Top Oversight Dem criticizes OPM’s forced distribution plan for federal worker appraisals

The highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee last week urged the Office of Personnel Management to rescind its controversial plan to drastically limit how many federal workers are eligible for top annual performance ratings, arguing the move would impede, rather than facilitate, better agency performance.

Last month, OPM formally proposed regulations that would formally lift the prohibition on the “forced distribution” of performance ratings, meaning agencies would be permitted to set quotas for how many employees could receive each rating. Despite the prohibition still being in place, federal workers widely reported being subjected to forced distributions during their annual reviews last fall. The Trump administration implemented a similar change for members of the Senior Executive Service last year.

In a letter to OPM Director Scott Kupor, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., warned that the measure is likely to reduce employee collaboration and hamper agencies’ mission delivery, rather than reward outstanding achievement and better motivate workers, as the dedicated HR agency has argued. Within government, employees tasked by their agencies with reviewing OPM’s proposal prior to its publication criticized it almost unanimously as counter to merit systems principles and likely to cause conflict within the workplace.

“The latest research indicates that forced distribution systems are likely to degrade, rather than enhance, organizational performance by effectively pitting employees against one another in open competition, reducing incentives for collaboration and knowledge-sharing,” Garcia wrote. “Consistent with these findings, many large companies including Microsoft and General Electric have abandoned forced ranking systems after concluding that such systems damage morale and overall performance.”

Garcia argued that forced distribution systems would violate federal law requiring that performance appraisal systems at federal agencies must evaluate employees based on objective metrics—a quota or ranking system necessarily constitutes a relative metric. And he noted that the agency did not meaningfully explain why OPM is abandoning its long-held assertion that forced distribution is antithetical to good performance management, a requirement when changing federal regulations.

“By design, forced ranking systems overlook objective evaluation of job performance in favor of relative (and potentially subjective) worker rankings, and as such, it remains unclear how this approach could consistently produce ratings that reflect actual job performance rather than artificially imposed quota-based targets,” he wrote. “Further, OPM acknowledges it previously rejected forced distribution as ‘incompatible with effective performance management.’ The current proposal does not substantively engage with that prior determination nor explain why the underlying concerns no longer apply. As such, the proposed rule lacks basic justification.”

The public comment period for OPM’s proposal closed last week.