Federal retirement processing has slowed substantially this year due to DRP. As OPM continues modernizing retirement systems, another application surge looms.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dar...
They seem to think the new systems helped:
> Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade.
> Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM.
> “OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network.
> But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications.
> “A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”
> When we met with the developers in Macon, Georgia, OPM's engineering hub, they told us the PowerApps experience was so unfriendly that even they were afraid to make changes. Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly.
How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?
Really depends. It can work great, I see some really good No/Low code tools in ERP systems. Things like alerts, workflows, custom fields, actions, etc are... you would be surprised the ingenuity of people, but also - yes there are limits.
An ERP is practically an opinionated entire operating system with its own data, conventions, rules, ACLs, etc...
But I wouldn’t build the foundation of an ERP system on stuff like that. I think you’re describing a scripting interface, rather than the core?
What i am talking about is more simple
1. user defined actions. 2. common triggers (object X Save, object Y delete) 2. user defined fields on core data tables 3. user defined tables
You can go very far with that, and a drop into a VB script, or run a prebuilt action (IE some verb on the object, like "print this document" on Save)
If the project you're implementing is Big (which the federal employee retirement system qualifies for by any sane metric), then the infra you described is inappropriate. If the project isn't Big, then my comment wasn't addressing it.
Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.
> With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end.
Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.
18F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F Overview of the related programs: https://willslack.com/pif-18f-usds/
(A warning about Odd Lots: the hosts never question or push back on people talking their book. This especially bad with politicians and political appointees, who are often very creative during their interviews.)
Without this, this effort would not have been possible.
> Fortunately, we stumbled on a critical clue. While poring over old documentation, we discovered that OPM actually had data warehouses that stored historic information about every federal employee. Apparently, these warehouses were created as part of a modernization effort in 2007, and HR and payroll offices all across government have supposedly been regularly reporting into it.
> For some reason however, this was not well known at OPM, and those that knew about it didn’t know what data it held, nor considered how it could be used to simplify retirement processing. Not many had seen the data, and administrators were initially resistant to sharing access.
> From a software perspective, this was the holy grail: a single source of truth that held all the information that the manual redundant steps were meant to review. Because the information was regularly reported by HR and payroll, by the time an employee retired, OPM should already have everything needed to process the retirement, without anyone re-entering or re-verifying information.
Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.
I’m sure in reality the people who built this system were smart, and wanted people to use it, but were just buried under layers of technology-unaware management and bureaucrats who felt threatened, afraid it would marginalize or eliminate their paper-pushing jobs. But this very likely reality is just more proof that the government needs significant restructuring. Most people in management at the government are there purely because of tenure, not because they’re great leaders, nor subject matter experts in how complex things are efficiently built and run outside the government world.
1. That’s a whole extra level of responsibility / management / bureaucracy. At some point, somebody near the top needs to care or it doesn’t all get done. The existence of this DB says somebody cared, they just didn’t have enough power.
2. I’m curious how this compares to experiences at Big Old Corp, like IBM or GM, not just the SV darlings.
Since that enormous breach of their core responsibility became public more than 10 years ago, I wonder if there are reasons, beyond managerial incompetence, that over the past 18 years the federal HR department hesitated to expose processes—specifically ones that depend on careers’ worth of highly personal data, and that don’t NEED to move fast—to the world through a publicly-routed hairball of JS SPA crud...
I get how it’s nice to see instantly what amount will be on your pension check, but that’s not exactly the only factor weighing into your decision to retire. You can reckon a fairly good guess yourself and from talking to peers, and it’s not like seeing the exact number instantly would let you do much to change it. And not to normalize mediocrity, but… I feel like federal employees by that point in their career have acclimated to long bureaucratic waits.
And it’s a nit, I know—but I sure wish they’d cleaned their phone cameras before they made photos for bragging to the public. On those… phones… which surely belong inside the secure document processing facilities where they were mugging for casual selfies…
[0] https://oversight.house.gov/report/opm-data-breach-governmen...
There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ, they're quick (sometimes to the point of seeming rushed) to show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements that are mostly hot air, and often even work stolen from others.
It's sad, but I think our generation is partly to blame, since we demanded that from them.
It must suck to lose your whole life and personality just to appease the meritocratic golem.
Edit:
>I've noticed a lot of crime in [city].
>Crime is not new to [city].
>Didn't say it was.
Come on, the quality of this discourse is abhorrent.
Those are some mighty fine hares you're splitting.
Like, the easiest, most obvious example in the world is trump: he hyperbolically brags constantly about things he didn't do or actively tried to stop and it would be real hard to argue that he's genZ.
When you single out a specific group for your observation, it has strong implications about the other groups you didn't mention.
As in this case: why did you only mention genZ?
>But that doesn't imply all [B]s are [A]s
Come on, dude. This gets covered in the first 10 minutes of any entry-level course to logic ...
Instead we're writing english language sentences to be read by humans. Where connotations and implications and other such "unspoken" things absolutely matter.
>But that doesn't imply all [Hyperbolic]s are [GenZ]s
Seems clear to me.
Steve Jobs was born in 1955, the ball has been rolling for a while now. Gen Z might just be the crowd that recognizes how lucrative it is to scam people.
Edit: you edited your comment so now my reply doesn't make sense. I would re-post your old comment but I didn't save it. I won't change mine because I'm not like that.
Musk was born in 1971, for example.
Isn’t it true for every so-called edge that CEOs pitch to shareholders?
> Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to spearhead the new National Design Studio that will seek to make digital services at federal agencies more efficient, two officials familiar with the plan said.
> Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create the studio - a new body that one of the officials said appears to be a stripped-down successor to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk.
The work described in this blog post seems to have been done under its predecessor, DOGE, given that the launch date was June 2. But apparently these engineers moved to the new organization, so that’s why the blog post is there.
Sigh...
Does anyone have a scoop on NDS? Is it composed of 18F staffers?
Sounds just like Sharepoint.
silexia•2h ago
The shrinking of the federal government is much needed as there is no mechanism to remove dead wood like bankruptcy does for private industry. We do need a smoother mechanism than just hacking whatever is not protected by insane public employee unions though.
witte•2h ago
Unless a given industry is too big too fail, or requires millions to billions in corporate welfare, or where bankruptcy voids responsibility of ecological disasters and socializes the damage. Since those things have obviously never happened.
rayiner•2h ago
silexia•27m ago
throwaway-11-1•2h ago
jfengel•1h ago
stocksinsmocks•1h ago
parrellel•49m ago
Certainly seems to be.
estearum•1h ago
What do you mean?
The budget is voted on by Congress literally every single year. The mechanism absolutely exists. The political consensus to do so is harder to achieve, but that's only when people actually don't universally agree change is needed (or how specifically to change it).
api•1h ago
xp84•1h ago