Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

3. Central Personnel Agencies · Minor

Build policy goals directly into federal employee appraisals

Partially done

74 3. Central Personnel Agencies

“It is essential that political executives build policy goals directly into employee appraisals both for mission success and for employees to know what is expected.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Appraisals now have to reflect the organization's results, which is most of the way to the ask. OPM's SES rule requires that a senior executive be appraised on the effectiveness, productivity and performance results of the employees under them, and its preamble records that the government-wide SES appraisal plan OPM issued in February 2025 expects ratings to be aligned with organizational performance and executives to be evaluated in part on achieving organizational goals. The rule reaching the rest of the workforce, finalized in July 2026, requires a supervisory critical element for every supervisor and biennial OPM certification of agency appraisal systems. Partial because no instrument does the specific thing the Quote asks — write the administration's policy goals into employee appraisals as elements; what exists is alignment to organizational results, which is narrower.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Researched 2026-08-27.

  • The 2025-09-15 SES rule amends 5 CFR 430.308(d) so that appraisal of a senior executive takes account of “the effectiveness, productivity, and performance results of the employees for whom the senior executive is responsible”. Its preamble records that under OPM’s 2025-02-25 memorandum on the new SES performance appraisal system and plan, “OPM expects ratings to be aligned with and reflect organizational performance and for senior executives to be evaluated in part based on achieving organizational goals.”
  • Upstream: the memorandum of 2025-01-20 required OPM to issue SES Performance Plans “that agencies must adopt” within 30 days — a government-wide plan, not agency-by-agency discretion.
  • Below the SES: the 2026-07-07 final rule on performance appraisal for General Schedule and prevailing-rate employees requires a supervisory critical element for every covered supervisor, removes the bar on forced distribution of ratings, removes the right to grieve a rating of record, and requires OPM to certify agency appraisal systems every two years.
  • What is absent is the specific thing the Quote asks of political executives: no instrument requires an agency’s appraisals to carry that administration’s policy goals as elements. The mechanism is organizational-performance alignment, which is adjacent and narrower.
Action
other
Object
employee performance appraisals
ID
112