The Trump administration has written its hiring control into regulation. On Wednesday the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) finalized a rule putting every agency's staffing under one centrally reviewed system: annual staffing plans prepared with OPM and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), progress updates to both offices every quarter, a hiring committee at the top of each agency, a stronger hand for each agency's chief human capital officer, and the removal of the word "diverse" from the standards describing the federal workforce.
The rule, Personnel Management in Agencies: Strategic Human Capital Management, amends 5 CFR Part 250. Filed Wednesday, published in the Federal Register Thursday and effective 30 days later, it covers more than 80 agencies and converts President Donald Trump's October 2025 hiring-accountability order (Executive Order 14356) into lasting regulation.
At its centre is the Annual Staffing Plan, replacing the Human Capital Operating Plan. Each agency prepares one yearly, in coordination with OPM and OMB and lined up with its strategic plan, budget and the President's Management Agenda. The plan must carry metrics, aim hiring at skills gaps and the highest-need jobs, and weigh efficiencies: restructuring, flatter management, eliminating duplicative or nonessential positions, consolidating administrative work, and cutting low-value contractor positions. Agencies report progress quarterly, and OPM and OMB review each agency annually against the plan.
The rule gives the agency's Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO) direct control of that process. Agencies must arrange their delegations, structures, policies and systems so the CHCO has — in the rule's words — "sufficient visibility, oversight and control" over agency human capital work. The CHCO coordinates the plan with the agency's chief financial officer and chief operating officer, runs its quarterly performance reviews, and sits on the hiring committee. To verify it, the final rule adds a check absent from the proposal: each year the agency head must sign a statement certifying the CHCO has that visibility, oversight and control — and document any gap, with a timeline to fix it.
Above the CHCO sits the Strategic Hiring Committee, now required by regulation at every agency: the deputy secretary or equivalent, the chief of staff to the agency head, and the CHCO, overseeing hiring against mission needs and the plan. Since last year they have reviewed and approved creating or filling vacancies, testing hires against mission criticality, cost effectiveness and strategic goals. OPM stresses the limit: the committee gets no power to examine, rate or certify candidates — competitive examining is unchanged — and its members remain bound by the laws banning political-affiliation discrimination.
The rule also settles a piece of language. In § 250.203, "and diverse" is struck from one paragraph and "diverse," twice from another: the regulation no longer speaks of building a diverse workforce. OPM's explanation, carried from the proposal, is that references to a "diverse" workforce "may be read to suggest that agencies are required or permitted to take race or other protected characteristics into account in hiring, evaluation, and promotion decisions" — unnecessary and potentially misleading language whose removal follows the President's order ending government DEI programs. OPM stresses it strikes only words the regulation added itself: the statutory merit principle — recruitment from "all segments of society," selection "solely on the basis of relative ability, knowledge, and skills" — is untouched, as are the disability and veterans' provisions. The same rule cuts the employee survey's required questions from 16 to 10; OPM discontinued the old Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey this year as too long and general to be useful.
The administration's case is that workforce planning was fragmented paperwork: three overlapping reporting exercises on schedules mismatched to the budget cycle, in an area on the GAO high-risk list since 2001. In proposing the rule, OPM said agencies "must move beyond traditional, transactional personnel management toward a strategic, modern human capital model that treats workforce decisions with the same rigor used in successful private-sector organizations," and merging the exercises is "intended to free CHCO offices to focus on substantive workforce management rather than compliance paperwork." OPM Director Scott Kupor, issuing the staffing-plan guidance in July, put it this way: "Successful organizations don't hire by accident, they hire strategically. Annual Staffing Plans will help agencies build the workforce they need to accomplish their missions while giving OPM and OMB a governmentwide view of hiring priorities… and ensure taxpayer resources are focused where they deliver the greatest value." Kupor has also insisted the order behind the rule contains "no prescribed reductions in headcount" — the goal is service at lower total cost, not a target headcount.
Critics who commented on the rule attacked the same machinery. Two commenters argued that centralizing career hiring decisions in political appointees violates the merit-system laws prohibiting consideration of political affiliation in hiring, and that undefined criteria such as "patriotism" provide insufficient guardrails against partisan favoritism; one called the committee political interference in career agency operations and urged OPM to abandon the rule over burden, potential politicization, and anticipated harm to scientific and DEI-related roles. Another argued the diversity wording is backed by statute and cannot be struck by regulation. OPM answered that the committee approves positions and plans, not people, and that documented decisions reviewed by OPM and OMB make "improper influence easier to detect, not harder." The Senior Executives Association backed much of the rule, including the CHCO's seat on the committee, but asked in vain for a requirement that committees take written input from the career executive responsible for a program before acting on its positions.
The rule is the planning layer of a wider programme: a hiring freeze on the President's first day back in office, the Merit Hiring Plan of May 2025, the accountability executive order that October, and February's Schedule Policy/Career rule, which made policy-influencing career staff removable at will and is being fought in court by the unions. Union leaders have condemned that programme bluntly — the largest federal union's president has said public servants must be "hired, judged, and fired on merit, not on politics" — though no union had commented on this rule itself by Wednesday evening. What this rule changes is structural: who plans the workforce, who approves hiring, how often Washington checks the numbers, and which words describe the workforce it wants. For the roughly two million federal civilians, hiring and planning now run through the plan, the quarterly updates and the committee. For citizens, the promise is machinery that pushes staff toward the highest-need jobs — inspectors, claims processors, technologists, safety staff — while squeezing out duplicative positions and low-value contracts. Whether it delivers, the rule cannot answer.
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