If we are now seeing this that means it is already underway!!!! Seems notable?
WASHINGTON — The White House is moving to do what no president has accomplished since the end of World War II: eliminate a major federal agency.
If the Trump administration succeeds at dismantling the Office of Personnel Management, the closure could be a blueprint for shuttering other departments as it tries to shrink government.
The agency would be pulled apart and its functions divided among three other departments. An executive order directing parts of the transition by the fall is in the final stages of review, administration officials said, with an announcement by President Donald Trump likely by summer. OPM employees were briefed at a meeting in March.
For Trump, the breakup of the 5,565-employee federal personnel agency would offer a jolt of bureaucratic defibrillation to a slow-to-change workforce that the president and his top aides have targeted as a symptom of a sluggish, inefficient government.
The experiment will be closely watched not just on Capitol Hill, but also by other agencies that could be next.
"It's a big, exemplary step," Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget and acting OPM director, said in an interview. She characterized the agency created to oversee the civil service in 1978 as "fundamentally not set up for success, structurally."
The agency is responsible for managing the civilian federal workforce; coordinating hiring, recruiting and performance policies; overseeing health insurance and retirement benefits; and ensuring that agencies adhere to laws governing employees' rights under an apolitical merit system.
For Democrats and their allies in the labor movement, the effort to abolish the agency and redistribute its functions is a power play in defiance of Congress.
"Does anyone really think that if tomorrow the president said, 'I'm dismantling DOD, and I think Ben Carson over at HUD can handle procurement and Betsy DeVos over at Education can handle the Army,' that it would fly through?" asked Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., chairman of a House Oversight Committee panel on government operations.
He has sent Weichert a lengthy request for details of the plan and is scheduling a hearing this spring "so you can make your case."
Watchers of the federal government say they cannot remember a stand-alone department of OPM's scope being dismantled since the World War II era. The Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that carried out public works projects, was dissolved in 1943. Congress abolished the Community Services Administration in 1981 and folded its functions into the Department of Health and Human Services, a closure faulted by congressional auditors as poorly handled. OPM, with a $2.1 billion annual budget, is bigger and more multifaceted.
Some former agencies, such as the Home Owners' Loan Corp., which was prominent in the 1930s, once were large but shrank substantially before being eliminated.
"We're very good at creating new entities," said John Palguta, a retired career executive with the Merit Systems Protection Board, "but we haven't abolished very much. I haven't seen this kind of wholesale dismantlement of an independent, executive branch agency."
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/white-house-considering-dismantling-the-office-of-personnel-management-1.576421