Office of Personnel Management

The Office of Personnel Management is the federal government’s human resources agency, responsible for hiring rules, employee benefits, retirement systems, and the policies that govern how the civilian workforce is staffed and managed. Because the federal government employs a large share of American workers directly, decisions made here ripple through hiring practices, pay systems, and retirement security for millions of current and former employees.

Running the civilian workforce. OPM sets the rules agencies must follow when recruiting, classifying, and promoting employees, and it administers the health insurance, life insurance, and retirement programs that federal workers rely on throughout their careers and after they leave government. A closer look at What the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Does explains how these responsibilities fit together.

Getting hired. The federal hiring process is often described as slow and confusing compared to private-sector recruiting, and applicants ranging from veterans to recent graduates frequently struggle to navigate it. Federal Hiring: How It Works, Why It Fails, and How to Fix It walks through why the system works the way it does and where reform efforts have focused.

Institutional strain. Like many agencies with broad administrative mandates, OPM periodically faces scrutiny over staffing, technology, and its capacity to keep pace with the workforce it oversees, tensions explored in OPM’s Recent Challenges and Opportunities for Improvement.