The inspector general charged with overseeing the federal government’s dedicated HR agency is warning that the system undergirding the U.S. Postal Service’s new employer-sponsored health benefits program could fail as a result of the Trump administration’s hiring freeze and efforts to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce.
The Postal Service Health Benefits Program, launched last fall by the Office of Personnel Management, was supposed to be an model for administering health insurance for federal workers, providing a more modern process for employees seeking to enroll or change their coverage and a centralized system for HR officials to better monitor for improper payments and enrollments.
But according to a report last week from OPM’s Office of the Inspector General, President Trump’s hiring freeze interfered with the hiring of IT workers to take over the PSHB’s underlying data platform from a government contractor. And the deferred resignation program took away even more employees who were slated to work on it.
Ahead of the April handover of the platform to OPM, the agency had seven out of a minimum 11 employees needed to administer the program. The hiring freeze effectively halted OPM’s search for the additional four workers, including in one instance where an applicant had their job offer rescinded in January.
“In addition to the hiring freeze, OPM offered a deferred resignation program on two separate occasions, resulting in four deferred resignations from personnel in the Postal IT Program Management Office, leaving only three staff to administer the data platform,” the inspector general wrote. “The loss of critical staff, in conjunction with the hiring freeze, risked operational failure of the data platform. This prompted OPM to allocate a supervisory IT specialist and an IT specialist from another [Office of the Chief Information Officer] team to help facilitate the administration of the data platform and other mission work. However, the additional staff was only a temporary solution since both IT specialists opted into the DRP.”
Making matters worse, OPM had been relying on a budget anomaly to provide additional funding over fiscal 2024 levels to administer PSHB while Congress funded the government via stop-gap continuing resolutions. But when Congress enacted a full-year CR in March, it omitted that provision.
“When requested, OPM was unable to provide a contingency plan to ensure continuity of operations for the PSHB program in the absence of securing funding,” the report states. “The lack of additional funding, along with the absence of adequate time and planning necessary to sufficiently staff and train personnel or contract for needed services, risks rendering the implemented PSHB program processes and systems unusable.”
In its response to the report, OPM insisted that it has taken steps to mitigate the issues caused by the hiring freeze and Congress’ funding cut.
“We have and will continue to work diligently to ensure adequate personnel and financial resources are available to sustain the program,” OPM wrote. Throughout OPM’s workforce restructuring, we have made changes in staff workloads and assignments as needed to maintain and operate systems, including the Health Benefits Data Platform, that are necessary for program operations.”
But the inspector general said the agency declined to provide any evidence to support its assertions.
“We acknowledge OPM’s statement that they are making adjustments prospectively to ensure adequate personnel and financial resources are available to support the Health Benefits Data Platform and other systems necessary to sustain operational functionality of the PSHB program,” OIG wrote. “However, no evidence was provided that would confirm that these changes address the finding and recommendation. Therefore, we cannot comment on the effectiveness of the referenced staffing adjustments and will continue to evaluate the staffing and financial resources during future oversight work.”
One former OPM official warned Government Executive that if the agency’s current leadership cannot quickly right the ship, this fall’s Open Season for postal workers could look a lot like the fraught rollout of the Affordable Care Act more than a decade ago.
“When you roll out a big new program, you have to invest in the people and in the IT in the early years to deal with the change management of it and the unforeseen issues that always come up,” they said. “[These] programs fall apart on the data—there are all these different sources of data that need to be merged together to make eligibility and enrollment decisions. [If that fails], then people fall out of the system and don’t get enrolled, and what OPM would be doing if it were fully staffed is trying to catch that before someone shows up the pharmacy only to be told, ‘You can’t get your drugs.’”
