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

7. Intelligence Community · Minor

Seek OPM authority for voluntary separation buyouts in the IC

Not started

212 7. Intelligence Community

“The IC should evaluate areas of bloat and underperforming cadre and work with OPM on authority for voluntary separation buyouts.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No allowlisted record of the IC working with OPM on voluntary separation buyout authority, and the search now covers OPM's own complete public record rather than the Federal Register alone. The read-queue row said the CHCO memoranda index was inert, so nothing could be found by index; that was the wrong index. `opm.gov/chcoc/published-memos/` is the full historical Chief Human Capital Officers memoranda index in one unpaginated 370 KB page — title, date, signatory and addressee for every memorandum from the 2000s through 2026-09-02 — and it was read in full on 2026-09-03. "VSIP" occurs in it exactly once: "Use of Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments (VSIP) Authority", Friday, March 12, 2004, Kay Coles James, Director, to Heads of Departments and Agencies. There has been no VERA/VSIP memorandum of any kind since. "Intelligence Community" occurs in the index zero times. The in-window separation memoranda are all Deferred Resignation Program guidance addressed government-wide — 2025-01-28 and two of 2025-02-04, all signed by Acting Director Charles Ezell — which is a government-wide separation *offer*, not the OPM buyout *authority* the Quote asks the IC to obtain; progress is measured on this ask. How far this negative reaches: OPM's public government-wide personnel record and the Federal Register. It cannot reach IC-specific separation authority, which is exercised under 50 U.S.C. authorities OPM does not publish — and the Fourth Circuit's footnote in John Doe 1 v. ODNI, No. 25-1527 n.2, that IC employees sit outside the Civil Service Reform Act framework OPM's public rules run through, explains why it would not be there. Federal Register full-text searches for "deferred resignation" and "voluntary separation incentive" since 2025-01-20 return six documents each, all government-wide OPM or agency-specific rulemakings and notices with no IC application; "buyout" appears nowhere in P.L. 119-60 and its "voluntary separation" hits are Armed Forces and Coast Guard pay provisions. IC employees are outside the Civil Service Reform Act framework those OPM authorities run through.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • What Congress did enact on IC staffing is P.L. 119-60 Division F section 6403: within 120 days the DNI must give the intelligence and appropriations committees a target end-state staffing level for ODNI and a plan for reaching it. A staffing plan is not buyout authority, and it is ODNI-only.
  • Corrected on 2026-09-03: opm.gov opens in a browser, and the index whose year filter does nothing — the CHCO Council’s latest-memos page, which shows only a dozen recent PDFs — is not the index that matters. The published-memos page is the complete CHCO memoranda record in a single 370 KB page and needs no filter.
  • This ask is also covered by a single negative search of the CIA internal-management asks on pp. 208-212.
Action
other
Object
Voluntary separation buyout authority for the IC
ID
557