Tens of thousands of government workers are preparing to leave the federal workforce Tuesday, the final day for many who took the government’s “Fork in the Road” resignation offer earlier this year.
Among those are as many as 60,000 retirees who will now anxiously wait for their federal retirement benefits to kick in – a process that could take months and is potentially impacted by the looming government shutdown.
“There’s no question there’s going to be a surge. We’re doing everything we can to try and address it,” Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor told the News4 I-Team.
Kupor, who was confirmed to the post in July, said roughly 150,000 federal workers took the Elon Musk-led Deferred Resignation Program offer earlier this year. He said roughly 100,000 federal workers’ final day is Sept. 30, with the rest leaving the workforce at the end of the year.
Even though OPM knew months ago thousands of employees were leaving, he said their retirements can’t start processing until after they’re off the federal payroll. That’s because each department in the federal government has to wait for an employee’s final paycheck before finalizing their application and sending it to OPM.
“Now look, it sounds crazy to me, as well,” he told the I-Team. “And so one of the things we’re looking at is we’re trying to just basically redesign the entire process from start to finish.”
For decades, every federal retirement has been processed on paper underground in a Boyers, Pennsylvania, mine known as Iron Mountain. Kupor said OPM had little idea who was retiring until a postal worker dropped off an employee’s paperwork at the mine.
He said that’s why OPM launched a new Online Retirement Application (ORA) system in the middle of the federal workforce downsizing. The I-Team has heard from federal employees who said switching systems added confusion during their retirement process, but Kupor said it’s enabled OPM to get a handle on how many retirement applications could be headed its way.
“What we know is we have roughly about 60,000 that are kind of in the process of going through this ORA system. As those come in, that’s basically our best sense of what the backlog looks like,” he said.
Asked if it was the right time to roll out the technology, Kupor – a former venture capitalist – said: “It’s always the right time to roll out new technology.”
Kupor said his team of 400 retirement benefits specialists would not be impacted by a federal shutdown because OPM is funded outside of congressional appropriations.
“We’re bringing in additional people in this period, so sure, we know it’s going to be a surge and we know it’s going to kind of test our mettle here, but the team is prepared for it and we feel good about where we are going into it,” he said.
OPM has long been criticized for slow retirement application processing times, so much so that it began publishing monthly reports on how many claims it received, had processed, had yet to process and how long it took to do so.
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As of August, for example, OPM reported having an inventory of more than 24,000 retirement claims yet to process, with it taking an average of 70 days to process a claim.
Kupor said he hopes that by Thanksgiving the new wave of retirees will at least begin receiving interim benefits as his office works on finalizing their retirement applications. But that’s only possible if the individual agencies get their retirees’ claims to OPM before then.
It’s unclear whether employees at individual departments would be furloughed in the event of a shutdown. According to guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), posted publicly by OPM, it’s up to each agency to decide whether to classify those retirement specialists as essential and keep them on the job.
“OMB has advised that agency human resources and payroll provider staff affected by a lapse in appropriations may be placed in an excepted status to perform work necessary to off-board DRP employees resigning or retiring on September 30 as orderly shutdown activities, including to submit retirement applications to OPM,” OPM wrote in its memo.
The I-Team has reached out to the OMB and several agencies about how a shutdown could impact those workers, but there has been no response yet.
The News4 I-Team wants to hear from federal workers, government contractors and local viewers impacted by the upheaval in federal government.
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