Kiran Ahuja says her return to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) “feels like coming home.”
Unfortunately, the agency she now directs has been a troubled house. It is coming off a period of unstable leadership under a Trump administration that diminished the agency’s influence and targeted it for deconstruction.
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Ahuja, OPM’s chief of staff during the last two years of the Obama administration, was confirmed by the Senate as President Biden’s chief personnel director in June. At the top of her priority list is rebuilding a federal workforce that former president Donald Trump scorned.
“Every single day that I wake up, I am thinking about the morale of this workforce and I am putting that front and center,” she told a small group of reporters Wednesday by Zoom. Among her top-three priorities are defining the future of work, including telework and work-life balance issues, and elevating diversity. Improving the federal retirement process, recruiting and training employees also are high on her agenda as she works to position “the federal government as the model employer.”
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After years in Trump’s wilderness, “this agency,” she said, “is positioned as the strategic human capital leader across the federal government” with its 2.1 million employees.
“There is no way in the world,” she continued, to do all the Biden administration plans “if we do not ensure that we have the right people in the right position, and that more than ever we have realized that people are our biggest asset.”
OPM has been stymied by what a detailed and influential National Academy of Public Administration report in March said was “a lack of clarity and consensus on OPM’s mission and role, together with funding and staffing constraints and leadership turnover.”
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What is different now is a president, Biden, who demonstrates his affinity for federal workers. This contrasts with Trump, who proposed federal employee compensation cuts, allowed agencies serving feds to wither, issued executive orders to neuter federal labor organizations and attempted to politicize certain agencies.
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Ahuja must deal with this legacy inside an agency that was a prime example of Trump’s disdain. His failed attempt to send key OPM functions to the General Services Administration and the White House was widely criticized as an effort to politicize the workforce. During Trump’s four years, OPM had confirmed directors for only 13 months between two appointees.
“As a result, the federal government has lacked the attention from the highest levels needed to address long-standing and emerging skills gaps,” the Government Accountability Office said in a March report placing “Strategic Human Capital Management” on the federal high-risk list, which identifies government operations “in need of transformation.”
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Speaking of high-risk, Ahuja’s confirmation vote amounted to a high-wire act as she sneaked through an evenly divided Senate with the vote of Vice President Harris, who only votes to break ties. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) blocked an earlier vote after her hearing in April. He was her chief nemesis at the session, interrogating her views on critical race theory and asking if she believed Trump was “an example of racist progress.”
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The 50-year-old, England-born daughter of immigrants from India could have rightly yelled “of course,” to the question about Trump, while providing reams of evidence to make the case. But she danced around Hawley’s query the way nominees do when they don’t want to reveal their opinions.
Ahuja’s racial consciousness and devotion to inclusion is evident, however, starting with her lived experience as an example of diversity when she, an Asian-American, chose and graduated from Atlanta’s Spelman College, an institution that is a jewel among African-American universities.
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“I was inspired when I visited the campus to see really strong Black women leaders, professors and students,” she said by email after the press briefing. Learning about Black history and culture, she added, “became a very formative experience for me.” After Spelman, she graduated from the University of Georgia School of Law.
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She emphasized her commitment to reversing racist progress in opening remarks to reporters, citing the “economic and racial reckoning that’s taking place in this country.” She was “very much involved” in those issues “on the philanthropic side” during the height of protests against police violence last year. Before leading OPM, she was CEO of Philanthropy Northwest in Seattle, after serving as founding executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. Both organizations include racial equity and justice among their priorities.
A “high priority” for Biden, she said, is a “federal workforce that looks like this country. I am a true believer that if an employer, a company, a government agency does well, then it has a diverse set of backgrounds and viewpoints and experiences of the American people.”
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