Exclusive
The nearly $400 million, 10-year contract is expected to deliver a single, governmentwide system for agencies to manage their human resources capabilities.
Drew Friedman
June 10, 2026 2:07 pm
4 min read
The Office of Personnel Management awarded a nearly $400 million contract to Oracle on Wednesday, as part of ongoing efforts to launch a governmentwide IT platform for agencies to manage their human resources capabilities.
The vendor is expected to deliver a consolidated, secure, cloud-based HR platform that all federal agencies will eventually use to manage personnel functions, such as payroll, benefits and employee performance.
“This becomes the centerpiece for how we create effectively a unified set of applications that every federal employee can follow from cradle to grave,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “The opportunities are endless — what this does is basically drive an enormous amount of self-service, and more importantly, the ability for us to actually be able to make the employee experience much more seamless.”
For decades, agencies have used disparate systems to manage various HR services. Governmentwide, there are currently 119 different IT platforms in use for managing agencies’ HR functions.
]]>
“Many are outdated and duplicative,” OPM said Wednesday in a press release. “Fragmented systems lead to delays and errors in personnel processing, leading to unnecessary costs and hurting the government’s operational efficiency.”
The Trump administration has been putting together plans to consolidate those 119 systems into one — a long-time goal for the federal government. The initiative is expected to reduce costs to taxpayers by more than 90%, according to OPM. The agency said the consolidated platform will streamline HR operations and improve data quality.
“Rather than 119 different versions of the same data field or the same capability, we are at OPM going to account for agency-specific flexibilities, but also drive standardization and consistency across the federal employee and practitioner experience,” Jason Parman, OPM’s principal deputy associate director for HR Solutions, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “Hitting the go button enables us to leverage that vendor partner, which will have all of their demonstrated capabilities, all of our fit-gap requirements worked out and all those configurations ready, so that agencies can effectively and rapidly transition to the new platform.”
OPM chose Oracle over Workday for the 10-year contract. Workday will have 10 days following its debrief to file a protest, if it chooses. OPM had initially awarded a task order to Workday in May 2025, only to withdraw the contract a few days later.
Oracle and Workday both did not immediately respond to Federal News Network’s emails seeking comments on the award.
OPM last year issued a request for proposals (RFP), seeking a 10-year contract for delivering the governmentwide HR IT system. The administration initially set a target launch date for July 2027, but that timeline will likely be pushed back by at least six months. Although OPM intended to award a contract by January 2026, the award was delayed by several months due to bid protests from two major tech companies that did not make it to the final contract award stage.
“It’s always hard to predict these things, but the team has done an incredibly thorough process,” Kupor said. “We’ve been using this delay that we had to make sure that all the prep work that we could do with all the agencies is up and running. Our hope is to be able to actually deliver on behalf of the American taxpayers. If things come up that delay, we’ll deal with it as they come, but I’m highly confident in the work the team has done and our ability to successfully defend any challenges to this process.”
]]>
Following the contract award this week, OPM said it will be working with “phase one” agencies on the first steps toward onboarding them to the new system.
“We’re going to literally start fanning out to the phase one agencies who are on the list to basically be able to be the first deployment agencies for the system,” Kupor said. “We’re going to be hard at work — no longer dealing with procurement, but actually the first phase of implementation of this system.”
The HR IT consolidation effort is a major part of the Trump administration’s “Federal HR 2.0” initiative, which OPM announced last year. As part of the same initiative, OPM in March launched a new HR shared service center — which gives agencies the option to enter into an interagency agreement with OPM to receive access to a suite of “vetted” IT tools meant to streamline human capital management capabilities.
OPM said the new platform will ultimately strengthen workforce planning and create a more consistent experience for federal employees and HR teams governmentwide.
“Imagine if you asked one workforce-related question, and you got 119 slightly different variations of the same answer. It takes people, it takes money and it takes time, and it disallows us from making decisions about the workforce,” Parman said. “Now replace that with what we intend to do — and those questions are answerable in real time from a single platform and a single dashboard, or a single set of decision-informing data that we can view — and help make enterprise strategy decisions at scale and quickly. That’s transformative … I see a tremendous improvement in both the lives of the HR practitioner at the federal level, but also all of those communities that the HR practitioner impacts.”
Federal News Network’s Jason Miller contributed reporting. This is a breaking story and may be updated.
Copyright
© 2026 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
