The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is getting close to releasing a proposal that would offer “equity around pay and flexibilities in the workplace” for Federal government tech and cybersecurity personnel, OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said today.
Speaking at ACT-IAC’s Imagine Nation conference in Hershey, Pa., the OPM director talked about the soon-to-be-issued proposal as part of a reply to a question about what she’s most proud of accomplishing at the agency since taking the helm at OPM in 2021.
One of those points of pride, she said, was “that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about cyber and tech talent,” including OPM’s efforts to recruit private sector tech and cyber personnel into service with the government.
“We’ve got a proposal coming out very soon around how they want to build equity around pay and flexibilities in the workplace” for Federal tech and cybersecurity personnel, Ahuja explained.
She said the proposal will incorporate existing work on that front at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and involve “really spreading that to the rest of government, and that is what I think is really going to be transformative.”
“I hear too much about agencies, you know, losing people to other agencies, because of the issue of pay and it’s not really just even around the Federal government, it’s about us being more competitive in the private sector,” she said.
During a separate conversation, Ahuja told MeriTalk it’s likely that “more details are going to come out later this week” on the proposal.
The OPM director did not divulge much in the way of additional details but did say that the coming proposal has been a “labor of love with our partnership” with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of the National Cyber Director “to think about a comprehensive approach that we need to take across government.”
“We’ve been managing, as you know, the inequities among agencies,” Ahuja said. “So, we took what DHS had pulled together, certainly we know DoD [Department of Defense] has a lot of these flexibilities, and then really created a comprehensive proposal that’s taking what’s good about DHS and adding to it,” she said, adding that the plan is to release the proposal “in the next couple of days.”
She said the proposal also will touch on partnership “with a number of different folks,” what Federal agencies need to be thinking about, and partnership with Congress.
