In June 2026, the Office of Personnel Management announced that it was decentralizing the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, ending a 20-year precedent of fielding a standardized, government-wide survey. The FEVS ensured that consistent questions were asked across agencies and over multiple administrations and provided valuable data to the public and Congress about agency performance, leadership effectiveness and employee engagement.
This critical transparency and accountability tool is now gone.
Under the proposed new rules, agencies will now have the responsibility to administer their own surveys and have relaxed requirements for sharing the data with the public. OPM also removed required questions that monitored essential metrics around employee satisfaction, leadership, workload and professional development.
While the FEVS needed reforms, it has served as a key accountability tool across four presidencies for monitoring organizational effectiveness and employee engagement and was an early warning signal for poor service delivery across government. These proposed changes will likely make it impossible for the public and Congress to have a transparent and full picture of the management and effectiveness of their government.
Last year, our team developed the Public Service Viewpoint Survey in response to the cancellation of the FEVS in 2025 to ensure continuity of key data, and we previously produced the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings using employee survey data for over 20 years. Our programming has shined a light on federal management practices and elevated employee engagement as a key driver of agency performance for the American public. With that experience in mind, we have outlined the consequences of the administration’s actions that Congress, government leaders and the public should recognize. Those challenges fall into three buckets:
Challenge 1: Gaining Employee Trust
After cancelling last year’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey during a year of significant upheaval across the federal workforce, agencies must overcome a massive deficit of employee trust. Our Public Service Viewpoint Survey found that only 10.2% of employees trust their political leaders – a gap OPM’s proposed new policies do nothing to close.
Across different administrations, employees have questioned how safe it is to take the FEVS. In truth, OPM’s administration of the survey ensured a neutral third party housed the data and enforced strict standards protecting respondent privacy. While OPM has provided recommendations for replicating their previous practices, there is now an increased privacy risk for employees. Under this new guidance, individual response data will likely be more easily accessible for leaders attempting to identify specific employee responses. This potential may lead to employees choosing to not take the survey or feel pressured to respond in a favorable way out of fear of retaliation. If agencies want staff to share their honest perceptions of how management practices are influencing organizational outcomes, they must implement transparent collection standards and clearly communicate how they will limit access to employee responses.
OPM’s decision to cut specific required questions sends employees a clear message: their engagement and experience are not valued. These questions, used for years in both OPM‘s Global Satisfaction Index and the Partnership‘s Best Places to Work rankings to measure employee engagement and satisfaction across administrations, are also tools for holding leaders accountable and are data points used in both the public and private sector as a critical predictor of organizational success. Cutting them signals a retreat from that accountability.
Most concerning is the loss of the question, “I believe the results of this survey will be used to make my agency a better place to work.” While agencies have struggled with this question for years, it offered an actionable measure of how employees perceive existing feedback channels and pushed leaders to respond more thoughtfully to staff concerns.
Individual agencies should ensure this and other key questions are included in their own surveys to rebuild trust with employees. However, in recent guidance to agencies, OPM has said that doing so will include a potentially arduous and time-consuming review process that will likely dissuade agencies from doing so. Despite this burden, agencies must prioritize adding more effective questions to gain a full accounting of how their agencies are performing for the American public.
Finally, OPM’s new allowance for agencies to choose what they publicly disclose opens the door to inconsistent, ineffective analysis that will breed suspicion among employees and the public. Before fielding any survey, departments must commit to full data transparency with their workforce and detail how they intend to use the feedback they collect – or risk an abysmal response rate.
Challenge 2: Identifying the Resources
Staff survey administration will presumably fall to chief human capital offices – many of which may struggle to field a representative and methodologically rigorous survey with limited personnel and resources. While internal HR teams can and should be integrated in the survey development process, effective deployment requires expertise in survey methodology, sampling, analysis and internal communications. Some agencies may have that expertise elsewhere in their organization, but detailing those staff to their chief human capital office means pulling them from their core programmatic responsibilities. Most agencies won’t have this in-house support at all, particularly at smaller agencies.
Agencies could hire a vendor, but most lack the budget or time to issue a contract before the fiscal year ends. Part of OPM’s value in running the FEVS was administering one centralized contract that supported most federal departments. If the more than 70 agencies that previously took the FEVS must now each issue their own requests for proposals, evaluate vendors and manage their own contract, any cost savings for the federal government seem unlikely.
Effectively collecting, analyzing and securing sensitive staff data also requires infrastructure most agencies may not currently have: a survey platform, statistical software and secure servers to protect personally identifiable information. Agencies could forgo investments in that infrastructure by using more readily available consumer-level platforms. But in so doing they face significant risks around data privacy that will further erode employee trust in responding to the survey.
Challenge 3: Developing an Effective and Consistent Methodology
In its new Employee Survey Playbook, OPM shared advice for how agencies can administer their surveys. While this playbook details various steps of the process, it provides minimal guidance and standards on how to ensure that the required questions will be comparable across agencies and administrations. Agencies must still report results to OPM and the Office of Management and Budget for benchmarking. But accurate benchmarking requires more than a “common form” of questions – surveys must be implemented and analyzed similarly, consistent in their timing in the field, survey similar types of employees and have compatible weighting procedures to ensure representativeness.
OPM’s guidance allows agencies to choose an individualized approach to survey methodologies and weighting standards. But without comparable data across agencies, Congress and other parties lose a key tool to “trust but verify” results, undermining the survey’s utility for oversight and a common interpretation of the law’s intent. Without clear reporting requirements, agencies can now omit key information needed to determine the quality of their survey results. Agencies may share response rates and their methodologies with OPM, but they are no longer required to share this publicly.
In the past, OPM’s unified survey and consistent methodology made comparisons across agencies and years possible. Even agencies that ran their own surveys like the Department of Veterans Affairs and NASA followed OPM’s practices more closely than regulations required because comparison with the FEVS dataset was valuable. Now that each agency is responsible for their own processes, encouraging common practices or enforcing any future OPM standards will be far more difficult.
A Congressional Call to Action
Agencies have their work cut out for them if they are to effectively administer and analyze their own surveys. Given the required technical tasks, lack of resources and the approval processes agencies will need to go through to adjust the instrument to fit their needs, the timeline for administering an effective survey instrument could be incredibly tight.
Can agencies fulfill these responsibilities and meet this timeframe? Possibly.
Will it yield meaningful metrics that Congress needs for effective oversight? Unlikely, given the risk of inconsistent methodologies, limited resources and fewer questions.
Congress must act. OPM’s new expectations risk reducing an essential accountability tool to a check-the-box exercise – meeting the bare minimum of its congressional mandate while providing little real insight. Congress should seize this moment and update the 2002 law to ensure that OPM consistently administers the survey across government, includes questions that enable rigorous oversight of agency leaders, publicly releases comprehensive results and promotes best practices for addressing organizational challenges.