FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Trump administration is seeking to increase accountability for federal employees by implementing new performance standards and training.
The Office of Personnel Management issued a memorandum published online Tuesday to fulfill President Donald Trump’s mandate for a federal workforce that prizes excellence, deals with underperformance, and fulfills its mission.
“Federal employees should be held to the highest standards of performance and accountability,” Chuck Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management and author of the memorandum, said in a statement.
“These reforms will ensure that strong performers are rewarded, poor performers are addressed, and the American people receive the effective and efficient service they deserve. OPM is proud to implement the president’s direction to create a culture of excellence throughout the federal workforce,” Ezell said.
The new standards are intended to reduce performance grade inflation among federal workers and to end the disproportionate number of highest performance-level reviews. They are also designed to improve the ability of federal supervisors to demote, remove, or fire employees who are underperforming.
The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, a self-described independent, quasi-judicial agency in the executive branch that adjudicates employee appeals, published a research brief in 2019 that found only 26% of supervisors answered in the affirmative that “[i]f a subordinate employee was deficient in a critical performance element after completion of a [Performance Improvement Period], are you confident that you would be able to remove that employee?”
That statistic was part of the rationale for the updated performance standards.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s new standards are designed to double down on rewarding excellence.
“[O]utstanding performance should be identified and rewarded in real time throughout the year. Supervisors should not wait for the next scheduled progress review to reward outstanding performance,” the OPM memorandum to the heads and acting heads of federal departments and agencies states.
These new standards will encompass all personnel who are non-Senior Executive Service and non-Senior Professional employees. New performance-management training will be required by federal agency supervisors. A governmentwide performance appraisal system will be implemented in all federal agencies beginning on Oct. 1, 2026.
The moves to reform the federal bureaucracy come after the Trump administration, through the Department of Government Efficiency, has sought to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Indeed, DOGE’s cuts to the federal workforce accounted for almost half of all layoffs so far in 2025. That meant 283,172 jobs were cut in the first several months of the administration, according to a recent report by the outplacement and career-transition coaching firm Challenger, Gray & and Christmas.
An additional 6,945 job terminations were linked to the impact of DOGE that has affected nongovernmental organizations and education institutions part of the proverbial Washington swamp.
