An earlier memo said that in agencies with five or more SES members, no more than 30 percent generally may be rated at level 4 or 5 starting with the fiscal 2026 rating cycle that begins October 31. Image: Cagkan Sayin/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffOPM has proposed rules to carry out White House directives on performance evaluations of SES members, aiming to limit how many can be receive ratings in the top two of the five levels and to eliminate DEI-related considerations from those ratings.
“It is particularly important that the Executive Branch have the option to implement a forced distribution of at least some ratings given the systemic and pervasive use of Level 4 and 5 ratings, and the disconnect between these ratings and actual senior executive performance, as reflected in reports and critical incidents throughout the past decade,” a May 2 Federal Register notice says.
As in an initial February memo under those directives, in the proposed rules OPM said that years of data “have consistently shown that the vast majority” of executives are rated as outstanding or exceeds fully successful. That continued in the fiscal 2023 cycle, the notice says, when about 96 percent of executives were rated at one of those two levels and less than a one-half of a percent of executives were rated below level 3, fully successful.
“These results indicate that senior executive ratings may be inflated, and poor performing executives are not being held accountable through a rigorous appraisal process,” says the proposal, which would remove a current section of rules banning forced a distribution in rating for both career and non-career SES members.
The proposed rules do not specify what that distribution would be, but the earlier memo said that in agencies with five or more SES members, no more than 30 percent generally may be rated at level 4 or 5 starting with the fiscal 2026 rating cycle that begins October 31.
Those ratings are especially important for SES members since they do not receive annual basic federal pay raises but rather are paid within a range with raises and performance awards based on those ratings. OPM said in the February memo that moving forward, only executives rated Level 4 or 5 should receive a performance award or performance-based pay adjustment exceeding 5 percent of their rate of basic pay, while an executive rated Level 3 should only receive a performance award equal to 5 percent of their rate of basic pay.
The proposed rules would not impose any requirements with respect to the number of executives rated at levels 1 through 3. The notice says that while imposing limits on the top two levels “would not directly require a greater number of ratings indicating unsatisfactory work or poor performance, a high-performance culture would encourage supervisors to provide poor performers ratings commensurate with their performance.”
The rules meanwhile would eliminate a requirement that SES performance appraisals “should take into account ‘leadership effectiveness in promoting diversity, inclusion, and engagement’ as one of several factors.”
That requirement “conveys to both the senior executive and to the public that executives are expected 1) to promote a particular, controversial ideology throughout the government and 2) to promote ‘policies, programs, and preferences’ throughout the federal government that the President has identified as wasteful and divisive.”
In the February memo, OPM had set new standards for the next rating cycle to require taking into consideration factors including whether execs “faithfully administered the law and advanced the President’s policy priorities; promoted government efficiency; demonstrated merit and competence; held others accountable and treated them fairly; and achieved organizational goals.”
OPM later applied similar requirements to senior level and senior scientific and technical positions equivalent in grade to the SES but without that level of supervisory responsibility, similarly citing “over-inflation” of their performance ratings, with on average 90 percent rated at one of the top two levels and almost all of the rest rated at the third.
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