The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) awarded Workday a sole-source contract to overhaul its human resources systems – bypassing any formal competition – citing critical failures in its aging, fragmented HR infrastructure and binding deadlines from President Trump’s executive orders on workforce restructuring.

OPM acts as the federal government’s central HR shop, setting workforce policies, handling background checks, and managing benefits programs for the more than two million civilians across federal agencies.

That made OPM an early target when the new Trump administration froze most federal hiring and issued orders to root out waste and dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Trump also launched DOGE, a Musk-led initiative aimed at shrinking the civil service.

DOGE has leaned on agencies like OPM to carry out its workforce reduction agenda, which has turned out to have saved a lot less money than originally promised.

Under that pressure, OPM said its current HR software stack is fragmented, outdated, and has “reached a critical failure point,” causing payroll errors, disrupted benefits, and forcing staff into unsustainable levels of manual work – all while trying to meet Trump’s directives to revamp the federal workforce.

“Recent Presidential directives impose strict deadlines for workforce restructuring and merit-based hiring reforms, requiring real-time workforce data and integrated HR capabilities that OPM’s current systems cannot deliver,” the justification letter stated. “Market research confirms Workday is capable of meeting these urgent federal-specific requirements within the required implementation window.”

So OPM is turning to Workday to fix the mess, and announced the one-year contract award in a sole source justification letter [PDF]. It’s rushing the award to get the new system in place by July 15, when it expects a federal hiring freeze to be lifted.

Opening the contract to bids would have delayed deployment by six to nine months, OPM claims, putting it out of compliance with Trump’s workforce mandates and risking reputational damage, as well as screwing with payroll, benefits, and retirement processing.

 

This article can be seen in its entirety at The Register