Workforce strategy
Every answer leads to the same decision.
A personnel reduction can justify a contract increase, and the resulting cost can justify further reform. With the right explanation, very little needs to be reconsidered.
03 Deferred Resignation Program
The first invitation came with continued pay.
In 2025, OPM offered eligible employees deferred resignation and explicitly encouraged private-sector work. Its FAQ described a move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector
to higher productivity jobs in the private sector
. OPM DRP FAQ.
Employees who stayed continued doing the work, which was an awkward response to an invitation to leave. There is only so much a personnel office can convey in a resignation offer before having to repeat itself through the pay schedule.
They offered to pay you to leave. You appear to have heard “please stay.”
04 Make room for leadership
The appointment was the assessment.
A political appointee arrives with an endorsement from the people making the decision. A career employee arrives with experience, qualifications, and several reasons the decision may not work. It is easy to see which application is more convenient to process.
Institutional knowledge has a habit of introducing information after leadership has finished being informed. A fresh perspective avoids this problem by having no recollection of the previous attempt.
Thirty years of experience is thirty years of attachment to procedures we have not read.
The decision logicThe accountability allocation
Accountability has been delegated.
The national debt requires an explanation, and bad civilian management is a convenient place to begin. Elected leaders approved the policies and appointees supplied the direction, but career staff were still in the building when the bill arrived. The personnel records should make them easy enough to find.
Who makes better decisions? We recommend looking at the results, provided the review preserves leadership’s ownership of the strategy and assigns everything that happened afterward to implementation.
This page does not calculate the causes of federal debt or assess individual performance.
06 The decision framework
Every outcome confirms the strategy.
The strategy can accommodate employees staying, employees leaving, and the cost of replacing them. Please select whichever result occurred; the assessment has already been entered.
| Observed outcome | Approved interpretation | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Employees stay | Compensation is sufficient. | Confirmed |
| Employees leave | Workforce reduction is succeeding. | Confirmed |
| Expertise disappears | External support is required. | Confirmed |
| Contract costs increase | The work demands specialized expertise. | Confirmed |
| Employees question the result | Resistance to reform remains a concern. | Confirmed |
There is no field for “the policy was wrong.”
Submit your objection to the explanationThe remaining consideration
The work may still be necessary. Your employment is a separate consideration.
Please take the pay decision into account when considering your next contribution.
The record is available