Office of Personnel Management

In the end, the department itself vanished just as silently as the savings it claimed to have found.

In November 2025, with eight months still left on its official mandate, Reuters contacted the Office of Personnel Management to check on the status of the Doge initiative.

The OPM director gave the kind of brutally efficient answer that Musk himself might have appreciated.

That doesn't exist.

And, you know, in addition to just those day-to-day things with the vendors, that also does include oversight over all those contracts that we have to negotiate with each of them.

We have to competitively bid these according to our contract with OPM.

And I also then oversee the employees, of course, and the workflow at the plan to make sure that claims are processed timely, they're paid correctly.

If there are any union issues with OPIU, that's the union who represents our bargaining unit at the health plan.

Continue by all means.

I can't let you off quite that easy.

So I also get to work with OPM, which is a completely different animal.

We're used to, you know, as union advocates working with the post office and management, try the government.

I retired from the post office a few years back, but I still keep a health benefit from the post office and I still have Medicare Part B also.

Can I keep both or cancel? I would reach out to OPM.

It really depends on your particular situation.

I know that they just changed.

If you want to try to keep working or if you're not sure whether you want to keep working, we can give you some good advice there.

We will represent you for OPM disability.

And then if you want social security disability or you get denied and you want appeal there, we'll represent you in that as well.

There's a very unique overlap between opioid disability and social security.

That's what these podcasts are about.

Feel free to watch the previous two and you'll find out why it's helpful to have someone who understands the offsets and the different requirements to qualify for each just for the federal employee.

today we're going to be talking about a situation that confuses many federal employees pursuing disability benefits that was read so poorly let me say that again and i don't want you to edit that out i just want to read it again more emphatically today we're talking about a situation that confuses many federal employees pursuing disability benefits i think that was better what happens when opm approves your disability retirement claim but social security disability insurance denies your application and what that difference can mean moving forward So the real question I'm trying to get at in a convoluted way is what happens if OPM approves you, but SSDI denies you? And I can answer it.

If let's say you're like, don't want to listen to this whole long podcast, right? Like you're sick of my jokes.

M&A, he advised Musk on that $44 billion Twitter deal.

He was a senior advisor at the Office of Personnel Management during the Doge era.

So His list goes on.

I'm curious about a Musk ally, a Doge veteran.

And I think we have a very, um, clear-eyed vision here that federal government as an employer needs to adapt to the reality of labor markets today and, um, reduce barriers to people moving in and out of government.

You know, when I first was working at the Office of Personnel Management during the Obama administration, and we worked a lot on intern issues, and the real focus was, if you're going to invest in an intern, you need to be able to turn that person into a full-time employee, or else the investment wasn't worthwhile.

I actually disagree with that now.

While I think it would be great that we have, like, real intern pathways into the federal government, I also think that if somebody who is fresh out of a college or a trade school or a community college, if they come in and work in federal government for two years in an internship, and then they go off into a private sector job, I don't think that's a bad result at all.