Feds wary of skills-based hiring survey after 15 months of attacks

Some federal workers this week have expressed reluctance to participate in the Office of Personnel Management’s latest phase of a long-running bipartisan initiative, something experts say could mark an unintended consequence of the Trump administration’s campaign against federal workers it perceives as disloyal.

This week, OPM deployed its federal workforce competency initiative survey to roughly 550,000 employees. The questionnaire, which has previously been fielded both in 2021 and 2024, queries feds about the skillsets needed to perform their jobs, a key piece in the ongoing effort to shift away from degree- and qualification-based jobseeker evaluations and toward skills-based hiring, long a priority of both Republican and Democratic administrations.

But concern about the survey and fears of an ulterior motive quickly surfaced among feds. Multiple threads on Reddit asked what the survey was, and some wrote that they feared their responses would be used in furtherance of future reductions in force.

One Commerce Department employee told Government Executive that they received the survey invitation despite a lack of prior communication or education by their HR office. They said the administration’s co-opting of terms like “merit” and “accountability” as part of its messaging on federal layoffs and purging of diversity-related government offices has bred suspicion across the workforce.

"We all want more efficient government hiring and development, but ‘efficiency’ was cited as the justification for all of last year's senseless workforce actions,” they said. “It kind of feels like they burned the trust needed to get information from us because we don't know if it'll be a genuine attempt to improve civil service, or the first step in new automation and AI-dependent layoffs that will further degrade current capacity.”

An OPM spokesperson said Thursday that since deploying the survey this week, the agency has received 21,000 responses, a figure they expect to swell over time. The official sought to reassure feds that information collected will be used solely as part of the skills-based hiring push.

“OPM is continuing to work with agency HR offices to reinforce outreach and ensure employees understand the survey’s purpose,” they said. “This long-standing, bipartisan effort is focused solely on understanding the work federal employees perform, not evaluating individuals, and the data directly inform skills-based hiring, job design and workforce development. OPM is committed to transparency and building trust by clearly communicating how feedback I used and ensuring employees see how their input strengthens the federal workforce.”

Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy, said the incident shows the downsides of the Trump administration’s adversarial stance toward its employees.

“Once the idea of merit becomes perceived as a code word for slashing federal jobs and the idea of accountability becomes a code word for engaging in purges according to the ideology of employees, the principles that have been there in the federal government’s human capital world for 140 years are now being distorted by the mixed messages coming out of the administration,” he said. “So someone can say, ‘We’re interested in merit, in building capacity and making the workforce more accountable,’ and on one hand that sounds right and in many cases is right. But from the point of view of the employees, it just sounds like a continuation of those threats. Oftentimes, the only sensible strategy then is not to do anything, so as to avoid sticking your head up.”