Original Broadcast Date: 09/13/2026
Sponsored by Deloitte
The Office of Personnel Management is pushing ahead with several efforts aimed at changing how the federal government recruits employees, manages human resources and uses technology across the workforce. On this edition of Fed Gov Today, OPM Director Scott Kupor and Deloitte Principal Lucy Melvin discuss different parts of that transformation, from federal benefits administration to centralized recruiting, artificial intelligence and Schedule Policy/Career.
Melvin says benefits administration remains an important but under-modernized part of the federal employee experience. She explains that many employees still complete benefits forms using paper documents, PDFs, email or agency intranets. That creates opportunities for errors, missed information and additional processing time.
She argues that federal benefits are complicated enough to require systems specifically designed for that environment. Employees may have to
That modernization conversation continues with Kupor, who outlines the expansion of OPM’s Tech Force recruiting model into the Pentagon. He says the new effort uses the same centralized recruiting and evaluation infrastructure OPM develops for Tech Force but targets a different type of employee: forward deployed engineers who combine software engineering skills with the ability to implement technology on site.
Kupor says the Department of War is looking to hire up to 250 people for those positions and has already received its first group of vetted candidates. OPM serves as the initial recruiting and evaluation point before qualified applicants move to the department.
The experience is also teaching OPM that centralized recruitment alone is not enough. Kupor says agencies are still accustomed to creating their own job descriptions, recruiting independently and running their own hiring processes. OPM is trying to get hiring managers more comfortable
Technology is another major piece of OPM’s approach. Kupor describes efforts to replace manual HR processes with digital tools, including an electronic navigator for processing personnel actions and a system that allows former federal employees to request personnel records electronically. He says the broader objective is to make individual HR processes more efficient while OPM continues work on HR 2.0.
Kupor also discusses Schedule Policy/Career, saying roughly 7,800 positions have initially moved into the new classification. OPM is now reviewing additional GS-14 and GS-13 positions based on whether those employees influence or make administration policy. He says OPM expects more positions could be added over the next six months.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly part of that work as well. Kupor says OPM is using AI to help employees review large volumes of information and is preparing to test AI-supported structured interviews with Tech Force applicants. He emphasizes that AI will assist human reviewers rather than make final hiring decisions.
Together, the interviews show OPM approaching workforce modernization from several directions at once: improving employee-facing HR systems, changing how government recruits talent, digitizing routine processes and testing new ways to use artificial intelligence while keeping human decision-makers in control.