What OPM Just Proposed
On March 5, the Office of Personnel Management issued proposed rules that would fundamentally reshape how federal agencies decide who gets cut when they reduce their workforces. Under the current system — in place, in various forms, since the late nineteenth century — seniority is the primary protection. Longer-serving employees go last. It's a blunt instrument, but it's a transparent one: everyone knows the rules, the rules are applied consistently, and the results are hard to manipulate. The new rules flip that. Under OPM's proposal, performance ratings from the prior three years would become the primary RIF factor. Seniority would be demoted to a tiebreaker. [2] On its face, this is a reasonable reform. A senior employee with a decade of mediocre reviews shouldn't automatically be better protected than a junior employee who has consistently outperformed their peers. That logic works in any organization, government or otherwise. The principle is not the problem. The problem is the rulemaking companion that arrived ten days earlier.
The Curve Problem
On February 24 — before the performance-based RIF rules were even proposed — OPM issued a separate rule requiring agencies to use "forced distribution" rating systems. In plain terms: supervisors must rate their employees on a curve. A fixed percentage must receive low ratings, regardless of how the team is actually performing. Now combine these two rules. Supervisors must, by policy, assign low performance ratings to a set share of employees. The administration then proposes to use those performance ratings as the primary justification for layoffs. [1] The logical endpoint is not difficult to trace. An agency head who wants to eliminate a specific employee — one who, say, testified before Congress, filed an internal complaint, or simply worked for an administration they now oppose — doesn't need to fire that person directly. They assign a low performance rating over the next three years, and when the next RIF comes, the math does the work for them. Legally. With documentation. [2] I've noticed that some of our more progressive commentators have recently been quite exercised about the possibility that private-sector employers might game performance reviews to justify AI-driven layoffs without genuine accountability. It is a legitimate concern in that context. Presumably the logic applies with equal force when the employer in question is the federal government. Consistency, as ever, is the hardest political virtue.
