Roughly half of those claims were completed digitally through OPM’s new processing system, which OPM said can finalize retirements at about double the speed.
April 9, 2026 11:25 am
< a min read
More than 55,000 federal retirement applications are still pending finalization at the Office of Personnel Management. That’s after OPM managed to shave off about 10,000 applications from its total case inventory last month. During March, OPM received close to 15,000 incoming retirement applications, but processed over 22,000. Roughly half of those claims were completed digitally through OPM’s new processing system, which OPM said can finalize retirements at about double the speed as the traditional system.At some agencies, there may be staffing increases in 2026 and 2027. The Trump administration’s new budget proposal is seeking larger headcounts at the departments of Interior, Commerce and Justice. Defense and Veterans Affairs would also see staffing growth under the president’s budget plans. Most agencies, though, are expected to remain below their 2024 staffing levels. The departments of Agriculture, Education and Labor are projected to see the largest decreases in headcount in 2027.The Postal Service received approval to add a temporary surcharge to most of its standard package shipping options. The Postal Regulatory Commission approved an 8% across-the-board price increase for its core package and shipping services. The surcharge will go into effect on April 26 and will remain in place until Jan. 17, 2027. USPS said the surcharge is necessary to keep up with higher fuel and transportation costs. Before this, USPS only added a package surcharge during its busy holiday peak season, which runs from October through December. ]]>
Thousands of Department of Homeland Security employees are set to get their first paycheck in more than 50 days. Furloughed DHS employees and those still working without pay will get back pay covering from the start of the shutdown on Feb. 14 through April 4. The department’s management directorate said employees should start seeing the deposits as early as this Friday, April 10. President Donald Trump signed a directive last week calling on DHS to pay thousands of cyber experts, FEMA staff, Coast Guard civilians and other employees who had gone without pay during the shutdown. But the management directorate said Congress will have to reach a funding deal to continue paying those employees past this week. A former Army civilian employee is being charged with giving classified information to a journalist. On Tuesday, the FBI arrested Courtney Williams and charged her with illegal transmission of classified national defense information. The Justice Department alleges Williams from 2020 to 2025 provided a journalist working on a book with classified information about a special military unit. The Justice Department also alleges that Williams made unauthorized disclosures of national defense information via her social media accounts. The Department of Health and Human Services has moved off a legacy COBOL payroll system. HHS is now running its payroll operations through a secure, cloud-based system. HHS recently completed the migration of these services from a legacy on-premise system that relied on COBOL. HHS partnered with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service over the last eight months, analyzing complex business logic and mapping system dependencies. The teams performed end-to-end testing with HHS’s internal time and attendance and payroll systems, while also validating the accuracy, performance and interoperability of the data. Through the new system, HHS employees now do tasks in minutes instead of up to six hours because the new system brings automation and is more reliable.The Securities and Exchange Commission inspector general’s office is using cash to incentivize SEC employees to report fraud, waste and abuse. The SECIG’s office announced the cash awards program this week. Federal law allows agencies to award employees up to $10,000 dollars for disclosing fraud, waste or abuse that leads to cost savings for their agency. The SEC inspector general’s office said employees are often the first to see where resources can be better utilized or where risks may be hidden. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is giving employees with disabilities more flexibility to telework as a reasonable accommodation. CDC supervisors will once again be able to grant telework as an interim reasonable accommodation while employees wait for final approval from the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS rolled out a new policy last year that strictly limited medical telework. HHS said telework will remain a last resort for employees whose medical needs can’t be met through alternative means. HHS faces a backlog of 9,000 reasonable accommodation requests it still needs to process.
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