Office of Personnel Management

The head of OPM - for what, the last six months? - has been replaced by an OMB apparatchik. According to the Washington Post report, this newest chief is fully backing the administration's re-organisation plan, which "... also calls for moving to the General Services Administration the OPM branches that administer federal insurance and retirement benefits and the training and other services it provides to other agencies. Further, the Defense Department would take over from OPM responsibility for conducting background investigations government-wide; that department already is set to assume that responsibility for its own employees.

Such changes likely would take time to accomplish although no timetable has been set.

“It wouldn’t be practical to move such a large entity as OPM is today into the White House,” Weichert said. “That’s just not the nature of the type of functional activities in the White House. The things that we proposed in the reorganization plan were very much focused on what are the policy functions that are similar” to those of other parts of the Executive Office of the President."

The plan is to "Move OPM into the White House." Didn't we do that once before? Something called, oh, gee, the spoils system? Won't having FEHP and FERS operating out of the White House be fun?