$25,000 bonuses for top-performing feds? OPM makes it easier for agencies to award them

The Office of Personnel Management last week delegated to agency heads the authority to award bonuses of up to $25,000 to “highly exceptional and unusually outstanding” civil servants. 

Previously, agency heads first had to seek approval from the federal government’s HR agency to distribute awards between $10,000 and $25,000. 

“A performance management system that makes meaningful distinctions in performance must also deliver meaningful rewards,” OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote in the memo. “Agencies should use this authority to provide larger awards to their highest performers, ensuring that the employees who contribute most to agency missions and results receive recognition commensurate with their contributions.”

OPM announced the bonus delegation change the same day that it set a 40% cap for fiscal 2026 on the share of federal employees that can receive the top two performance ratings. 

“I think you could view this as part of a package to limit the number of people who are achieving the highest ratings and getting bonuses, but sweetening the pot a little bit in terms of the size of the bonuses,” said Alan P. Balutis, who worked in the federal government for nearly three decades and is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. 

Likewise, Kupor posted on social media in August that, for OPM’s internal awards, the agency reduced the number of categories but tripled the honor’s monetary value “in-line with our efforts to create a high performance culture across government.” 

Balutis also argued that giving agency heads the authority to award these bonuses “seems logical.” 

“They're running multi-billion-dollar budgets and programs and [for them] to have the authority to give employees what is — certainly compared to the private sector — a relatively modest annual bonus makes imminently good managerial sense,” he said. 

The Partnership for Public Service — a good government nonprofit that has criticized many of the Trump administration’s federal workforce reforms, especially the removal of civil service protections for around 8,000 positions in “policy-making” roles through the Schedule Policy/Career job classification — contended that “streamlining the approval authority for the awards process may be a step in the right direction, [but] it fails to address the core problem that agencies still lack the incentives, tools and culture needed to meaningfully reward high performance.” 

“Building a truly high performing workforce requires holistic reform to performance management as opposed to the piecemeal tweaks we continue to see from this administration," said Jenny Mattingley, the organization’s vice president for public policy and stakeholder engagement, in a statement to Government Executive. 

OPM canceled the fiscal 2025 presidential rank awards, a program to honor outstanding members of the Senior Executive Service that includes a financial award component, for no specified reason. At the start of this year, however, the agency said the awards would return for fiscal 2026. 

While OPM has delegated its authority over federal worker bonuses, it has recently taken several actions to centralize power over the civil servant removal process.