The Trump administration’s controversial plan to merge most of the federal government’s HR agency with the General Services Administration appears to have been put on hold, at least for now.
A provision of the latest version of the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the result of weeks of negotiation between both chambers of Congress and the White House, stipulates that the administration cannot move any of the Office of Personnel Management’s functions out of the agency until an independent study of the agency’s responsibilities and challenges has been completed.
In May 2019, the administration formally proposed legislation that would authorize the transfer of most of OPM’s functions to GSA, and move the agency’s policy shop to a division within the Executive Office of the President under the leadership of a non-Senate confirmed political appointee.
But the plan was met with bipartisan skepticism, as Democrats decried the move as an effort to weaken civil service protections and Republicans questioned the lack of analysis preceding the decision. To date, OPM still has not conducted a variety of studies related to the proposal, including analyses of the costs and benefits, as well as whether the agency has the legal authority to transfer any functions administratively, according to an inspector general report released last month.
The NDAA language prevents the transfer of “any function, responsibility, authority, service, system or program that is assigned in law” from OPM to GSA until at least six months after the completion of an independent report on the issue by the Nationa ..
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