Welcome back. The Office of Personnel Management says it'll consolidate more than 100 human resources management systems across government into one. OPM's named a new leader for the project, and the agency has a September 2027 deadline to finish. Scott Kupor is the director of OPM. Scott, welcome. It's great to see you again. I quote from the LinkedIn post of Donald Bower: 'In late October, I laid out some uncomfortable truths,' he writes, 'about federal HR consolidation because the scale of the challenge demands honesty.' He goes on, OPM reached out and suggested realism was being welcomed rather than resisted. He's now leading this effort for you.
Tell me about the process behind that, where you and your team saw what he wrote and it led to conversations and now him running this.
So it was actually a lot of fun, and I talked to Don about this when I had lunch with him when we were interviewing him. So he wrote this article, and I would say some of it was very, very good. Others, what we realized was there were things that he didn't know that we had already anticipated, that we were talking about. And so we had this long email exchange over the weekend between our teams, culminating in our decision to say, 'Hey, look, let's reach out to him. At worst, we're going to learn something from this engagement.' And it turns out in that process we kind of each bandied our way to saying, 'Hey, wouldn't it be great to work on this together.' So I'm excited we did it.
You and I were talking about this in the break room. I think the tendency sometimes is when people kind of, you know, take a shot at something is probably to kind of disassociate from them and say, 'Hey, look, this person doesn't know what they're talking about.' Our view is, look, we don't have all the answers. We need a lot of smart people around the table. This is a very ambitious project, and we thought Don could help us with that.
What do you anticipate the challenges being, and what do you anticipate being able to learn from other attempts to do this within single agencies and enterprise-wide across government in the past?
Yeah. So there's kind of a couple things. I mean, one is, look, just the scale of the project is big, right? You know, we're literally talking about two-plus million federal civilian employees coming onto a single system. You mentioned in the lead-in there's about 119 disparate systems today, so there's a massive just technical problem, which is how do we integrate all the data from those systems, how do we get everybody on a single instance. And then we've got to integrate into the payroll providers. So I would say the technical problem is a very big problem.
The bigger challenge, which I learned from kind of talking to people about what hasn't worked in these other areas, is I would just refer to it as a governance problem, which is how do we make sure we get all the agencies involved and they feel like they are part of the process without also allowing this to become kind of, you know, this monster of, you know, 50 different heads basically and every agency kind of pulling us in a different direction. So one of the things that Don's going to help, as well as the rest of the team, is how do we make sure we distill the requirements in an appropriate way and come to some commonality so that we don't end up with this, as I said, this kind of 50-headed beast that will basically make it impossible for us to achieve the kinds of savings and integration that we're looking for.
Who are the stakeholders that you are going to involve in that requirements process, and what are you going to ask them to contribute to get requirements that will result in you being able to build something?
Yeah. So the good news is, you know, the requirements gathering we've been doing literally for almost the last nine months now. So that includes basically all the major, major agencies. So, you know, think of the — there are these 24 what they call CFO Act agencies, right, that are very large ones. We're interested in talking to their HR people, we're talking to their IT people, we're talking to their business operations people to understand it. So for the last nine months we've been gathering those requirements. That's what got distilled into the RFP that we put out obviously at the end of last year.
Now, though, we've set up a whole governance structure going forward. So there is a technical governance board, there is a business process governance board, and then there are kind of different checks and balances across the ways. So I think we will do a very good job of kind of avoiding some of the pitfalls that we've seen in some of these major projects before.
One of those pitfalls, not peculiar necessarily to HR systems consolidation but just broadly across government, is agencies will say, 'Well, we do things that other agencies don't do.' How do you break through that objection to get folks to yes?
Yeah. So everybody is a special snowflake, as you know, and that's true, by the way, not just in government, that's true everywhere. What I think has helped us so far is we've tried to basically make sure everyone understands the overall objective here, which is obviously, look, there's certainly opportunities from a cost perspective to save money when you consolidate systems. But what's even more important is when you talk to the HR folks, what you realize is they spend an inordinate amount of time literally managing systems today, trying to find data that's useful to the business owners. We have today somewhere order of magnitude 45, 46,000 HR professionals across all the agencies.
And so what we found was the most persuasive argument was to say, look, if we can figure out a way to make your jobs better, to actually improve the information dissemination that you can get, improve visibility for Congress, improve visibility for the White House, people tend to align around those objectives. So look, I'm not sitting here telling you this is easy. It's a major, major process we're going through, but I think we've been able to convince people why this is good not just for the government at large but also for each of them and their agencies in terms of the work they do every day on behalf of the American people.
I noted the September 2027 deadline that you've established. What are the markers between now and then so that you know that you're on track to meet that deadline?
Yeah. So this is rolling out in several phases. So what we're about to kick off here very shortly will be phase one, and we've just kind of staged different agencies basically. So what you can basically see between now and that September 27 deadline will be three distinct phases, which will include three kind of groups of agencies all along. And some of those we determined with people who were like most aggressive in terms of wanting to get out of the gate, and others had other integrations or things they were doing. So we tried not to play any favorites here, but just tried to be responsive to what the business needs were. So we will have good milestones along the way at each of these phases to understand if we're on track or off track.
I'm not recalling any particular HR project across government over the last 20 years that I've been paying attention. But in general, once you get people past the special snowflake phase and they get on board, 'Okay, I need my piece of this to be customized to a particular direction.' How are you going to avoid that one, Scott?
Well, look, we're just going to have to have the conversation. The customization is the death knell for these types of projects, right? And that's not to say that there aren't things that might ultimately be agency-specific that have to be done, but we've got to do — and this is why we started with what we call core HCM, which is not the entire enchilada, but basically kind of a piece of personnel records, self-service, health insurance information, all those things.
We've got to keep that as pristine as possible. And then, look, if it's required for an agency to truly do something unique, there is a governance process that we've set up for them to kind of present that to this board, for us to discuss it, so that we're not going to allow splintering of the group. Basically we're going to require that the governance group as a whole sign off on some of these decisions.
It strikes me that the side benefit to that, or maybe the intended benefit to that, is an agency says, 'Well, at least I have a chance to raise my hand and say I might need this special thing.'
Absolutely. No, look, this doesn't work if it's OPM dictating what people can do, right, more so than it works if every single agency can do their own thing. So, look, there's some give and take on both sides. There's no question about that. But I think we've set up a process where we've been building consensus, as I mentioned, really over the last nine months. We've got White House visibility on this. OMB Director Russ Vought is very, very supportive of this. He kind of penned the memo that we sent to people. OMB has been very helpful to make sure that budgets have been set aside for this. It's gone all the way to Susie Wiles and that level of kind of governance within the White House. So I think we've done everything we can do. Not to say that there won't be issues that'll come up along the way, but at least I think we have buy-in from folks in a way that everyone's kind of aligned around the same objective.
You touched on what my next question was going to be: what's the budget authority going to be, where's the money going to be set aside, not just at the OPM level but at the agency level too.
Yeah. So one of the things we did, and the reason why it was so important for us to partner with OMB, was as part of the '26 budget process, which I guess just ended or beginning — I don't know. I'm new to this thing. I don't know exactly where we are in the process. But basically one of the things OMB did was when we put out the memo that Russ and I signed, we said, 'Hey, when you do your budget preparation, OMB is going to work with you to identify a line item associated with that.'
So think of it as basically a phased period where people have their current HR system expenses they're doing. We're going to slowly kind of wean them off that. At the time we start to bring that down, they will then obviously start paying for this new system. So as best as we can, we want those curves to cross in a way that is actually as efficient as possible. But we needed OMB's help in order to make sure that we had the budget set aside.
How did you come up with that 2027 deadline?
