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The Office of Personnel Management Office of the Inspector General last month reported that the agency’s backlog of pending retirement claims, long a source of headaches for agency leaders and retiring federal workers alike, no longer constitutes a “top management challenge” for the agency.

The news came in the form of the inspector general’s annual report on management challenges in fiscal 2025, in which the oversight office concluded that OPM has made “continued improvements” to the process in recent years.

“For this year’s top management challenges, we removed the retirement claims processing backlog due to OPM’s continued improvements in this area,” the report states. “While there is continued concern regarding Retirement Services meeting its goal of achieving an average case processing time of 60 days or less, OPM is continuing to work to enhance the Retirement Services customer experience, which includes performance measures related to the average number of days to process retirement applications.”

During the Biden administration, OPM has taken a more proactive posture towards reducing the backlog of pending retirement claims. The agency boosted staffing and overtime during peak seasons, such as the annual spike in requests around the start of the calendar year, and it created an online guide to help departing federal workers better understand and navigate the retirement process, as well as avoid common errors that contribute to long processing times.

Those measures appear to have made an impact: since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the backlog consistently hovered above 20,000 pending retirement claims, OPM has brought the inventory of retirement requests down to better than pre-pandemic levels. So far this year, only in January—the annual peak of submissions–has the backlog exceeded 20,000 claims, and by the end of last month, it fell to within 2,000 claims of the agency’s “steady state” goal of 13,000.

September marked the second straight month in which OPM made headway on its retirement backlog, falling to 14,494 outstanding claims. And measured on a monthly basis, the average time it takes for a retirement claim to be processed fell to 63 days, just three days from the agency’s 60-day goal.

Though the retirement backlog no longer dominates OPM’s management challenges, the agency should turn its focus toward insuring the “financial integrity” of its benefits programs—namely OPM’s role administering federal workers’ employer-sponsored insurance benefits. That includes the successful rollout of the new Postal Service Health Benefits Program, which is slated to begin when the federal benefits open season begins Nov. 11.

“The upcoming first Open Season of the PSHBP will present challenges for ensuring that USPS subscribers and members are able to successfully enroll in plans and navigate the PSHBS,” the inspector general wrote. “It will be a challenge for OPM to ensure the [Postal Service Health Benefits System] is operational before Open Season due to a narrow development and testing window. OPM is also challenged with ensuring that USPS enrollees receive adequate communication to understand the PSHBS as well as the new requirements to participate in the PSHBP.”

OPM received an additional $24 million over fiscal 2024 funding in the September continuing resolution that funded federal agencies until December due to the additional costs associated with standing up USPS’ new health insurance program for employees this fall.

The inspector general also continued to prod the agency to address concerns raised in a 2023 Government Accountability Office report that found gaps in the agency’s oversight of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to ensure that enrolled beneficiaries are still eligible for benefits. The inspector general’s office has previously estimated the cost of ineligible family members retaining benefits as between $500 million and $3 billion per year.

“Ineligible family members receiving FEHBP benefits remains a top management challenge for OPM,” the report states. “[OPM] has taken or has plans to take appreciable steps towards addressing this issue, including issuing further and more robust guidance in benefit administration letters as well as monitoring recommendations from GAO. However, ineligible member enrollment in the FEHBP remains an ongoing difficulty for the agency.”

As the report states, last April OPM announced new measures aimed at curbing improper payments due to family members retaining benefits despite no longer being eligible, such as when a dependent reaches age 26 or a spouse becomes divorced, including requiring agencies to review family members’ eligibility for FEHBP for a random 10% sample of FEHBP enrollees.

Part of the difficulty in auditing FEHBP’s beneficiary rolls is the decentralized nature of the system across more than 100 federal agencies. OPM officials have said that they hope the development of the USPS insurance system, which will be centralized within the HR agency, could be a model for building the needed capabilities for OPM to conduct better oversight over FEHBP.

“I’ve been involved in enough IT projects in my time to say that until it’s done, it’s not done, but it is our honor to be able to implement this provision for postal employees, and we look forward to turning on a modern system that can be a model for FEHB going forward,” said Acting OPM Director Rob Shriver at a meeting of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee last May.

Two government officials said Tuesday that pending changes to the federal background check system could soon reduce the amount of time it takes to onboard new agency employees, assuming the changes are implemented in a timely fashion. 

The program to build a new IT system to support Trusted Workforce 2.0, a government-wide initiative to enable continuous vetting of federal employees, is over budget and years behind schedule. 

Matthew C. Eanes — the director of the Performance Accountability Council Program Management Office, an interagency group tasked with implementing credentialing reform — said the legacy IT system is outdated and limiting. 

“It’s almost like heroic that they can get the work done that they get done today,” he told the audience at the Professional Services Council’s Defense Conference. 

Eanes said an implementation strategy for the National Background Investigation Services IT system would be released this week. Similarly, David Cattler, the director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, which is responsible for NBIS, previously told a congressional panel that a new cost estimate for the program would be completed by October. 

Ultimately, Eanes said the goal is for initial low-risk background checks to take no more than 25 days, moderate-risk no more than 40 days and high-risk no more than 75 days. 

Eanes also brought up Taurus, which is a new system that will promote reciprocity when employees change intelligence agencies, although he said that there’s not currently an implementation timeline. Reciprocity essentially allows an individual’s background check to follow them to a new agency, so they don’t necessarily have to go through the process again. 

“One of the things Taurus is designed to do is to centralize the core information that is needed to make [a credentialing] decision in one place so [officials] can see it,” Eanes said. “So what’s happening now is the agency is requesting that information from the other organization, and it just takes time for them to get it and hand it over.” 

Eanes pointed out that employees at national security agencies and with a security clearance are already subject to continuous vetting requirements. The official said continuous vetting will make it easier to move people up security grades, reducing the time it takes from more than 100 days to 20 days or less. 

“The existing model has a bunch of inefficiencies in place where when we need to move someone from a moderate-risk public trust position into a secret [one] we start over and do a brand new initial investigation. Even though 97% of that work is already completed, we redo the work now because that’s how the model’s set up,” he said. “So in the future model, we’ll have someone in continuous vetting…and there will be no need to redo any of that work.”

Likewise, Jonathan P. Maffet, a senior official at DCSA, said his agency is increasingly focused on making manual processes automated. As an example, he pointed to credit checks. 

“Over the last few years, we’ve implemented a fully automated review of credit reports that come in,” he said. “It used to be a person weaning through all that information, finding the issues and it’s all automated now.”

The Biden administration will have sufficient resources and personnel to respond to Hurricane Milton, officials said Wednesday, despite the ongoing recovery efforts related to Hurricane Helene and other disasters. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has deployed 1,200 search and rescue personnel to Florida, where Milton is expected to make landfall on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning, who will serve in addition to the 1,000 FEMA employees already in the state following Helene. Across the country, 5,200 federal employees have deployed in Helene response and President Biden has also sent 1,500 active duty military personnel to affected regions. 

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said her agency is not spread too thin and is instead well postured to help Florida respond to Milton. In addition to search and rescue staff, she has also sent incident management, power assessment and medical facility assessment teams into Florida ahead of the storm. The agency has millions of meals and liters are water prepositioned for distribution. 

“And let me be clear,” Criswell said from North Carolina before heading to Florida later on Wednesday, “these resource movements are not taking away from the ongoing, complicated response and recovery we are still working in the aftermath of Helene. I want the people to hear it from me directly: FEMA is ready.”

She expressed confidence despite FEMA currently responding to more than 100 active disasters across the country, which Criswell said was unprecedented at least in her tenure. She noted FEMA maintains a “layered approach” to its staffing, with its full-time disaster response personnel supplemented by headquarters staff and other employees at times when major crises arise concurrently. FEMA has also tapped employees from other agencies throughout government who have pre-registered to volunteer for details during emergencies. 

The emergency response agency has long struggled with insufficient staffing, which has been exacerbated by the ever-growing demands of a more intense and frequent disaster season. It has made headway in its recruiting efforts, however, and officials stressed they have the personnel necessary for the current crises. 

“We have enough personnel between FEMA, our federal partners to continue to support the response and recovery efforts from Helene, as well as what we’re seeing and potentially going to see from Milton,” Criswell said. 

FEMA employees have said before even Milton presented itself as the potentially historic storm it has become that it was “all hands on deck” to respond to Helene, and staff from Hawaii to Texas were engaged in getting supplies and resources to the right places. Biden on Tuesday promised to send more federal employees to Florida as needed. 

“I’ve also surged thousands of federal personnel on the ground across the Southeast already [to] deliver every available resource as fast as possible,” Biden said. “And my priority is to increase the size and presence of our effort…as we prepare for another catastrophic storm about to make landfall.”

FEMA has been working hard to battle misinformation that has circulated since Helene struck, including by launching a “rumor response” page on its website. The breadth of the inaccurate data has waned, Criswell said, but still something the agency must confront. She noted, for example, that impacted individuals who never see someone “wearing a FEMA shirt” are likely still receiving water and food from FEMA stockpiles.  

Another such rumor is that FEMA is out of money and Criswell clarified the agency has $11 billion left available to it in its Disaster Relief Fund. She added she will assess the burn rate for the remaining funds once Milton makes landfall and determine whether FEMA will need Congress to inject more funds before it is currently planning to return in November. 

Either way, she said, her agency has made the necessary preparations.  

“Yes, this is going to be hard,” Criswell said. “Two massive storms have come our way. In only a matter of weeks, but this is what we do. We are here to save lives, and that is exactly what we are postured to do for these incidents.”

Leaders in the federal healthcare space revealed ongoing and future artificial intelligence use cases and policy at NVIDIA’s AI Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, emphasizing the benefits predictive softwares can have on health outcomes.

Much like other federal agencies, HHS is aiming to help spur and harness ongoing innovation with AI tools while applying appropriate guardrails, especially when leveraging these tools alongside sensitive clinical data, according to Micky Tripathi, the national coordinator for health IT and acting chief artificial intelligence officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“We hear more and more about people being concerned about getting too innovative in the healthcare space, and a desire for guardrails to help channel that innovation appropriately,” Tripathi said Tuesday . 

HHS components — like the National Institutes of Health, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and the Food and Drug Administration — have found a wide array of AI use cases. 

As with other agencies, creating internal chatbots to help HHS employees sift through large volumes of diverse data is a popular use case for HHS, but Tripathi notes that major commercial players, such as Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are not trained on clinical data.

Tripathi said HHS is looking to leverage the vast troves of clinical data across HHS and other agencies to create finely-tuned AI models tailored to healthcare uses. 

“We have amazing amounts of clinical data; we haven’t even tapped into that yet,” he said. “How do we open that up in safe ways, but offer the ability to use these technologies on actual clinical data so that we can actually be much more specific as we think about diagnostics, as we think about reduction of medical errors, as we think about streamlining clinical decision making, and as we think about the patient being more of a direct participant in their care,” he said. 

In terms of challenges moving forward with these goals, Tripathi noted that the quality of the clinical data will make or break its applications in AI software.

“Data is inherently biased by the healthcare system that we live in today,” he said. “So those who are left out of the healthcare system today or have poor healthcare because they have less insurance or no insurance at all, that’s all reflected in the data, and machines are unfortunately going to pick that up.”

Belinda Seto, the deputy director of NIH’s Office of Data Science and Sharing, underscored the need for a robust AI ethics perspective. She added that as her agency looks to leverage AI in mission areas like processing and analyzing disparate data types — such as data from genomic research and electronic health records — creating a culture of ethics in using AI tools is paramount.

“When we think about healthcare, It’s a trust relationship with the care provider and the patients,” Seto said. “And if we can think of ways to make sure that the trust is not undermined, and that the explainability of the AI that may be…a clinical decision support, we have to keep in mind not to undermine that trust.”

 Seto and Tripathi’s comments on AI come as the agency’s strategic AI plan –– due to be released in January 2025 –– is set to evaluate the role AI can play across HHS mission areas.

“We’ve got a strategic plan now in each of those primary domain areas hard at work,” Tripathi said. “It’s both externally focused as well as internal.”