Scott Kupor is the director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Charles Guiteau, a deranged attorney from Illinois, became violent when he didn’t land a position in James Garfield’s administration. “I am a stalwart, and I want my reward,” he said after shooting the president in 1881. That was his shameful attempt at a defense: Guiteau had campaigned for Garfield and thought he ought to be compensated accordingly. He was hanged for murder the following year instead.
The only good thing to come from that tragedy was the modern civil service. Congress ended the so-called spoils system after Garfield’s assassination by passing the Pendleton Act in 1883. That law, long overdue, formally established merit as the governing philosophy of the federal workforce. Nearly 150 years later, its animating principles — that hiring be based on performance, not fealty, and that competent employees be protected from political interference — remain sound.
Yet thanks to decades of additional legislation — the New Deal of the 1930s, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 — it is still too difficult to reward excellence and punish underperformance. Removing even a demonstrably subpar employee can require months, if not years, of documentation, notice periods and appeals, a process so arduous that many managers never begin it. The system needs fixing, and the federal government is keen to do so. Last month brought welcome news that one state is, too.
Consider North Carolina, whose Republican-controlled legislature unanimously passed — and Democratic governor signed — the Public Workforce Modernization Act. The law simplifies hiring, endorses new assessments to measure employee skills and updates the state’s performance management system. Perhaps most significant, it addresses a disciplinary process that in 2025 reportedly saw only 0.025 percent of the state’s workforce removed for poor performance. As The Post’s Editorial Board noted, such business-style HR management is popular and ensures that the nation’s most important institutions don’t settle for mediocrity.
The same concern is informing the Trump administration’s efforts. Whereas the Tar Heel State is home to some 50,000 state government workers, the federal government had roughly 2.3 million employees in fiscal 2024. In each fiscal year from 2022 through 2024, the Office of Personnel Management reported that supervisors rated 99.5 percent of staff as meeting expectations, exceeding expectations, or outstanding.
The majority of these employees — not appointed by the president and fireable only “for cause” — are talented, dedicated public servants. Yet the system fails them.
When more than 99 percent of employees are described as superlative, the metric means nothing. When excellence is indistinguishable from mediocrity on paper, no one can be rewarded properly. And when managers believe it’s too difficult to reform underperformance, they begin to ignore problems. The result is a workforce in which good employees carry the load, bad employees collect a paycheck and taxpayers foot the bill.
At the Office of Personnel Management — Washington’s chief HR agency — my team has spent the past 20 months reforming this system. Our goal is simple and uncontroversial: Merit matters, not how long anyone has been in a role or what college degree he earned, both in hiring and in day-to-day performance. That means accountability for employees who can’t deliver and distinction for those who knock the cover off the ball.
Among other things, my office has dispensed with self-assessments in government job applications. Whereas prospective hires were historically evaluated based on their own account of their skills, the government now requires tests or interviews to check them. The government is also rewriting job descriptions to eliminate proxies for talent — e.g., college degrees — in favor of skills-based assessments.
My office has stopped the practice of giving nearly everyone an “A” on their annual review by capping the share of above-average performers government-wide at 40 percent. In the same spirit, we’ve replaced the evenly spread “peanut butter” approach to doling out bonuses with one that pays substantially more for outstanding performance. Tenure will no longer be the primary factor for promotion. Supervisors will likewise undergo formal performance-management training. The government has simplified rules around reductions-in-force to give agencies greater flexibility to restructure as their objectives change and to make performance the basis for determining who stays.
The office, in other words, is following in its 19th-century forebears’ footsteps. The Pendleton Act was a good and necessary fix. But almost 150 years have turned its foundational principles into a Rube Goldberg machine of overly complex rules and processes. The result: The civil service induces exemplary employees to leave in frustration and bad ones to stay in comfort. The days of that backward system are numbered.
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