Last week, the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR agency, announced that it was removing 115 job descriptions from the list of occupations, including “bowling equipment repairing” and “buffing and polishing,” among other outdated or obscure categories.
Though this reform cuts loose just a small portion of the more than 2 million people working for the federal government, Scott Kupor, the former venture capitalist who heads OPM, says that it’s only the first phase of an attempt to radically simplify and modernize the workforce.
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The goal is to make the federal government look more like private-sector employers, which have in recent decades adopted the practice of “broad banding”—placing many different jobs under a general description and giving managers more discretion to hire and set pay for those positions.
Kupor wants to reduce the total number of federal job titles by a fourth, which will mean eliminating at least 100 more in future phases, likely affecting much larger numbers of employees than the first announcement.
Those job titles are listed in an obscure manual known as the Handbook of Occupational Groups and Families, which attempts to describe every position in the federal government. Like many government documents, it’s not an easy read. And like many government documents, it has not been updated in some time.
The Handbook lists dozens of overarching “groups” of jobs, such as the “General Administrative, Clerical, and Office Services Group” and the “Fabric and Leather Work Family.” Inside each of those groups are more minute descriptions of “series”—or types—of positions, such as 31 series of general administrative occupations, including the “Equal Opportunity Compliance Series” and the “Closed Microphone Reporting Series.” Each series has its own set of documents that describe how to classify employees into different pay scales with different duties. For example, the 72-page document for the Equal Opportunity Compliance series describes nine factors that determine whether an Equal Opportunity Specialist is of high or low rank.
The reform announced last week will remove jobs from the Handbook that were either outdated or that affect only a small number of employees. It will also eliminate titles that haven’t been used in the private or public sector for years, such as elevator operator. In total, the reforms will affect about 5,000 employees, who won’t lose their livelihoods but will now work under different titles and requirements.
Unlike many Trump administration reforms, this one has received a positive response even from the bureaucracy. One anonymous federal HR official told Government Executive, “It’s the most reasonable and data driven change we’ve seen [from OPM] so far.”
The other part of Kupor’s reform push will involve rewriting all existing job descriptions by 2027 to reflect modern practices more accurately. One of the biggest job series in the federal government, right behind nurses and general administration, is the catchall “Information Technology” category. Kupor announced that his first official rewrite would involve changing the IT description to allow the government to hire based on formal tests or assessments rather than college degrees or specified years of work experience.
To illustrate the importance of this effort, Kupor noted an anonymous federal employee’s objection in the press to the hiring of Edward Coristine, known in the media as “Big Balls,” because he was just 19 and a college dropout. Kupor thought it more important that Coristine was already one of America’s top software developers. Rewriting the descriptions for IT and other categories will make it easier to hire high-skilled people like Coristine even if they don’t check all the typical federal career boxes.
The media has focused almost exclusively on the scale of President Trump’s federal workforce reductions—300,000 and counting. They should pay more attention to how he is changing the civil service for those who remain. Kupor’s efforts to modernize the workforce and to hire and promote based on actual skills will have a more lasting impact than any short-term job reductions.