Ahuja, who is the longest-serving OPM director in more than 10 years, will depart her role in coming weeks, according to an agency release Tuesday. Ahuja was confirmed by the Senate in June 2021 and became both the first South Asian American and first Asian American woman to lead OPM. 

“From my time as a civil rights lawyer in the Department of Justice, to my years as OPM’s Chief of Staff, I’ve seen the power that public service has to change lives, rebuild communities, and make our nation stronger,” Ahuja said in a statement. “We have accomplished so much these last three years at OPM, but I am most proud of the friendships and bonds we built together in public service.” 

During her time leading OPM, Ahuja oversaw the administration’s efforts to implement a $15 minimum wage for federal workers, prohibit use of non-federal salary history in pay-setting for federal jobs, implement a new data strategy plan, and bolster the federal government’s tech workforce, among other things.

As part of the Biden administration’s AI efforts, Ahuja is a member of the AI and Tech Talent Task Force, which was created to support hiring efforts related to the president’s executive order on the technology. Related to that same order, OPM has also authorized direct hire authority for AI-related positions and outlined incentives for attracting and retaining AI workers in the federal government.

Prior to serving as OPM’s director, Ahuja was the agency’s chief of staff from 2015 to 2017. She also served in other federal government roles, including as executive director of the White House Initiative of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during the Obama administration and as an attorney at the Justice Department.

“Under Kiran’s leadership, OPM has bounced back stronger than ever and partnered with agencies across government to better serve the American people,” Rob Shriver, deputy director of OPM said in a statement. “Kiran represents the very best of the Biden-Harris Administration, and I am honored to call her a dear colleague and friend.”

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Experts told FedScoop that the order shows significant progress in developing a U.S. strategy for AI regulation, tackling everything from privacy risks to large models. At nearly 20,000 words, the order is remarkably detailed and includes references to everything from models “trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10²⁶ integer” and obligations of new chief artificial intelligence officers to incentive pay programs for AI-focused roles in government. 

The Biden administration, which announced the new executive order Monday at a White House event, is calling the effort one of the most ambitious attempts yet at regulating artificial intelligence. Critically, this strategy involves leaning on federal agencies to take on AI issues within their own areas of focus. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services is supposed to develop an AI assurance policy for healthcare programs, while the Department of Energy is charged with creating tools to study AI systems that could contribute to nuclear or biohazard risks.

“This EO has significantly more specificity and provisions to support implementation than EO 13859, EO 13960 and the AI in Government Act,” said Christie Lawrence, a Stanford researcher who focuses on trustworthy AI. “For example, it defines over 30 terms and requires that [the Office of Management and Budget] provide annual guidance and create mechanisms for tracking implementation and reporting progress to the public.” 

However, one of the primary implementation challenges will be hiring people with the AI expertise necessary to help agencies meet the myriad responsibilities established by the order. 

The executive order emphasizes that the government must determine what competencies are needed for AI-related positions and adds a sense of urgency following the onset of generative AI and increased adoption of the technology, Office of Personnel Management Director Kiran Ahuja said in an interview with FedScoop.

“How do we manage it? How do we kind of use it in a way that’s going to be useful for our organizations?” Ahuja said. “And so there is going to be more focus on ensuring that we are hiring quickly enough to bring those individuals in.”

Notably, the White House debuted a new AI.gov portal for prospective government workers focused on the technology. At the leadership level, the executive order also calls on OMB to create guidance for managing AI and for that agency to chair an interagency council. The order also aims to use changes in immigration policy to bring more AI expertise into the U.S., too.

But as the government’s “National AI Talent Surge” begins, agencies are supposed to simultaneously begin meeting their AI responsibilities. That timing creates a potential challenge, said Lynne Parker, a former Biden and Trump administration official who helped craft a 2020 executive order on artificial intelligence. 

“In some sense, the EO is a little bit paradoxical in that it gives pretty aggressive timelines for agencies to craft this guidance, [while] at the same time acknowledging that they don’t have enough expertise in the government to address AI,” Parker told FedScoop. The paradox, she added, is: “Will they have the expertise to deliver good guidance and timely guidance?”

The government is still in a battle for talent, said Suzette Kent, a former U.S. federal CIO and an adviser to the Virginia-based IT firm stackArmor’s AI risk management center. And like the process of building up cybersecurity and data expertise within the federal agencies, “it’s really important that we have the engagement with industry, because industry is further ahead in the operational level use” of AI.

Beyond hiring, the true value of the order will be in its implementation, said Alexandra Givens, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Even absent expanded hiring procedures, agencies may need to look for help with the United States Digital Service, the General Services Administration Center of Excellence for AI, and other portions of the government, she added. 

Meanwhile, much of the work of creating actual rules for the technology, according to the executive order, is ultimately left to the agencies themselves. While this approach allows agencies to lean into their respective subject matter expertise, it also creates the opportunity for agencies to create relatively lax or ineffective regulations. It may be some time before the true impact of the executive order is clear. 

“There are definitely some concerns that it didn’t go far enough in directing the agencies,” Caitlin Seeley George, the campaigns and managing director at the digital rights group Fight for the Future, told FedScoop. “It uses a lot of language that opens up the doors for different agencies to take some sorts of actions, but in a lot of cases, it doesn’t require extensive enough policy actions.”

Of course, the White House remains limited in what it can and cannot do. For example, an executive order can stipulate where already allocated funding can go but can’t provide new funding, said Lav R. Varshney, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who worked on the EO as a White House fellow at the National Security Council. 

And the Biden administration, critically, is also calling on Congress to take action related to data privacy. Specific guidance for how federal agencies can use AI is still expected from OMB. The White House can’t tell the Federal Trade Commission, for example, what to do, though the executive order encourages the agency to consider using its authority to investigate potential AI competition issues. 

“What’s happening here is the White House is using the tools at its disposal, right? The White House can’t issue legislation,” said Maneesha Mithal, former associate director of the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection and current partner at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. “The White House is saying, ‘OK, well in our position as head of the executive branch, we’re going to require all of these executive agencies to do certain things.’”

Madison Alder contributed to this article. 

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In an interview with FedScoop on the sidelines of ACT-IAC’s Imagine Nation ELC23 event in Pennsylvania, Kiran Ahuja, director of OPM, described the coming proposal as “far-reaching” and said it will focus on where pay needs to be and “flexibilities” that the government can incorporate. 

The proposal will come as the latest effort by the Biden administration to close the cyber workforce gap in the public and private sectors. In July, the administration released a cyber workforce and education strategy that included a goal to strengthen the federal cyber workforce.

“We are in a couple of days releasing a proposal where we have really looked at what has worked for the DHS model to create equity across government,” Ahuja said, pointing to the flexibility that agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense have with pay.

“Right now, we have a very inequitable system where DHS and DOD have a certain level of compensation, how they’re able to manage the workforce, how they rank performance, all of that, and it really hurts other agencies. And that’s a big complaint that we’ve heard of,” Ahuja said. 

The coming proposal is an effort in conjunction with the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the National Cyber Director, and would need the support of stakeholders across the federal government and Congress, Ahuja said. 

She stressed the importance of congressional support to ensure agencies have “a budget to be able to compete.” That doesn’t happen with the current budget, Ahuja said. “There just has to be this realization that we think these issues are important.”

Ahuja said she’s seen agencies come to dead ends with trying to pursue separate pay tables for subsets of their workforce, such as cyber and IT positions. “Unless you’re able to get those resources, they’re not able to do it,” Ahuja said. 

OPM has already been encouraging agencies to come to them and request special salary rates for a block of their workforce if they’re experiencing recruitment or retention issues. The coming “comprehensive” proposal is more of that, she said.

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Amid a yearslong backlog within OPM’s retirement services division, constituents have even sought help from their congressional representatives. As FedScoop reported earlier this month, inquiries to the agency’s congressional, legislative, and intergovernmental affairs office about tripled between 2020 and 2022. Back in April, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and several other members of Congress wrote to OPM Director Kiran Ahuja about the problem, emphasizing that “[w]e cannot fail to serve the public servants who have dedicated so many years to keeping our government running.”  

In some cases, members of Congress say the backlog has led to a severe delay in retirees receiving their benefits. In a statement to FedScoop, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said his staff have even had wait times extend over a year in at least a few cases. “OPM’s outdated system is unacceptable and putting an undue burden on desperate federal retirees,” Lankford said.

Lawmakers are so concerned that some Senators anticipate another hearing focused on the agency’s retirement services division in the coming months. 

“OPM has known that they have a problem for years and has made almost no progress to fix it. One of the major culprits for delays is their current paper-based application system,” Lankford told FedScoop in a statement.

Now, data obtained by FedScoop via a public records request provides further insight into the problem. While much of the blame has been laid at the feet of OPM, the error rates for documents submitted by agencies about their retiring workers — OPM needs these documents to process applications — have risen steadily since 2012, according to the agency’s data. While OPM publishes the data on a month-by-month basis, it has not made it available in full.

This data shows that the governmentwide error rate for applications submitted to OPM rose to 20% in August 2022, up from 8.27% in August 2012 — which represents a more than 11 percentage point increase. The January 2023 governmentwide error rate was 28.6%, up from 17.8% in January 2013.

The data comes with important caveats, notably that for some months it is missing — which makes it difficult to create a composite annual statistic. The data also included per-agency error rates, but agency audits are sometimes suspended, and not every agency is listed for every month of data. In addition, the number of applications processed each month sometimes varied slightly between Excel sheets. (FedScoop asked both the agency’s press office and a FOIA officer for more information, but did not hear back by the time of publication). 

The kinds of errors can vary. For example, the Pentagon told FedScoop that its most common errors included missing documents like marriage certificates and missing signatures on life insurance forms. While errors like these might seem small, they play a significant role in exacerbating delays within OPM retirement service. OPM says it provides training, guidance, and other assistance to agencies, and that it’s working with agencies on reducing their errors, along with continuing to attract error statistics. 

“Agencies have for too long been able to skirt accountability for their role in sharing info with OPM,” Jason Briefel, who serves as the policy and outreach director at the Senior Executives Association (SEA) and a partner at the government-focused law firm Shaw Bransford & Roth, said in an email to FedScoop. 

Briefel argues the data serves as a reminder that OPM isn’t as transparent as the agency could be. SEA, he says, has long called on the agency to release this data in a public dashboard, including information on case number load, as well as the error rate percentage for different agencies and governmentwide. 

“The high rates of agency errors in retirement applications indicates agency HR offices have their part to play in improving the speed of retirement application processing,” said John Hatton, the staff vice president of policy and programs for the National Association of Retired Federal Employees. “Less application errors would reduce the need for a back and forth between OPM and the agency prior to adjudicating the claim.”

FedScoop reached out to several agencies, including the Department of Defense, to request comment on their June error rates. The Pentagon said its error rate “trended downward” since June 2022, but noted that the agency’s benefits center had reported significant turnover — and that its team meets with OPM twice a month. 

The Agriculture Department and the Department of Energy both told FedScoop that the error rates tracked in OPM’s records weren’t always accurate. Several agencies have previously flagged that “aspects of the error reports were not user-friendly,” according to a Government Accountability Office report published in 2019. At the time, agencies also flagged that “errors charged to them were incorrect.” 

USDA said that OPM sometimes points to errors on forms of marriage certificates that the agriculture agency can’t identify — and then doesn’t update the accuracy rate. Three of 10 DOE cases reported by OPM as erroneous in June were, in fact, correct, according to an agency spokesperson. 

“It is impossible to not see the agencies consistently scoring 20-40% of submitted cases with errors each month,” remarked Briefel. “Some of those are agencies like in federal law enforcement where we know there is an acute workforce crisis, heightened burnout, increased levels of suicide.”

The DOE told FedScoop it plans to implement a peer-review system that will come before the agency submits applications to OPM. USDA, meanwhile, says it plans to deploy a new automated applications system that will let employees create their retirement applications electronically, including “a questionnaire that will be utilized to ensure all required documents are submitted with the retirement application and digital signature where applicable,” according to the agency.

Still, critics of OPM have said these issues just bolster the immense need for the personnel agency to build a digital retirement application system. Earlier this year, OPM brought on Nava Public Benefit Corp. to help with the agency’s IT modernization. While OPM’s retirement application processing system remains largely paper-based, the agency is also working on an online retirement application pilot that could launch later this year.

An online system, observed Hatton from NARFE, could prompt agencies to submit all the required documents the first time — instead of waiting for OPM to analyze them. 

“It must cost both agencies and OPM millions of dollars to fix issues in retirement packages,” said Briefel in an email. “[H]ow much HR staff time could be freed up for other mission-critical work if the Biden Administration focused on bending the error rate curve down?”

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According to the missive, which was sent in response to questions from House lawmakers, OPM’s Congressional, Legislative, and Intergovernmental Affairs branch received more than 9,000 congressional inquiries in 2022, compared with more than 3,000 in 2020. In other words, the number of inquiries from Congress to the agency has approximately tripled in three years.

FedScoop obtained the letter from Pearson through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Retirement services managers associated with a retirement case receive a notification when they receive a congressional inquiry about the applicant associated with that application, Pearson wrote. In the letter, she added that the agency’s CLIA “is working to improve its operations regarding congressional inquiries by focusing on customer service, improving processing times and educating congressional offices about best practices.”

“Seems like average response time of ~4 months to congressional inquiry,” observed Jason Briefel, the policy and outreach director at the Senior Executives Association and a partner at the government-focused law firm Shaw, Bransford, & Roth, in an email. “OPM’s congressional relations office seems overwhelmed with requests for information.”

OPM was contacted for comment.

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In a letter to lawmakers, which was obtained by this publication through a Freedom of Information Act request, agency director Kiran Ahuja said OPM will conduct an approximately 120-day pilot in coordination with the National Finance Center, which is a federal agency division under the United States Department of Agriculture.

Responding to questions from lawmakers including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Il., Ahuja wrote: “Between the electronic employee data received from the payroll center and the online retirement application, RS will receive all the information necessary to process a retirement application electronically.”

She added: “The pilot will likely last 120 days, at which point RS will evaluate the results and determine the appropriate next steps to expand the program.” 

Details of the anticipated pilot come as escalating concerns about delays and retirement application backlogs attract increasing attention from Congress. Last month, FedScoop revealed that the Government Operations and Border Management Subcommittee, which is held within the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, is considering a new hearing focused on the retirement application backlog at OPM.

Other letters obtained through freedom of information requests, illustrate a range of challenges facing the agency in relation to the backlog. These include an increase in errors in retirement packages, difficulties filling vacancies, new in-person work limitations created by the pandemic, and a decline in legal administrative specialists at the agency. 

In at least two of the letters to members of Congress, OPM said that plans for an online retirement application platform — considered a first step in reforming a still largely paper-based system — are expected at the end of this year.

“OPM has made investments to drive OPM’s retirement claims inventory to six year low in June 2023. OPM remains committed to helping federal employees transition from serving the American public to enjoying their hard-earned retirement,” a spokesperson for the agency told OPM.

In an effort to boost online access to its retirement services tools, the agency has released content urging retirees to use Login.gov and created a survivor benefits-focused chatbot, among other initiatives.

Despite details of the pilot, which is set to launch in the coming months, other efforts seem farther out. In a March letter, Ahuja told Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., that the agency would not open the retirement services online portal to representative payees — citing issues with authentication challenges. In the letter, Ahuja noted that the new modernization and oversight of the payee program would “enable us to authenticate the payee so we can consider opportunities to provide payees with access to additional online tools.” 

In an email to FedScoop, John Hatton, staff vice president of policy and programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, emphasized the importance of ensuring the online system pilot is successful and that it is implemented governmentwide.

He said: “For a federal retiree community that has faced multi-month delays for decades, and failed modernization attempts in the past, history cautions skepticism. But recent signs provide at least a sparkle of hope.” 

Jason Briefel, who is both the policy and outreach director at the Senior Executives Association and a partner at the government-focused law firm Shaw, Bransford, & Roth, reviewed these letters before publication. In his view, in these letters there was “[n]o clear plan for modernization” — and there wasn’t a clear timeline for when the online application would actually become usable. 

“OPM’s answer is simply more money and hiring more people,” Briefel said in an email to FedScoop, adding: “not addressing root causes of issues, reliance on paper-based systems.”

The National Finance Center at the USDA provides human resources, financial and administrative services for U.S. government agencies.

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The announcement comes as federal agencies face pressure to improve customer service — and as OPM continues to try to whittle down a backlog of retirement applications. Preemptively reducing errors in applications is one of the agency’s strategies for cutting down on the number of delayed applications, along with the introduction of new technology to help streamline application processing within OPM retirement services.

“OPM remains committed to helping federal employees transition from serving the American public to enjoying their hard-earned retirement,” said Kiran Ahuja, the director of OPM, in a Wednesday statement. “The purpose of these videos is to reduce login errors for federal retirees managing their retirement accounts online, and to improve responsiveness by reducing wait times at our call centers. Our goal is to make this transition for federal employees as easy as possible.”

FedScoop reported earlier this month that the Government Operations and Border Management Subcommittee, which is part of the broader Senate Committee on Homeland Security, may schedule a hearing focused on retirement application processing at OPM within the next few months.

Pending claims filed with the OPM’s retirement services division hit a six-year low in June, according to the agency.

At the same time, OPM’s announcement shows that Login.gov is continuing to gain traction. The service is already in use by several federal agencies, though it’s also faced scrutiny from lawmakers over security compliance, as FedScoop has previously reported.

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The backlog of retirement applications, which are processed through a primarily paper-based system, has been a years-long issue at the agency. While the inventory of applications is now around 16,000 — nearly half of the 36,349 applications that were on-hand in March 2022 — Congress still isn’t satisfied with OPM’s progress. According to statistics released by OPM for June, the average processing time for retirement applications at OPM, per month, is creeping up, too.

Earlier this week, Sen. James Lankford, R-OK, sent a letter to OPM Director Kiran Ahuja noting that, despite progress on the backlog overall, processing times for the more difficult cases processed by OPM — or cases that take longer than 60 days — have increased. Those more complex retirement applications take an average of 142 days for OPM to process, the inquiry noted.

The recent statistics reported slightly more updated numbers, “that cases that were produced in more than 60 days, on average, took 126 days to complete.”

In April, several members of Congress, led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), also wrote to OPM expressing “our concern with the excessive delays federal retirees in our states are facing as they wait to obtain their hard-earned retirement benefits.” The letter noted that there had also been delays in responses to congressional inquiries, and it’s not clear if OPM ever provided a response.

FedScoop has reached out to OPM for comment.

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In a memo to chief human capital officers across federal agencies, which was sent on Thursday, OPM set out a list of 44 general competencies and 14 technical competencies that according to the agency future government employees working with AI will be required to fulfill.

The range of general competencies include: accountability, attention to detail, integrity, mathematical reasoning and political savvy. Technical competencies set out by the agency include: application development, data extraction and transformation, software engineering and values-driven design.

OPM was mandated to carry out a survey of key skills required for AI-related government jobs by the AI in Government Act of 2020, which was enacted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. 

That legislation also required OPM to establish an occupational series for positions relating to the technology, to establish an estimate of the number of federal employees in positions related to AI by each agency, and to prepare forecasts for how many AI specialists each government department will need to employ.

In the Thursday memo, OPM Administrator Kiran Ahuja wrote: “To help the Federal government recruit and train more AI talent, today, OPM is providing for immediate use the attached general and technical AI competencies. Agencies can use the AI competencies to select, assess, and train AI talent as confirmed by a job analyses.”

She added: “Agencies are responsible for conducting job analyses for work within their agency. Similarly, agencies must determine the applicability of these competencies to positions within their agency.”

According to OPM, the agency collected the list of competencies by conducting an “environmental scan” of AI work, issuing a governmentwide AI workforce survey, holding focus groups and consulting experts.

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A spokesperson for the agency in a note announced details of the new dashboards, which can be found at natsec.usajobs.gov and stem.usajobs.gov.

The launch of the portals comes after OPM in January launched tech.usajobs.gov and intern.usajobs.gov to streamline the search process for tech and intern positions in government agency jobs.

Commenting on the new addresses, OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said: “These USAJOBS portals create a one-stop shop for positions in tech, national security, STEM, early career talent, and more.” 

She added: “We know that millions of Americans want to serve their community and do impactful work, so our goal is giving them a place to see the full range of incredible jobs serving in the federal government.”

Improving the quality and diversity of employees entering government service has been a top priority for the Biden administration. Last month, OPM launched a program to standardize and improve the quality of internships offered by agencies across federal government.  

In a missive sent to government chief human capital officers, the agency said it had created the scheme to offer training, information and support needed to support early career talent.

As part of the program, interns working at federal agencies will have access to mentoring, executive speakers, self-directed training and new intern hub.

Last week, FedScoop revealed details of a fake “USAJOBS”app on the Google Play Store, where it was downloaded more than 50,000 times and had a two-star rating. The app, which was most recently updated in June, attracted a slew of reviews complaining about it being “misleading,” as well as its advertisements, broken links, and “fake jobs.”

Google took down the app from the Google Play Store after it was flagged to the technology company by FedScoop.

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