The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) wants to overhaul the way some federal employees are evaluated and make it easier to identify poor performers by setting quotas for ratings and limiting challenges to performance scores.
In a notice of proposed rulemaking that OPM posted to the Federal Register on Tuesday, the agency said it wants to increase the efficiency of performance management for non-Senior Executive Service (SES) employees, including general schedule and prevailing rate employees. To do this, it proposed consolidating performance rating levels and requiring agencies to have employee review systems certified by OPM every two years.
OPM also said it wants to remove a ban on forced distributions of performance ratings. If finalized, OPM said it would likely limit the highest rating levels, which could cap how many employees receive the highest marks, even within an overall high-performing unit.
The agency said it also wants to restrict formal challenges to performance scores and stop requiring automatic second-look reviews for the lowest “Level 1” ratings.
In its justification for the change, OPM said the federal performance review system has not kept pace with the modern workforce and has led to inflated ratings and weak accountability. Reforms, the agency said, are needed to reward strong performers, address poor performance more quickly, and build a results-driven, high-performing government.
“Accurate performance management is critical to the success of any Federal agency,” OPM wrote. “The ability to measure and assess employee performance enables agencies to reward excellence, address skill gaps, and strengthen accountability. If a Federal agency is to fulfill its mission, then it must have accurate performance measurement.”
OPM said that inflation of performance ratings also hinders efforts to “recognize, motivate, and reward high performances” within the federal workforce.
The performance review overhaul aligns with the Trump administration’s broader effort to reshape how the federal government hires and manages its workforce, part of a series of moves aimed at boosting merit.
Under a 2025 executive order, OPM rolled out a merit hiring plan that pushed agencies to hire faster, focus on skills and mission-relevant talent like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and early-career candidates, and strip out longstanding diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring criteria in favor of purely merit-based decisions.
Comments on OPM’s notice of proposed rulemaking are due by March 26.