DOGE still at work behind the scenes: 'We are not at maximum efficiency'

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may have been disbanded months ago, but some of the staffers who were on board by billionaire Elon Musk to make good on his promise to dramatically slash government spending are reportedly still hard at work at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

According to Politico’s Sophia Cai, the “task of overhauling the federal workforce continues" despite reports the fact that DOGE came up woefully short of its goals, with the Wall Street Journal reporting it had a negligible impact.

Nonetheless, the ethos of DOGE has carried over to OPM, with director Scott Kupor claiming there is much work still be done when it comes to revamping hiring and firing in the government ranks.

"The president has been very clear that our job is to be stewards of taxpayer dollars and deliver services in the most efficient way,” he explained before adding, “There's no question in my mind that we are not at maximum efficiency. We have incredibly old technology in all kinds of places.”

Kupor noted that future hirings will be handled in new ways, telling Cai, “Historically, we haven’t used, for example, coding assessments as a way to analyze peoples’ skill sets. So where there are skill-based assessments that make sense — like a coding job or an accounting job — we want to use those. We think those are better and more objective measures than resume reviews, which we know have lots of variability and inherent biases.”

He also indicated that there is a desire to change hiring standards that could impact longtime federal employees.

“What we can do is reclassify jobs and eliminate degree and tenure requirements in the GS schedule,” he explained. “If there’s some 19-year-old developer who is functioning at the level of a GS-13 or GS-14 in terms of productivity, historically we couldn’t hire that person because they don’t have a college degree and don’t have minimum tenure requirements. We’re redoing those requirements, starting with the IT job classification.”

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