The Trump administration is asking agencies to convert the government’s top tech positions from titles reserved for career feds to roles that political appointees can occupy.
The Office of Personnel Management sent out a memo on Tuesday recommending that agencies redesignate any chief information officer positions reserved for career senior executive service employees to SES roles that can also be filled with appointees that don’t go through the merit staffing process required for career feds.
“No longer the station of impartial and apolitical technocrats, the modern agency CIO role demands policy-making and policy-determining capabilities across a range of controversial political topics,” the memo reads.
Currently, most agency CIOs are career federal employees. They serve as the business executives in charge of the government’s technology, overseeing their agencies’ tech portfolios on which the government runs, ensuring the management of sensitive government data and making sure technology is secure.
“Historically, CIOs have always been regarded as the necessary operational glue that makes government operate,” one former government tech executive told Nextgov/FCW, saying that the change politicizes CIOs. They requested their name be withheld for fear of reprisal.
“This sounds like another method of censorship and control of the federal career workforce,” they added. “A president can choose which data to share with the public and which not. They can hold career people hostage by turning off their network access, or spy on career personnel’s data and actions.”
At minimum, dozens of CIOs across large and small agencies and their subcomponents are “career reserved employees” as of 2023, including those at the Education Department, National Science Foundation, IRS, U.S. Agency for International Development and Small Business Administration, according to OPM data. Those types of jobs can’t be filled by appointees.
The OPM memo calls for agencies to change positions to a “general” classification that can also be filled with political hires. Those in career roles are entitled to some protections against retaliatory or politically motivated reprisals. Noncareer appointees can be removed without appeal rights.
The memo follows the replacement of a career CIO at OPM itself days into the new administration. That former CIO was replaced with an appointee, according to a person familiar with the matter who wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. That job was not in OPM’s 2023 list of “career reserved” positions and would therefore have been under the “general” classification.
Legally speaking, no more than 10% of SES positions across government may be filled by noncareer employees — even if they do have the “general” designation — but an individual agency may have as much as 25% of such positions filled by noncareer staff, per the 2024 Plum Book issued by OPM.
A few agency CIOs are actually Senate-confirmed presidential appointees, like those at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Defense Department. The government has thousands of political appointees, the vast majority of which don’t require Senate confirmation.
An OPM guide says that Career Reserved positions are filled by career feds “to ensure the impartiality, or the public’s confidence in the impartiality, of the Government.”
But the new memo notes that during the Biden administration, CIOs did work on policy-related efforts, spanning cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and diversity, equity inclusion and accessibility.
“When an agency CIO makes policy choices about which of these topics to prioritize and fund — and which should be deemphasized or defunded — the CIO determines government policy in important ways,” the memo reads. “Emphasis on policies like DEIA siphons labor and resources from other core government objectives. The public rightly expects government officials who make such choices to be democratically accountable.”
The memo also states that the change would widen the pool of available talent to fill agency CIO roles beyond the ranks of career SES employees.
Federal tech issues largely stayed out of the spotlight and major culture war issues in the first Trump administration.
“Technology is nonpartisan,” Biden’s former federal CIO told Nextgov/FCW in December. “I don’t think that’s going to go away because the constituents that are complaining to their members on the Hill are the customers of these systems.”
The current Trump administration and its cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency effort led by billionaire Elon Musk have already devoted significant focus to government tech and data.
Musk and his collaborators have reportedly accessed the federal payment system and accessed federal human resources databases, locked some employees in the Office of Personnel Management out of department data systems, and sent out mass emails to government employees offering delayed resignations, inciting cybersecurity concerns in the process. A lawsuit has also been filed over DOGE’s access to government data at the Treasury Department.
“This basically means the end of the era for the long experienced CIO cadre,” said the former IT executive of the new memo, noting that complicated modernization work in government takes time. “There is going to be constant change… which will make it even harder to drive long term positive change in federal IT.”
OPM “recommends” that each agency send OPM a request to redesignate the positions by Feb. 14.
Nextgov/FCW executive editor Jessie Bur contributed to this story.
