first came into office?