The governmentwide federal employee survey was cancelled, then decentralized, then cut nearly in half. Here is what that means for federal workforce management — and why it matters beyond government.
What changed, and when
For more than two decades, the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) served as the primary instrument for measuring workforce engagement, satisfaction, and organizational health across the U.S. federal government. Administered annually by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the survey produced data used by agency leaders, oversight bodies, and researchers to understand how federal employees experienced their work and what drove performance.
In early 2025, the survey was cancelled outright. OPM cited a need to reevaluate the instrument and reduce burden on agencies. Shortly thereafter, guidance emerged indicating that some agencies might conduct their own internal surveys, but with no standardized approach, no cross-agency comparison framework, and no centralized reporting requirement. The result was a fragmentation of what had been a unified measurement system.
By mid-2025, additional workforce data collection activities had been significantly curtailed. The Partnership for Public Service, which had long published Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings derived from FEVS data, noted that comparable data would not be available for the foreseeable future. FedSmith and Federal News Network both reported on agency-level confusion about how to proceed with workforce measurement in the absence of OPM-coordinated guidance.
Why standardized measurement matters
The loss of a consistent, government-wide survey instrument is not a technical inconvenience. It is a structural problem for workforce management at scale.
Standardized measurement enables comparison. When all agencies use the same instrument, administered under the same conditions, the data supports legitimate benchmarking. Agency leaders can identify whether their employee experience challenges are unique to their organization or reflect broader systemic conditions. Policy makers can distinguish between isolated problems and government-wide trends. Longitudinal tracking becomes possible: a sustained decline in a particular dimension of engagement, visible across agencies and years, signals something worth addressing at a policy level.
Without a common instrument, each of those functions collapses. An agency that conducts its own survey using its own questions cannot be meaningfully compared to another agency that did the same. A trend identified in one agency’s internal data may reflect real change, or may reflect a change in how the question was asked. The appearance of progress y or decline y can be an artifact of measurement rather than a reflection of organizational reality.
The downstream effects on leadership
Federal agency leaders who have relied on FEVS data to guide management decisions face a practical problem: the data they used to diagnose workforce challenges no longer exists in its prior form. Engagement scores that informed retention strategies, identified high-risk offices, or supported the case for leadership development investment are no longer available as benchmarks.
This creates pressure in several directions. Leaders who want data-informed management practices must now build or procure their own measurement capacity, at agency expense and without the credibility that comes from cross-agency comparison. Leaders who were skeptical of the survey in the first place now have fewer external accountability mechanisms. And leaders who were using the data well y to identify and address genuine workforce problems y lose a tool they had learned to use effectively.
The accountability dimension is worth naming directly. Federal statute (5 U.S.C. 7101 note, as implemented through OPM guidance) has long supported systematic assessment of federal workforce conditions. The survey was one mechanism through which that statutory intent was operationalized. Its absence does not eliminate the underlying obligation to manage human capital effectively; it simply removes a structured way to assess whether that obligation is being met.
What organizations outside government can learn
The federal situation illustrates something that applies to any large organization: measurement systems are infrastructure. They are easy to overlook when they are functioning and very difficult to replace once they are gone.
Organizations that eliminate or significantly reduce their employee listening programs y whether due to cost, organizational change, or skepticism about the value of surveys y often discover that the absence of data does not make workforce problems disappear. It makes them invisible until they become crises. Retention problems go undetected until voluntary turnover spikes. Engagement issues in specific units go unaddressed because leadership lacks the data to know they exist. Manager effectiveness problems persist because there is no systematic mechanism to surface them.
The temptation to reduce measurement is understandable. Survey fatigue is real. The cost of administering, analyzing, and acting on survey data is not trivial. And poorly designed surveys can generate data that is more noise than signal. But the answer to bad measurement is better measurement, not no measurement.
What good workforce measurement looks like
Whether you are running a federal agency or a private organization, effective workforce measurement shares common characteristics.
It is consistent. The same core questions are asked in the same way over time, so trend data is meaningful. This does not mean the instrument never changes, but changes are made deliberately and with awareness of their effect on longitudinal comparability.
It is comprehensive enough to be useful. A single annual question about overall job satisfaction tells you almost nothing actionable. Effective measurement captures dimensions of the employee experience that are linked to outcomes leaders care about: retention, performance, innovation, customer service quality.
It produces actionable data. Results are disaggregated to the level at which action can be taken y the team, the department, the unit y not just reported as an organizational average. Averages mask the variation that is often where the real problems live.
It is connected to action. Survey data that is collected and then filed is worse than useless; it creates cynicism about the process without generating any benefit. Measurement that is consistently followed by visible action y even when the action is explaining why a particular change is not being made y builds credibility over time.
The situation as of publication
As of September 2026, OPM has not announced a timeline for restoring a government-wide employee survey. Some agencies have begun conducting internal surveys; others have not. The Federal Register has not published a proposed rule that would establish a new standardized measurement framework. The Part 250 regulations (5 CFR Part 250) that historically supported strategic human capital management remain on the books, but their implementation in the absence of a functioning FEVS infrastructure is an open question.
The Partnership for Public Service continues to monitor the situation. Federal News Network has reported that some senior HR officials within agencies are concerned about the long-term effects of the data gap on workforce planning and succession management.
What was once a yardstick y imperfect, contested, but consistently applied y has disappeared. What replaces it, and when, remains to be seen.
Gotham Government Services works with federal agencies and government contractors on organizational effectiveness, leadership development, and workforce strategy. If your organization is navigating workforce measurement challenges in the current environment, we welcome the conversation.