The effort by OPM to "decentralize" administration of the FEVS will result in higher costs for the taxpayers for a lower quality result, if a result ever comes.

On July 9, the Office of Personnel Management answered a June letter from 23 Democratic lawmakers about the 2026 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) with a memo announcing that it would no longer administer the FEVS. Without OPM, each agency will be responsible for administering the survey themselves. This change all but dooms any chance for a 2026 FEVS. In practice, this means the FEVS will not happen for the second year in a row for most agencies and its long-term existence is threatened.

According to a Substack post by OPM Director Scott Kupor, this change was made because the centrally administered survey was “costly, doesn’t serve as a valuable management tool and fails to enable actionable results.”

In a statement sent to Federal News Network for this commentary, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) responded to this change by saying, “The FEVS is intended to provide important feedback on how agencies are functioning from leadership to rank-and-file employees – feedback that helps ensure Americans are getting the services they deserve. This shortsighted decision is the latest effort by Trump appointees at OPM to sabotage the process of collecting data related to government efficiency and transparency that Congress relies on as an important oversight tool. The result will be less information to help our agencies operate more effectively on behalf of the American people.”

This comes only a week after OPM published proposed regulations seeking to reduce the amount of mandatory questions from 16 to 10 to “make the annual survey a helpful tool instead of a popularity contest.”

The last year OPM administered the FEVS was 2024, resulting in 674,000 responses across 86 agencies. Now this burden will be split across the government.

The only guidance agency leadership received is the Employee Survey Playbook released alongside the memo. This playbook recommends 12 weeks of preparation to select a survey platform, create a survey with any additional questions, address privacy considerations, program and test the survey, develop a communications plan, prepare helpdesk processes and many other tasks. With 12 weeks of preparation, the typical six weeks to administer the survey and the recommended six weeks of post-close analysis and reporting, administration will take 24 weeks to complete.

If directors started this week, they would barely meet the requirement by the end of the calendar year. But even this is not possible because the survey questions are not finalized. The public comment period on OPM’s rule change is open until Aug. 31 before the rule can be finalized and take effect.

The proposed plan also gives agencies extraordinary flexibility in administration and methods. It lets each individual agency choose to use the current census model of surveying all employees or a random sampling method. Additionally, it lets agencies choose to use anonymous surveys or confidential unique-link surveys. Demographic questions are left up to agency choice. All of the variability of survey methodology and administration across the government will compound and produce incomparable data. These changes limit the utility of the survey for agency comparison in congressional oversight, for prospective employees, and agency leadership looking to compare their own performance.

Contrary to efforts to make government efficient, this change multiplies the survey workload across all agencies. The survey playbook recommends each agency have a survey program manager and a people analytics officer who will work with general counsel, IT and the chief information officer, the chief privacy officer, the communications teams and agency leadership. This places burdens on all agencies, and likely insurmountable obstacles for vital but small ones like the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board or the “very small” Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. It additionally creates an increased burden on OPM, who has to collate responses from all agencies and validate the data from each.

The effort by OPM to “decentralize” administration of the FEVS will result in higher costs for the taxpayers for a lower quality result, if a result ever comes.

Jack Dando is an applied social scientist specialized in workforce analytics in the military intelligence community. He holds a MA in sociology from George Mason University.

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