United States federal civil service
Non-elected workforce of the US government
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| April 18 2025 | The entire Lab at OPM innovation team was eliminated by DOGE and the Trump agenda, effectively ending the team's work on complex challenges using human-centered design with federal partners. |
| 2025 | A lawsuit was filed by two anonymous federal workers against OPM, alleging failure to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment before launching a new email communication system with potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities. |
| February 24 2025 | OPM announced that employees were not required to reply to the previous accomplishment reporting email, amid a pending lawsuit challenging the mass layoffs of probationary workers. |
| February 22 2025 | OPM emailed all federal employees requesting they report their previous week's accomplishments by midnight EST on February 24, with Elon Musk publicly stating on X that failure to respond would be considered a resignation. |
| February 2025 | Mass layoffs began, resulting in the termination of approximately 30,000 federal employees. |
| January 27 2025 | Trump issued a memorandum regarding Schedule F, with OPM's acting director Charles Ezell issuing guidance to implement the executive order, supporting workforce restructuring initiatives. |
| January 20 2025 | The Trump administration established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with Elon Musk appointed as its leader, aimed at reducing the federal workforce. |
| January 20 2025 | Charles Ezell takes on the role of acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management. |
| January 2025 | Trump's second administration, with the Department of Government Efficiency chaired by Elon Musk, sent a memo offering deferred resignation to approximately two million federal employees. |
| January 2025 | The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) warned workers against accepting the deferred resignation offer, expressing concerns about potential benefit disputes and unclear legal protections. |
| January 2025 | OPM launched a controversial 'deferred resignation' program offering federal employees the option to resign effective September 30, 2025, while continuing to receive pay and benefits until that date. The program was part of a broader Trump administration effort to reduce the federal workforce. |
| May 6 2024 | Rob Shriver assumes the role of acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management. |
| March 2022 | Total number of federal agencies reached 392, including 9 executive offices, 15 executive departments, 259 executive department sub-agencies and bureaus, 66 independent agencies, 42 boards, commissions, and committees, and 11 quasi-official agencies. |
| June 24 2021 | Kiran Ahuja becomes Director of the Office of Personnel Management. |
| January 22 2021 | President Joe Biden eliminated the Schedule F executive order, nullifying the proposed personnel changes. |
| January 19 2021 | Deadline for federal agency heads to report positions that could be reclassified under the Schedule F executive order. |
| October 2020 | Trump signed an executive order creating Schedule F, a new category of federal employees in policymaking roles that would remove civil service protections and make them subject to political dismissal. |
| 2019 | Trump administration continued pushing the proposal to merge OPM into GSA and transfer federal personnel policy-making components to the Office of Management and Budget in the White House. |
| 2019 | Representative Gerry Connolly, chair of the Subcommittee on Government Operations, publicly criticized the proposal during a congressional hearing, arguing it would politicize merit policy-making functions. |
| 2019 | NBIB was dissolved, and its background check functions were transferred to the Defense Security Service (later reorganized into the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency). |
| September 16 2019 | Dale Cabaniss is appointed as Director of the Office of Personnel Management. |
| 2018 | President Donald Trump first proposed merging the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) into the General Services Administration (GSA) as part of a broader executive branch restructuring initiative. |
| August 2018 | U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily struck down most of Trump's executive orders targeting federal employee unions, ruling they were an attempt to weaken labor unions. |
| May 2018 | President Donald Trump signed three executive orders targeting federal employee unions, aiming to make it easier to fire federal workers under the claim of strengthening merit-system principles and improving government efficiency. |
| 2015 | OPM experienced a major data breach that compromised over 21 million federal employees' personal records, highlighting significant cybersecurity weaknesses within the agency. |
| 2014 | OPM declined to renew its contract with USIS after several scandals and brought background investigations back in-house under the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB). |
| November 4 2013 | Katherine Archuleta is appointed as Director of the Office of Personnel Management. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles United States federal civil service & United States Office of Personnel Management, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.