The Improving Government Services Act, sponsored by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., James Lankford, R-Okla., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, would require certain agencies to develop an “annual customer experience action plan” within a year of enactment of the bill, providing details on how to offer a better and more secure experience for taxpayers by adopting best customer service practices from the private sector.

“Taxpayers must be able to easily and efficiently reach federal agencies when they have questions about services or benefits,” Peters, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said in a statement. “My commonsense bipartisan bill would require agencies to adopt customer service best practices that limit wait times and use callbacks to ensure taxpayers receive support in a timely manner.”

The bill, which will get a committee vote next week, would require federal agencies to develop a written strategy to improve customer experience. That strategy would include a plan to adopt customer service practices such as online services, improved protections for personally identifiable information, telephone call back services and employee training programs. 

The legislation would direct the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to designate certain federal agencies as “high-impact service providers,” such as those that deliver key services to the public or fund state-based programs. 

Federal agencies that deal with health care, public lands, loan programs, passport renewal, tax filing, customs declarations and other such key programs are likely to be designated as high impact.

“Some agencies have already successfully implemented private-sector best practices, but we need them governmentwide,” Lankford said. “Providing good customer service doesn’t have to be difficult. Let’s get this nonpartisan bill to the finish line so interacting with the federal government is less frustrating for the public.”

The bill also references the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, also known as the IDEA Act, and its push for the expansion of easy-to-use digital services through which Americans can communicate with federal agencies and programs while also maintaining in-person, telephone, postal mail and other contact options.

Nearly five years after the IDEA Act was first signed into law in 2018, OMB last month issued guidance for agencies to deliver on implementation of the legislation.

The new legislation is scheduled for a markup and vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Oct. 25.

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The Telework Reform Act (S. 3015), introduced Thursday, also attempts to bolster the training and monitoring of those in federal telework positions. 

“By re-thinking how the government uses remote work, we are encouraging federal agencies to hire in diverse communities across the country; instead of requiring our workforce to be centralized in Washington, D.C.,” Lankford said in a statement. “We should allow both people to serve their nation and build a career.”

Sinema added that the legislation serves as a means to cut costs and boost “career opportunities by improving federal telework for Arizonans and military spouses who rely on telework to stay employed when moving due to military orders.”

The legislation seeks to permit federal agency directors to “noncompetitively appoint” veterans or people married to armed forces members and law enforcement officers to remote work positions. 

It also introduces multiple reporting requirements for agencies with regard to telework, including annual reviews and contingent renewals of remote work pacts between employees and supervisors, as well as mandated yearly trainings on best telework practices and supervisory reporting protocols.  

Additionally, the legislation calls on agencies’ chief human capital and chief financial officers, in conjunction with the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services administrator, to deliver a report to Congress one year after the bill’s enactment on expected cost savings, productivity outcomes, needed cybersecurity and IT changes, which job classifications could benefit from remote-exclusive work, and how agencies could better coordinate with the Defense Department secretary on the recruitment of spouses for telework.  

Lankford and Sinema’s bill is a pivot from previous Senate efforts to curb pandemic-era telework practices within the federal government. In May, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and six Republican cosponsors introduced the Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems (SHOW UP) Act, which sought to reverse all federal agencies’ COVID-19 telework policies. And in August, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, asked the State Department’s acting inspector general to conduct an agency-wide review of “federal agencies abusing remote work on the taxpayer’s dime.”

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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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DisasterAssistance.gov is extremely important. The site offers information on finding relief assistance, as well as a way to apply online for FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program assistance program. There were nearly 30 million visits to DisasterAssisance.gov last year, according to the agency, which spent approximately $11 million in 2022 to maintain the site. 

While some people impacted by disasters apply for assistance from FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program in person or on the phone, during the last 12 months around 75% of program applicants used DisasterAssistance.gov — and 70% of those visits were completed via a mobile device, according to the agency.

Streamlining disaster survivors’ access to funding is a key pillar of the Biden administration’s push to improve citizens’ experience of government services. In May, the White House announced a multi-agency project to improve the SBA disaster loan application process. 

“In order to get federal assistance from the president and FEMA, that’s kind of where this website comes into play, for the most part,” Laura Adcock, Disaster Recovery Branch Chief for Ohio Emergency Management Agency, told FedScoop.

Now, though, there’s also a growing effort led by Senate lawmakers to consolidate key aspects of federal disaster assistance— which would create changes that would invariably impact the site. Notably, DisasterAssistance.gov includes links to 76 different forms of assistance from several different federal agencies right now. Still, “the website only allows applicants to apply for one FEMA program and has limited capacity for information sharing among participating agencies,” according to a recent Senate report.

“Someone might be able to access things that they might need, whether it’s financial assistance, whether it’s temporary housing through a multitude of federal agencies, and you have to go to each separately,” added Tiffany Del Rio, the deputy director for government relations and advocacy at Team Rubicon, an NGO that mobilizes veterans to assist with disaster response.  “You have to follow those applications in multiple places.”

The most recent programs were added to the DisasterAssistance.gov relief program repository in March 2022. According to FEMA, federal agency partners are prompted to review these forms of assistance every year, though changes and new forms of assistance can be sent to FEMA at any time. “The FOAs don’t change often. They only change when an agency decides an existing or new program or service would benefit people affected by a disaster or when they need to retire an old one,” the agency added in an email responding to FedScoop’s questions.  

FEMA highlighted two companies it currently works with to maintain the site: Appddiction Studio, which provides Amazon Web Services GovCloud infrastructure services, and LexisNexis, which helps with identity verification, among other services. Records on USASpending show that at least one other company has been involved with the site — at one point, a firm called Teracore had a five-year, $18.6 million agreement that referenced the development of the portal (FedScoop reached out to Teracore and did not hear back before publication). 

FEMA receives engineering and software development assistance from the Department of Labor, too, the agency said. 

There could be changes coming, though. The Disaster Assistance Simplification Act, which was introduced in May by  Senators James Lankford (R-OK), Gary Peters (D-MI), and Rand Raul (R-KY), pushes for a more integrated application for disaster assistance that would be available through a new version of the website. The revamped DisasterAssistance.gov would allow people to receive updates on their applications for various assistance programs, among other changes.

According to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, FEMA is likely to need $34 million between 2023 and 2028 to “develop new user interfaces and information sharing mechanisms and to enhance the website’s capacity to manage, store, and secure data.”

The website would also be used as a way to share information about disasters between different agencies. As part of the proposal, the head of DHS would publish a privacy impact assessment for the platform.

“Our proposal creates one online application portal to use across federal agencies to ensure disaster victims can easily apply for assistance on their phone or tablet while they clean up,” said Sen. Lankford in a press release published in May.

Even if the legislation does not pass, other changes may still be coming to DisasterAssistance.gov. FEMA is planning a modernization of its online registration form, which is scheduled for the end of this fiscal year, as well as eventual updates to other backend applications. FEMA is also weighing creating a unified disaster application with the Small Business Administration, and potentially other agencies, too.  

Following a transition to cloud technology, the agency is planning to decommission its legacy infrastructure at the end of the 2024 fiscal year. 

In the meantime, the agency says the DisasterAssistance.gov runs on fully redundant data centers, so it’s never experienced a complete outage. Instead, the agency relies on a strategy of redirecting traffic when technical problems emerge.  

For example, in November 2021, the Amazon ElastiCache and Elastic Load Balancing services operated by Amazon Web Services “experienced an outage” that lasted around three hours, which led the agency to relocate traffic to its “infrastructure not hosted in this region,” the agency explained. 

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