The Office of Personnel Management has delayed the timeline for distributing the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) — the government’s signature survey to take the pulse of the federal workforce each year.
Typically, federal employees take the governmentwide survey each May. But for 2025, employees will not be asked to fill out the FEVS until later in the year, OPM said in a memo published Friday. OPM did not give a specific timeline for when the survey will be administered.
OPM said the postponed timeline is intended to help agencies as they handle the Trump administration’s “urgent” and governmentwide efforts to restructure the federal workforce. This week alone, agencies have been given a two-week deadline to put together plans for conducting reductions in force — on top of many agencies’ return-to-office plans now getting underway.
OPM’s postponement of the survey this year is not the first time FEVS has been delayed. In 2020, OPM pushed back the survey timeline to help agencies focus on high-priority work related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Adjusting FEVS questions
OPM said this year’s FEVS will also bring back a question that had previously been removed from the survey during the Biden administration. The question asks employees if in their work unit, “steps are taken to deal with a poor performer who cannot or will not improve.”
The revival of the question on poor performers appears to align with the Trump administration’s push aiming to increase accountability of the federal workforce, and remove employees who it believes are poor performers. Agencies have already removed many probationary federal employees on the basis of poor performance, but many of those who have been terminated say they have never had performance issues in their jobs.
Although the survey question about steps being taken to address poor performers was removed, the survey has continued to ask employees about poor performers in their work units more generally. In 2024, 40% of survey respondents said poor performers remain in their work unit and continue to underperform. 20% of respondents said there are no poor performers in their work unit, and 18% said poor performers remain in their jobs but improve over time.
For the 2025 survey, OPM also said all questions related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility will be removed. The 2025 FEVS will also not include any “gender ideology-related questions,” OPM said in its memo.
The DEIA questions were added to the survey in 2022 following former President Joe Biden’s executive order on advancing DEIA in the federal workforce. The FEVS DEIA index questions asked federal employees, for example, if they feel included in the workplace, whether supervisors give fair promotion and work opportunities to all employees, and if agencies are meeting accessibility needs. The index results had continued on an upward trend between 2022 and 2024.
The Trump administration’s OPM said it will go back to the past couple years of FEVS reports and mark the documents to say they are inconsistent with President Donald Trump’s executive orders. OPM asked agencies to do the same by updating their online FEVS content to reflect the most recent changes to the survey.
The 2024 FEVS results marked an all-time high for the employee engagement index since its introduction to the survey in 2010. Between 2023 and 2024, the engagement score increased from 72% to 73%.
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