Editor’s Note: Over the last four months, Federal News Network has conducted more than 20 interviews, reviewed dozens of emails and documents, and pulled together both current and historical data to shed light on the status of federal retirement processing.
This in-depth report shows that extraordinarily high volumes of retirement applications, largely due to the deferred resignation program, are flooding many agencies’ HR offices. The influx of applications is causing significant delays, leaving many recently retired federal employees in limbo and with few answers. For those interested in reading about a specific topic, please use the links below to navigate to lower-down sections of this story:
How DRP is impacting retirement processing
The status of federal HR staffing
OPM’s major retirement digitization effort
For Jay B., the decision to opt into the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program (DRP) earlier this year was not an easy one.
Like many federal employees, Jay, who requested using an initialism of his name for fear of retaliation, spent decades in public service. But after working remotely for over 10 years, the administration’s return-to-office requirements meant he’d have to commute over 100 miles a day — a change that became a major factor in his decision to take the DRP in April and end his Forest Service career.
Governmentwide, the DRP let eligible employees sign a contract earlier this year, agreeing to quit their jobs in exchange for months of paid leave, until Sept. 30 for most. Over 154,000 employees took the offer, accounting for about half of this year’s federal workforce reductions.
But with 30 years of service, Jay, along with thousands of other DRP-takers, also qualified for the government’s Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA). So in April, he applied for retirement.
“Thirty years of my life has been in the federal government,” he said. “So relying on VERA, along with the deferred resignation program, has been a little bit scary.”
Jay’s decision, however, would lead to months of uncertainty: After submitting his retirement application, HR lost some of his paperwork, causing him to be incorrectly marked as “ineligible” for VERA and delaying his application.
Jay emailed his agency’s HR office over 30 times in search of assistance. But because he lost access to his government computer after taking the DRP, emails from his personal account were marked as spam.
“It just felt like I was out on an island,” he said.
At the Forest Service, HR has processed 2,253 retirements, and 508 applications remain pending, according to an agency spokesperson.
HR staff are “committed to providing prompt, accurate and courteous service,” the spokesperson told Federal News Network.
Jay eventually managed to reach an HR specialist and have the error corrected, but only after weeks of stress and exhaustion. As his application began processing in the months that followed, he said he had limited communication with his assigned HR specialist. But knowing that the specialist was juggling more retirement applications than usual due to the DRP, he maintained that she “did a great job,” given a difficult situation.
“I believe that if I had not been in the DRP, that issue would have been resolved well before my retirement date,” he said. “Things are looking a little better now, but the process has just been really, really difficult.”
As one of tens of thousands of federal employees leaving their jobs, Jay’s experience is all too common. Though the government’s retirement process has been a pain point for years, 2025 is a particularly difficult time to retire, according to many benefits experts and former employees.
Federal News Network interviewed more than a dozen retiring employees at various points in the process, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. The individuals come from agencies including the IRS, Social Security Administration (SSA) and departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Defense, Commerce and Justice.
Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade.
Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM.
“OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network.
But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications.
“A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”
At the Forest Service, a spokesperson said ORA “streamlines submissions, reduces errors and shortens processing times,” and added that the agency’s HR specialists work directly with OPM to resolve processing issues.
Still, the surge of applications meant that Jay, like many others, waited months after his salary payments ended, before he received a payout of his lump-sum annual leave. The financial boost is usually delivered within a few pay periods, and often tides over retiring employees while they wait for their annuities.
“I’m still worried about how all this will go,” he said.
At the time of publication, Jay’s retirement application had still not made it to OPM.
Retirement processing times on the rise
OPM itself is already well above its typical retirement workload due to the DRP, and seeing slower processing times as a result. Later this month, the agency is anticipating a second wave of retirement applications, which will further flood the system.
In November, OPM took in nearly 23,400 retirement applications from agencies to begin processing them. And in October, OPM had a similarly high intake of over 20,300 applications. That’s more than triple OPM’s volumes from October and November 2024, when just about 13,700 applications entered the system.
All told, OPM’s inventory of retirement applications is now over 48,300, nearing four times the 13,000 applications the agency aims to have on hand at once, as it both manages incoming applications and processes existing ones.
In April, OPM estimated the entire process — from the day an employee submits an application, to the day the employee’s annuity is finalized — took between three to five months. OPM’s part of the process alone, at that time, took about a month and a half.
But the rising application volume has slowed the pace of processing. The average time it takes OPM to review an application, calculate benefits and finalize an annuity has continually increased for most of 2025. After peaking in October at an average of 79 days, nearly three months, OPM’s average processing time decreased to 73 days in November.
Processing times for digital retirement applications, however, are notably faster. OPM has been completing those applications in about 38 days, or just over a month. In November, OPM reported that about one-third of incoming applications were digital, and two-thirds were paper-based.
“Digital cases are moving more than twice as fast as paper cases, but we are expecting these numbers to decrease,” Lee said. “We have a surge of applications going on right now, but as the surge decreases, we also expect our digital case [processing times] to decrease substantially.”
At many agencies, the retirement process is relatively similar. Once an employee applies for retirement, the employee’s home agency first prepares the application and sends it to a payroll provider for processing.
Image source: Office of Personnel Management.
After initial agency and payroll processing is complete, the retiring employee receives a lump-sum payout of their unused annual leave.
From there, the application goes to OPM for review and the calculation of a temporary “interim” annuity payment, usually between 60% and 80% of a retiree’s final annuity.
Lastly, retirees begin receiving their final annuity once OPM fully adjudicates their applications — a process that, under usual circumstances, takes several months.
Some outlier cases can take much longer. OPM has said court orders, special annuities, part-time or intermittent federal service, or even working at multiple different agencies, can all slow the process.
One federal employee who spoke to Federal News Network retired in June 2024 and is still waiting for her application to be fully adjudicated, despite receiving interim payments in the meantime.
But with this year’s massive wave of retirements, the retiree feared further delays in the finalization of her application.
“I just don’t want it to get lost in the system,” she said. “I feel like I have no control.”
OPM has received nearly 139,000 retirement applications so far this calendar year, and processed about 103,000. But the workload is expected to grow in the next few months. OPM is anticipating thousands more applications to enter its systems by the end of December.
With applications on track to surpass 140,000 this calendar year, OPM is facing the highest retirement volume in at least the last quarter-century — and possibly ever.
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DRP has swamped the federal retirement process
The flood of DRP retirees has added substantially to the government’s retirement application volume. Of the 35,000 total applications in ORA with a September retirement date, DRP employees represent about half — more than 17,500 applications.
In other words, September’s digital retirement volume is likely double what it would have been without the DRP.
Of all DRP applications currently pending, close to three-quarters, or about 12,650, have reached OPM, according to numbers OPM provided to Federal News Network.
Other retirement applications, however, are still with either agency HR offices or payroll providers, awaiting initial processing before they can be delivered to OPM.
A glance at the status of federal retirement applications stemming from DRP.
Applications not yet with OPM may face longer wait times. The National Finance Center, for instance, estimates a current processing time between 60 and 90 days once receiving an application, according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.
Rob Shriver, a former acting director of OPM during the Biden administration, summed up the current experience as one of “incredible frustration” from DRP employees and others trying to separate from government service.
“HR was already understaffed — now lots have left, and they have an ever-increasing workload. It’s all going to create backlogs,” Shriver, currently managing director of the Civil Service Strong initiative at Democracy Forward, told Federal News Network.
As those thousands of retirees wait, the typical end-of-year retirement flood OPM is expecting will add to the workload, and as a result, likely delay the timeline for finalizing annuities.
“There’s no question — we have a very busy time now, and we’ll get another big surge in December,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in an interview with Federal News Network. “We’re certainly cognizant and doing everything we can to anticipate and deal with the larger volume.”
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Retiring federal employees “in the dark”
Along with OPM, agency HR offices are also seeing slowdowns in retirement processing work, as they review employees’ applications before forwarding them to OPM. Challenges in HR have led to many retiring employees saying they are confused or frustrated, as they face delays, limited information and, for some, application errors.
Some fear the issues will only get worse as more retiring employees enter the process.
One former employee from HHS, for instance, described having to submit her retirement paperwork three separate times earlier this year. The employee opted to retire after being told she was one of 10,000 that HHS laid off in April as part of a reduction in force (RIF).
Despite being subject to the RIF, the HHS employee said her personnel file was incorrectly marked as a “voluntary retirement.” As she attempted to work with the agency to correct the error, she said she received conflicting and limited information from different parts of HHS, as well as OPM.
“I’ve been yanked around — the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing,” she said.
By now, the HHS employee has managed to receive her interim annuity payment, nearly five months after her official separation date, but is still waiting for her final annuity from OPM.
“I’m pretty happy that worked out, but getting there really required several months of working with my HR specialist,” the employee said. “I think there were some points that she was ready to pull her hair out.”
An HHS spokesperson declined to comment and referred all questions on retirement processing to OPM.
One employee retiring from a career at SSA also experienced delays in the retirement process. On multiple occasions, when he reached out to HR to request updates, he received auto-replies saying SSA’s HR department was “experiencing an unprecedented volume of requests,” according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.
Still, the SSA employee expressed a level of understanding for the delays he experienced.
“All the people in my agency did the best they could,” the employee said. “I’ve been in the dark a good bit, but that’s through no fault of anybody’s.”
In response to questions from Federal News Network on retirement processing, an SSA spokesperson said the agency “has the right level of benefit specialists dedicated to processing employee retirement applications in a timely manner.”
“Processing times vary based on when an employee submits their application, the completeness of the application, and the review process,” the spokesperson added.
For some, the retirement challenges go back to the beginning of the year, prior to the DRP flood. One IRS retiree who retired in January described limited information from HR throughout the process. Though his application eventually made it to OPM and was finalized, he questioned how IRS would handle much higher volumes later in the year from the DRP.
“If you’re months behind from 1,400 people, what are you going to do when 22,000 people go at once?” the retiree said.
The situation at IRS has changed considerably since January. Some currently retiring IRS employees described the agency’s HR office being far behind schedule. Several told Federal News Network they have not received their lump-sum annual leave payouts, nor their interim annuities.
“It’s crazy, and we all feel very, very unsettled,” one said.
“We are in administrative limbo,” another said. “We’re just all at a standstill.”
Over the last few months, retiring IRS employees have received multiple mass emails from the agency’s HR office, asking for patience as the office worked to process an “unusually high” workload. The office has asked employees not to call with questions, as that could lengthen the delays, according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.
“Even with this increased volume, our team remains fully committed to ensuring each retiree receives the support they deserve during this important transition,” one email reads.
An IRS spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Federal News Network.
Governmentwide, the processing delays were also exacerbated by the 43-day government shutdown. OPM’s Retirement Services (RS) division continued to operate throughout the shutdown, since it is funded through a trust fund rather than appropriations. But slowdowns still occurred, as some agencies opted to furlough their HR staff during the funding lapse.
“When HR offices close down, finance offices close down, there’s nobody there to process cases and send them to OPM,” Kenneth Zawodny, a former associate director for RS at OPM, explained. “There’s still work coming in, but that big surge continues to be delayed and delayed and delayed.”
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For HR, it’s “the biggest test they’ve ever faced”
As retirement applications flooded into agencies this year, many HR offices quickly became swamped. Some HR employees themselves took the opportunity to exit their jobs, leaving larger workloads for those who were left.
Glieger, the retirement planning advisor, described many HR departments as “simply overwhelmed.”
“We have bottlenecking of a lot people that are leaving on DRP, and so [HR] just can’t provide the kind of support that they used to before,” Glieger said.
The challenges for HR have left some retiring employees in the dark. One described his experience in the retirement process as “not normal.”
“Because of their caseload, I was just one in a huge stack of people,” the employee said.
The governmentwide HR workforce had been steadily growing over the last few years. Overall, HR staffing increased by about 8,000 employees between fiscal 2020 to 2025, according to OPM data.
But due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, HR staffing has decreased by about 5% so far in 2025, with agencies losing a cumulative total of about 2,600 employees. The numbers are only accurate through September, however, and do not include HR employees who left their jobs through the DRP.
A former agency chief human capital officer (CHCO), who requested anonymity to be able to speak candidly about the situation, said federal HR has long been “chronically understaffed.”
“My heart is with the HR offices,” the former CHCO said. “They are overworked, underappreciated and this is really the biggest test they’ve ever faced.”
In 2022, OPM named HR as one of the government’s three ongoing mission-critical skills gaps. And during a 2023 CHCO Council forum, one participant noted difficulties in retaining HR specialists, due to a broader skills shortage in the HR profession.
“The agency is effectively competing with the private sector and the whole of the federal government,” the participant said.
The former agency CHCO also expressed concerns about the future of the HR profession in government, especially considering the higher workloads HR employees have faced this year.
“They didn’t create this mess,” the former CHCO said. “They’re the ones that were trying to implement what was never done before, with very little direction, very little support, and a lot of people yelling at them to move faster, without any understanding of what the consequences would be.”
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A second retirement flood lies in wait
As DRP applications inundate the government’s retirement process, agencies are also bracing for a second retirement wave at the end of this month.
Many federal employees choose to retire each December, since it can maximize their lump-sum annual leave payouts. That leads to a yearly, and expected, surge in retirement applications entering OPM’s system.
The DRP wave and the December wave make up a significant part of this year’s retirements: Employees with retirement dates in September and December, combined, account for 72% of all 2025 retirements, according to OPM.
In anticipation of the annual application surge each year, OPM temporarily adds more staffing to its Retirement Services division. That can mean anywhere between 30 and 50 additional full-time equivalents (FTEs) to assist with processing new applications. The agency also addresses the annual surge by increasing overtime hours for RS employees.
Kupor said those usual accommodations will be “a little bit higher this year because of the DRP-related retirements.”
But at the same time, OPM lost a significant chunk of its own workforce this year. The agency’s staffing has declined by more than one-third — about 1,000 employees — due to the DRP, as well as some RIFs and probationary firings.
In OPM’s RS division, the staffing losses have been relatively smaller. Since January, more than 100 RS employees have left their jobs either due to the DRP or regular retirement — a reduction of about 16% of that division’s workforce, according to OPM.
Currently, the RS division has about 300 employees who process incoming applications. Another 200 or so employees work in the call center to answer retirees’ questions, and several hundred more handle other types of cases, like survivor benefits and post-retirement adjustments.
In November, OPM’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) warned that “operating with a reduced workforce” will be a top management challenge for OPM in the coming year.
“The effective loss of this large number of employees represents a challenge facing OPM in building and sustaining an optimal workforce to support the agency’s mission,” a Nov. 24 OIG report states. “This reduction occurred rapidly and has created immediate gaps in operational capacity.”
Kupor, however, pushed back against some of the concerns from the OIG report.
“More headcount is not the answer to the currently long application processing and call center wait times,” Kupor wrote in Dec. 8 comments addressed to the OIG. “We have a comprehensive approach to address this … Nonetheless, given we are dealing with both paper-based and electronic-based applications and the sheer volume of applications we are receiving, we recognize that processing times are likely to increase in the short term.”
OPM looks to interim annuities. But some are waiting on that too.
In the short term, Kupor said OPM is trying to be “as transparent as possible,” while also asking RS staff to focus on delivering interim annuities to retirees as quickly as possible.
“We recognize that this is a very, very significant number of applications we’re seeing,” Kupor said. “We’re trying to get ahead of that and make sure that we can be responsive.”
The standard approach to retirement processing, in the past, has been for HR to work on a retirement application, and then send it to OPM, usually within 30 to 45 days, according to a former agency CHCO. An employee will also typically see a lump-sum payout of their annual leave within about two pay periods.
“A lot of people would live off that lump sum while their retirement annuity is being calculated by OPM to get an interim payment,” the former CHCO said. “But now they’re at a point where they’re not even able to do that.”
Lee, from OPM’s RS division, said having to wait months to receive an interim annuity payment is “the first thing retirees worry about” once separating from government.
Historically, about 40% to 50% of all retirement applications have been able to receive an interim payment almost immediately.
But more recently, OPM said it has made “system changes” that now allow for about 70% to automatically get an “instant” interim payment.
“This is a major improvement in financial security for retirees,” Lee said.
Some retiring DRP-takers, however, still expressed frustrations as they remain waiting on their interim annuities, as well as their lump-sum annual leave payouts, with little communication and few answers.
“This whole process has been a nightmare — employees are still showing up on rolls as active employees, and a large amount of employees have still not heard from HR,” one employee wrote in an email to Federal News Network. “We are literally stuck in limbo — no payments, no more checks. This is causing financial hardship for so many people.”
In another email viewed by Federal News Network, one HR representative told a retiring federal employee: “The events of this year and the large amount of employees leaving the federal government has put a strain on the normal processes.”
“Things are moving forward,” the email reads. “Just at a slower pace than normal.”
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A major step toward retirement modernization
The challenges in federal retirement this year come as OPM attempts to make longer-term improvements to the process overall.
After several years in the making, OPM fast-tracked its modernization initiative, the ORA platform. Over the summer, the agency launched ORA and began asking all incoming applications to be entered through the new platform.
For decades prior, OPM’s Lee said the retirement process was highly fragmented, with many agencies and payroll providers operating under different systems. She lauded the ORA as a “unified retirement ecosystem” that removes some manual processing steps that had been creating delays and bottlenecks. She said new automation features have reduced application errors.
“Now by the time the package reaches HR, it is far more accurate — it’s more complete than anything we have ever seen in a paper environment,” Lee said.
Lee added that OPM has continued to ask for feedback from HR specialists using the new platform, which she said has been critical in shaping ORA.
“That collaboration is one of the big reasons ORA is working as well as it is today,” Lee said. “They test new features before they were released. They told us immediately when there were glitches.”
Since its launch over the summer, more than 91,000 retirement applications have been initiated through ORA. Kupor said that generally, the rollout so far is “going very well.”
“It really enhances the front-end of the process,” Kupor said. “Instead of people literally printing out paper documents and sending those documents to our team in Pennsylvania to handle manually, [employees and HR offices] now can just go onto the [ORA] system and they can begin their application electronically.”
John Hatton, staff vice president of policy and programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE) said that generally, adding more visibility through ORA and being able to see where a claim is in the process, is a significant improvement.
“We’re not out of the woods with the whole system being improved,” Hatton said. “But I think it’s a step in the right direction.”
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Some cite issues in new retirement platform
While many experts see OPM’s retirement modernization project as a positive development in the long run, some have expressed reservations about the timing of the rollout — coming at the same time as a major surge in applications.
“Retirement is already a pretty stressful process for people, so then on top of that, not having a clear process or information about a new system only adds to the anxiety,” said Glieger, the federal retirement advisor. “[OPM is] very hopeful that over time this is going to be a good system, but right now there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together for all of that efficiency to really start showing up.”
OPM has rolled out three versions of ORA since the platform first launched in June. OPM’s Lee said a “big re-platforming” in August went “extremely well,” something that she credited to the feedback of HR specialists who pointed out development issues early on.
The initial rollout of ORA over the summer, however, also hit some bumps in the road. The update caused many retiring employees to resubmit their paperwork at the request of their agency HR offices, according to multiple retirees.
The new ORA platform, notably, also contains an auto-population feature, which fills in employees’ service history, annuity estimates, high-3 calculations and more.
Some employees who have used ORA described seeing errors appear on their applications, after being auto-populated. One DOJ employee who resubmitted her application on ORA said an auto-populated error led to further delays. Her experience was “confusing,” she said, adding that some parts of the ORA platform were “too limited.”
A DOJ spokesperson told Federal News Network that the agency “continues to look for ways to improve the offboarding process to ensure employees are processed out in an efficient and timely manner.”
In November, the IRS’s HR office also acknowledged that ORA had been auto-populating incorrect data for retiring employees. The errors were apparent in calculations for service history, “high-3s” and sick leave, according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.
“Please rest assured that your HR specialist will include accurate documentation with your retirement package,” the message said. “These documents will ensure that [OPM] receives the correct information needed to process your retirement accurately.”
Lee said the auto-population feature of ORA is intended to give retiring employees an opportunity to identify and correct errors earlier on, and to “reduce preventable issues” before they further slow the process down the road.
“Instead of relying on guesswork or waiting weeks for an answer, ORA shows employees exactly what’s finished and what needs attention,” she said. “It took a complicated, technical process, but it made it straightforward and manageable for an employee.”
But some employees said they are continuing to experience technical difficulties with OPM’s platform. In one example, when a retiree struggled to get a temporary password from OPM to access ORA, her inquiries to OPM’s customer service went unanswered. She instead received automatic email replies, saying it would take two weeks to generate the password.
“I have still not received any money — interim annuity or even annual leave payment,” the employee told Federal News Network. “It has been a mess!”
Kupor said OPM will continue rolling out new versions of ORA as more features or adjustments are needed. At the same time, though, he acknowledged the frustrations from retiring employees who are experiencing long wait times, and who had to resubmit their applications.
“We’ll never just kind of clap our hands, declare ourselves done,” Kupor said. “This is a major modernization project, and it’s going as well as we could have expected. We obviously appreciate that this is an incredibly important thing for us to get right and to get timely. And we totally respect the fact that after a long career in federal service, people expect that they should be able to retire with dignity, and in an efficient way.”
OPM’s long-time efforts to modernize federal retirement
The ORA platform was an initiative that began under the Biden administration as part of a multi-year strategy to modernize the government’s entire retirement process. The Trump administration has since taken up the mantle and continued the initiative this year.
“I really do believe it’s an improvement. It’s something I’ve been waiting for — for a long time,” said Tammy Flanagan, a federal retirement expert and advisor with Retire Federal. “I can’t understand why it took this long, and I was concerned that OPM implemented it this year, but maybe it’s a good thing because of the volume. Maybe it will help ease that burden.”
By now, OPM has onboarded major payroll providers, including the Interior Business Center (IBC), National Finance Center (NFC) and Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), to the new ORA platform. OPM said it is still working with some smaller providers to bring them into ORA.
Shriver, the former OPM acting director under the previous administration, said he was “glad to see” the modernization efforts continuing.
“But an online retirement application is only step one,” Shriver said. “If you have a bunch of digital applications coming in, but you still have a paper process on the back end, you need people to take those applications [and] turn them into actual annuity payments.”
For decades, OPM has been trying to update its retirement systems, with some efforts dating back to the 1980s. But time and again, the agency’s attempts at modernization have fallen short of expectations.
In 2006, for instance, the agency awarded a contract aimed at digitizing the retirement process, but the effort ultimately failed to deliver.
Then in 2010, OPM tried taking smaller steps toward updating the retirement process, an initiative that made some progress, until the agency changed course again a year later.
In a report from 2011, the Government Accountability Office wrote: “For over two decades, OPM has been attempting to modernize its federal employee retirement process by automating paper-based processes and replacing antiquated information systems. However, these efforts have been unsuccessful, and OPM canceled its most recent retirement modernization effort in February 2011.”
After a major data breach hit OPM in 2015, the agency had to scrap many of its IT modernization plans, including the ongoing efforts to modernize the retirement system.
Then during the Biden administration, the retirement modernization effort took on yet another new shape. In 2023, OPM’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) issued a multi-year IT strategy, which became the basis for many of the retirement updates OPM is still continuing now.
What a past surge indicates for those retiring now
The current surge in retirements across government is uncommon, but not entirely unprecedented. In 2013, OPM faced another massive retirement wave.
During fiscal 2013, OPM processed 138,039 total retirement claims from federal employees. It’s the highest volume OPM has had in at least the last 25 years — until now, with OPM on track to surpass 140,000.
In 2013, OPM attributed the delays in part to sequestration, which at the time forced the agency to curtail call-center hours and to suspend overtime hours for Retirement Services employees. The large volume also went hand in hand with longer processing times.
For Zawodny, the former OPM associate director of RS, the problems boiled down to a lack of funding and resources at OPM.
“Without the adequate staffing, without the adequate automation, there’s nothing you can do,” Zawodny said. “There’s only so much that’s going to be able to come through that funnel at a time. No matter how much you pour on top of it, it can’t all come out evenly.”
Zawodny said over the course of 2013, the backlog continued to increase. The office attempted to address the paperwork surge, similar to the current situation, by having staff work overtime.
Later, after getting approved to make more hires in RS, Zawodny said it still took OPM months to get the new recruits through a lengthy hiring process.
“And then you have to train the individuals,” he added. “It took upwards of nine months to a year to get an individual ready to start processing, doing calculations, providing benefits and advice.”
Congress eventually got involved, raising concerns about OPM’s absence of a long-term plan to overhaul the mostly paper-based process, combined with across-the-board budget cuts and a lack of consistent leadership within OPM.
More than a decade later, OPM’s new modernization efforts have taken a significant step forward. But in the big picture, the ORA platform represents about one-third of the total work for overhauling retirement processing. ORA modernizes the user-facing part of the process, OPM officials have explained, but more work is ahead before the government’s retirement process can be considered fully digital.
OPM is still looking to upgrade its digital file system (DFS), which contains personnel data on all retiring employees, as well as “Janus” — OPM’s program for calculating retirement annuities for applicants.
“We are revamping an entirely manual process — we’re realistic enough to understand that takes time. It takes iterations of software development, it takes process changes,” Kupor said. “Our team is doing everything we can to be proactive and get ahead of it. I’m certain there will be lessons that we’ll learn and things that we can do differently as we go forward, but we are absolutely committed to the cause here.”
“Digital retirement is changing what federal employees can expect from all of us — from every agency, from our payroll providers, and from OPM as well,” Lee added. “We’re seeing real results today with faster service, fewer errors, greater transparency. We’re committed to continuously improving.”
Despite OPM’s long-term efforts, though, the Trump administration’s workforce disruptions across the entire year have ultimately heightened employees’ uncertainty, according to NARFE’s Hatton.
“Whether it’s a shutdown, whether it’s reductions in force, hollowing out agencies, hollowing out HR staff through the deferred resignation program,” Hatton said. “That all can create disruptions in getting these files processed. We’re especially concerned that the agency side of the process is going to be difficult.”
In the immediate term, Flanagan, the retirement advisor, recommended that retiring employees currently in the process keep an eye out for any communications from OPM or their agencies, while also simply being prepared for things to take much longer than usual.
“But I don’t know what else employees can do,” she said. “I really don’t.”
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