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

3. Central Personnel Agencies · Notable · Needs Congress

Make performance the first factor in reduction-in-force retention

Partially done

79 3. Central Personnel Agencies

“Moreover, four factors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: tenure, veterans' preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. … A determined President should insist that performance be first and be wary of costly types of reductions-in-force.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Performance is now first — on paper. OPM's final rule reorders retention standing so that employees are ranked by a numerical performance credit drawn from their three most recent ratings (7 points for Level 5 down to 0 for Levels 1 and 2), augmented by points for veterans' preference, with tenure subgroup and length of service demoted to tie-breakers. That is precisely the reordering the Quote asks a determined President to insist on, achieved by regulation rather than by the legislation the item's flag anticipated, because 5 U.S.C. 3502 names the four factors without fixing their weight. Partial and not done because the rule takes effect on 2026-09-02, after the close of the evidence window, and a RIF noticed before that date is still processed under the old order — so nothing has yet been decided this way.

  2. Attempted

    OPM proposed to rewrite the reduction-in-force regulations to prioritize performance over tenure and length of service in deciding who is retained. A proposal, with the existing order still governing every RIF.

Research log

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

Research notes

Researched 2026-08-27.

Marked as needing an act of Congress because 5 U.S.C. 3502 names the four factors. What the statute does not fix is their order of importance, which lives in OPM’s regulations at 5 CFR part 351 — and OPM has rewritten them.

Read the final rule’s executive summary on govinfo.gov:

“3. Reorders retention standing to place performance first. Agencies will maintain separate retention registers for competitive service and excepted service employees; within each group, employees will be ranked by performance credit, augmented by veterans’ preference, with tenure subgroup and length of service used as tie-breakers. 4. Creates a new numerical performance credit methodology … 7 points for Level 5, 5 points for Level 4, 3 points for Level 3, and 0 points for Level 1 or Level 2 ratings … 5. Applies veterans’ preference by adding points to performance credit.”

That is the Mandate’s reordering exactly: performance first, veterans’ preference next, tenure and seniority reduced to tie-breakers. The rule also excludes probationers, trial-period employees, short time-limited appointees and Schedule C and Schedule G employees from RIF competition.

Effective 2026-09-02, six days after the close of the evidence window, so no reduction in force has yet been run under it.

Reviewed 2026-09-24: the rule took effect and OPM corrected it. A correcting final rule of 2026-09-15 records that the August rule “became effective on September 2, 2026” and restores two paragraphs of the definition of “displaced” that an amendatory instruction had inadvertently removed (FR 2026-18800, docket OPM-2025-0107, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/15/2026-18800/reduction-in-force-correction). The correction is housekeeping and adds no step, but it settles the one fact the 2026-08-03 event left open — the new retention order is now the law governing every RIF. Whether any RIF has actually been run under it is still unanswered and is not a Federal Register question. A first reading from the Federal Register record alone was checked against the full correction, read on govinfo.gov (RIN 3206-AO86), and it holds, with one precision: the restored paragraphs are in the Career Transition Assistance Plan definitions at 5 CFR 330.602 — when a competitive-service employee counts as “displaced” — and not in the part 351 retention order, which the correction does not touch. OPM calls it a correction that “makes no substantive change to the regulations”.

Action
other
Object
reduction-in-force retention order
ID
121