Kupor: 99.7% of federal workers receive performance ratings of three or higher
Scott Kupor · The Person Who Runs HR For 2 Million Federal Workers · Oct 2, 2025 · at 13:10
Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shares internal performance management statistics regarding the federal workforce during an interview with Catherine Boyle.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So fours and fives, so the very, very top, is roughly 65 to 70% of people get a four or five. 90, when you add threes, fours, and five, that's 99.7%, ok? So 99.7% are a three or higher. 0.3%, therefore, is a one or a two.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Scott Kupor
Kupor: Federal workforce will shrink by 300,000 employees due to DOGE
“We've done a lot of work over the course of this year, a lot of which was catalyzed by Elon and the Doge team. As a result, we expect probably that we'll end up with somewhere around 2.1 million employees at the end of the year, so roughly about a 300,000 redu…”
Kupor: OPM introduces forced distribution, capping top executive ratings at 30%
“So one of the things that we're doing, we just put out guidance on this, at least with respect to what are called the SES, which are the most senior level people in government, is we are effectively doing a modicum of a forced distribution. And so we put out g…”
Scott Kupor: U.S. government is unprepared for rapid technological advancement
“Technology continues to advance rapidly and, you know, just to be blunt, the government is nowhere near prepared for it. We just don't have the right talent here.”
Kupor: Federal culture treats risk as binary while ignoring upside
“We've kind of just embedded in the culture, this idea that risk is like this pass fail thing. Like you either have risk or you don't have risk. And if you have risk, God forbid, like, you should ever go there, basically, and so that to me was like the most eye…”
Kupor: Political weaponization of failure prevents a portfolio approach to innovation
“There's no concept I would say of a portfolio. Everything is a one-off project. And when a one-off project fails, then whichever party didn't sponsor it says, those guys are idiots.”
Kupor: Government tech roles fail to attract engineers by focusing on contractors
“The other problem we have with getting, you know, engineers here is many jobs in, in the engineering organizations are managing contractors. Right. And so if you're some like, you know, super smart person, you know, whatever coming out of, you know, MIT comput…”