Portal of federal employment metrics to get a facelift, OPM announces

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The announcement comes months after the removal of race and ethnicity data from the statistics about federal employees.

The Office of Personnel Management plans to update FedScope, the government’s portal for statistics on the federal civilian workforce, it announced on Tuesday.

“In the coming months, OPM will launch a newly designed platform featuring interactive visuals, detailed datasets, and tools tailored to answer the most frequently asked questions about federal employment,” OPM said in a press release, previewing a fall 2025 update to the website. 

A banner on the website also hints at more regular updates, saying that “beginning this fall, Federal Workforce Data will be routinely available in an easily accessible, reimagined format.”

Although the agency slammed the previous administration for not updating the public-facing website sooner, the effort started under the Biden White House, according to news reports and former employees.

There’s been an ongoing effort to update FedScope over the last two years as part of a larger, multi-million dollar push to modernize the government’s human capital data, and the plan was to launch the overhaul in the last quarter of fiscal 2025, two former employees with knowledge of the matter told Nextgov/FCW.

An early January report from Federal News Network also describes an OPM already in the process of iteratively modernizing its FedScope platform with new features.

The Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency actually “killed off” the Human Capital Data Management and Modernization unit doing the work with voluntary departure incentives for employees, layoffs and defunding, one of the former employees said.

Still, OPM criticized the Biden administration in its press release, saying that “the FedScope program and user interface has needed modernization for over a decade and yet under the Biden-Harris Administration this was not prioritized and FedScope data was not updated in a timely manner.”

Asked for comment on the discrepancy, an OPM spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW that “this is something we are prioritizing that the previous admin clearly didn’t.”

The update comes months after OPM removed race and ethnicity filters on FedScope earlier this spring, a move the spokesperson said was part of the Trump administration’s executive orders aimed at shuttering diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility efforts in the federal government, citing guidance acting OPM Director Charles Ezell issued to agency heads in January. 

“Just because FedScope is modernizing, doesn’t mean data will be correct,” said one of the former employees.

The website does still allow users to filter by characteristics like gender, education level, agency and more. There are “no plans at this time” to remove additional data from the portal, the agency spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW

“Data transparency is essential to building trust in the federal government,” said Chuck Ezell, the agency’s acting director, in a statement. 

The announcement of the coming site modernization came alongside the release of updated data through March 2025, offering a glimpse into the effects of Trump 2.0’s push to shrink the workforce. Previously, the data was current through last fall.