OPM’s public tally of senior government staff is incomplete, watchdog says
The Office of Personnel Management’s digital disclosure of politically appointed and senior career positions in the federal government is missing information it’s statutorily required to have and contains “numerous errors,” a congressional watchdog said Thursday.
According to a Government Accountability Office report, auditors found the website for OPM’s Periodically Listing Updates to Management (PLUM) dataset didn’t include at least seven federal entities, was missing at least 130 presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed roles, and contained errors and inconsistencies, such as duplicative positions and misspellings, among other issues.
“Without accurate information on who holds these senior positions, the public and Congress may not fully understand who is accountable for key decisions, hindering oversight and weakening trust in government,” the GAO report said.
As a result, the watchdog made seven recommendations to the human capital agency to remedy the dataset, including developing processes to ensure that reportable positions are included in the data and disclose the limitations of the information.
The report, which took place between February 2025 and February 2026, comes just a few years after Congress directed OPM to replace its existing publication, known as the PLUM Book, with an online public directory in an effort to increase transparency about senior leaders in government.
According to the GAO, that very law — the PLUM Act of 2022 — came about in response to a previous recommendation it made to Congress to make the information about political appointees more publicly accessible. The site officially launched in December 2023 and as of July 2025, contained data on over 10,000 roles, the report said.
Generally, the PLUM dataset contains information about roles in the government filled by political appointees and senior career staff, including whether it’s vacant, its location, the pay plan it belongs in, and the name of the person in the role.
While GAO found the human capital agency took some steps to ensure quality data, it found more work is needed to make the dataset fit the vision laid out by lawmakers.
Among the roles that were missing from the dataset, for example: The Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for rural development, the Department of Labor’s chief financial officer, and the director of the Peace Corps.
In other cases, the report said, officials who were serving in acting capacities or performing the duties of a role were not reflected in the data, such as the acting administrator of the General Services Administration or the acting director of the U.S. Mint.
Meanwhile, entities that were missing entirely included the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.
Per the report, OPM officials told auditors that they work with the White House to identify what positions are required to be included but that agencies have the primary responsibility for determining reportable positions. Those officials cited lack of visibility into agency human resources systems as an issue.
Other issues uncovered by GAO include inconsistency with unique identifiers, inability for some users to download some of the data, and deficiencies with data contained in an OPM system known as the Executive and Schedule C System (ESCS), which contains information on senior positions and fuels the PLUM website.
According to a Feb. 10 letter included in the report, Veronica E. Hinton, the associate director of workforce policy and innovation at OPM, concurred with all of the recommendations from GAO and said the agency was already working on several of them.
Hinton said OPM is “considering a number of automated data validations and other controls to improve data integrity,” has plans to implement corrective measures to account for issues with ESCS information, and will disclose information on the limitations of the data in an “easily accessible location on the PLUM Reporting website.”
