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Kupor: 70-80% of Federal Employees Receive Top Ratings, Only 0.2% Fail

Scott Kupor · America’s New AI Strategy: "We're Building a Tech Force" · Joe Lonsdale · Dec 18, 2025 · at 12:51

Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), discusses systemic grade inflation and performance management failures across the federal workforce with host Joe Lonsdale.

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“In the government, if you look across, you know, government for long periods of time, about, like, you know, 70, 80% of people get ranked a four or five, meaning, like, 70, 80% of the people are well above, like, average, basically, and Literally, like, 0.2% of people get ranked a one or a two, basically”

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

Disclosure
Kupor: OPM Is Implementing Forced Curve Ratings Across Federal Government
“We're doing this in our, in the, across the government is you have to kind of effectively legislate you know, effectively a force curve in order to change this behavior. So you have done that at senior levels of the organization. Yeah, we're doing it. We're do…”
Scott Kupor Dec 18, 2025 ▶ 13:40 America’s New AI Strategy: "We're Building a Tech Force" · Joe Lonsdale
Assertion Supported
Kupor: OPM successfully dissolved 42-year federal hiring test consent decree
“And literally that consent decree existed until about three months ago when we kind of went back to the original plaintiff in that case, actually, who was still alive. And we were able to actually get to a resolution where we got ourselves out of that consent …”
Scott Kupor Dec 18, 2025 ▶ 18:21 America’s New AI Strategy: "We're Building a Tech Force" · Joe Lonsdale
Assertion Supported
Kupor: Federal government relied on self-attestation without skill tests for 42 years
“Literally for like 42 years basically the government did away with any form of test, not just like that pace test, which was kind of a, an aptitude test and a leadership test, but also any kind of like Functional tests... We literally relied on self-attestatio…”
Scott Kupor Dec 18, 2025 ▶ 18:36 America’s New AI Strategy: "We're Building a Tech Force" · Joe Lonsdale
Disclosure
Kupor: OPM Is Eliminating Degree and Tenure Requirements in Federal Job Classifications
“And so if we, and we're doing this, by the way, we're going to go eliminate all those requirements in the job classifications so that we can at least hire people at the level that's appropriate for their skills.”
Scott Kupor Dec 18, 2025 ▶ 30:05 America’s New AI Strategy: "We're Building a Tech Force" · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Kupor: Government Cannot Cut Its Way to Deficit Neutrality Without Growth
“No matter how much we cut, and I think there's a lot of ways to cut, you can't cut your way to deficit neutrality in the government, basically. You can only solve this problem through growth, so we have to get to, like, three plus percent GDP growth”
Scott Kupor Dec 18, 2025 ▶ 31:58 America’s New AI Strategy: "We're Building a Tech Force" · Joe Lonsdale
Assertion Supported
Kupor: Only 7% of the federal workforce is under age 30.
“We've got about seven percent of the workforce in the federal government that is early career. And so I'm not supposed to say, you know, ages, but let's call it under the age of 30 is the way to think about it. And that compares with about, like, 22% in the no…”
Scott Kupor Dec 18, 2025 ▶ 3:10 America’s New AI Strategy: "We're Building a Tech Force" · Joe Lonsdale
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