EXCLUSIVE — Scott Kupor wants to streamline the workforce at his agency, but that doesn’t mean he’s handing out large numbers of pink slips.
Kupor, who was sworn in as director of the Office of Personnel Management on July 14, aims to reduce his workforce from nearly 3,000 to 2,000, mostly through voluntary efforts.
“We can’t be all things to all people,” Kupor said in an interview with the Washington Examiner, citing programs he has cut that no longer fit with OPM’s mission, among them an executive education initiative. Most of the employees who are leaving have taken a deferred resignation or otherwise left on their own, Kupor added, with fewer than 200 cut through a direct reduction in force.
His approach stands in contrast to the specter of mass layoffs the Department of Government Efficiency fanned as Elon Musk, its onetime head, wielded a literal “chainsaw for bureaucracy” at a conference in February.
Kupor, who has a background in the tech industry, says he wants to restore merit to his agency and bring a more entrepreneurial focus to the bureaucracy more broadly. OPM is the human resources arm of the federal government and manages personnel and retirement benefits.
“We have a really great opportunity to help really create kind of a performance-based culture here in the government,” he said. “We focus on things like merit hiring, compensation, and all the good things that [President Donald Trump] has directed us to do, with the goal of making sure that we can make civil service a really strong and coveted opportunity for people.”
Not everyone is on board with that vision, of course, and OPM has faced lawsuits from labor unions including the American Federation of Government Employees that aim to prevent the agency from reducing employee headcount.
Kupor got a big win on that front last week, when the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with OPM in a suit against AFGE and other unions that claimed Trump was targeting labor unions and therefore violating their members’ free speech rights.
AFGE National President Everett Kelley called the ruling “a setback for First Amendment rights in America,” but that’s not how Kupor sees it.
“Presidents have broad discretion to exclude certain agencies from being able to have union-based activity,” Kupor said. “That’s really important. Historically, what we’ve seen in some cases is the unions have been an impediment to the president’s ability to execute on the important plans that he’s doing.”
In practice, the ruling means that OPM and other agencies can move forward with headcount reductions and otherwise try to streamline their services for the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
“This really clears the path then for us to move forward with some of those areas and to make sure that we can obviously serve the American people as efficiently as possible,” Kupor said.
Trump orders federal agencies to protect religious expression
He has taken other actions during his early days on the job, including ending the famous “five things” email Musk started that forced employees to list out their weekly accomplishments.
“We think fundamentally that the responsibility of any manager in any organization is to obviously know what their team members are doing and to be able to be appropriately informed on that,” Kupor said of the decision. “And that was a tool that was available to people, but there’s lots of other tools.”
One other recent move from Kupor was a memo he sent telling employees they are free to express their religious views in the workplace.
Issued late last month, the memo clarifies that employees may pray, display religious personal items, hold group gatherings, or even invite colleagues to church without fear of discrimination or retaliation.
“When you look at what the Supreme Court has said on these topics, those types of displays are perfectly legal, and we want to make sure people understood that,” Kupor said. “We want the workplace to be a place where people don’t have to just kind of pretend to be something else other than what’s important to them in terms of their religious beliefs.”
The memo was necessary because of confusion on the topic left over from the Biden administration, Kupor added, saying he had received several inquiries about it.
“We thought it was important to set the record straight,” he said.