By Eliminating the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) We Lose A Critical Performance Feedback Loop
by Peter Bonner
This is the first of two blog posts on cancelling the 2025 FEVS. Look for “How to Improve Future FEVS (and employee feedback)” next.
Feedback loops are crucial for the effective functioning of any system. The pain from touching a hot stove is a negative feedback loop, the upward growth of dividends on your savings is a positive one. Financial management, key performance indicators, supply chains have built-in feedback loops that give managers data that tell them how the operation is functioning. It helps them make decisions, large and small, that change direction or improve operations. Employee experience is another feedback loop on organizational performance. Studies on organizational performance correlate high employee experience scores with achieving organizational performance goals.
The federal government is shutting off the only enterprise-level employee experience feedback loop that helps assess performance. However flawed, OPM has eliminated the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey for 2025, likely the largest employee survey of its kind in the world. All organizations of any size use employee surveys to find out how they are performing and where they need to improve; they are a pervasive tool for organizational effectiveness.
With this cancellation, we are losing important data that helps federal agencies perform more effectively. In addition to employee perspectives on resources and workload, FEVS tells managers how well they are communicating with employees, if employees understand performance goals, and how their work connects to the work of the agency. It helps make leaders accountable by providing the White House/OMB with data on agency performance.
According to Federal News Network reporting, the reasons for the cancellation include the desire to “thoughtfully recalibrate the FEVS to align with administration objectives,” “to give agencies more bandwidth to focus on the Trump administration’s ‘urgent’ efforts to restructure the federal workforce” and that “a transformed workforce requires a transformed Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.”
Cancelling the 2025 FEVS is yet another blow to data availability and transparency. The Administration has cut budgets for programs collecting and disseminating data at the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Energy, and the Interior as well as the EPA and others. Cancelling FEVS prevents the American taxpayer from getting another data point that provides a composite picture of how their money is being spent and how their government is performing.
What We Lose By Cancelling the 2025 FEVS
Federal Managers and Supervisors will not have data on program performance gaps pertaining to employee attitudes and behaviors beyond what they observe day-to-day. FEVS provides a perspective that helps them step back and get information about whether their employees perceive that they have the skills, resources, relationships, and support to do their jobs effectively. They use the FEVS results to improve their own performance as well as that of their programs.
Agency Leaders use FEVS to take an enterprise view on specific strengths and weaknesses including: leadership and management quality, strategy execution, compensation, resources, work environment, performance, poor performers, communications, ethics, etc. Leaders use this data with their program and branch managers to support performance feedback. In addition, agencies have developed diagnostic tools on how to use the FEVS data to improve in areas where they see comparative deficits or where there are opportunities to build on their strengths. Now, there will be no data later in 2025 to target specific agency and unit actions on how to attract and retain talent. Nor can the data be evaluated with an eye on how to attract and retain excellent talent.
Policy, Oversight, and Assistance Teams from Congress, OMB, GAO, the IGs, and OPM use FEVS to track how well the agencies are doing in fostering agency program performance through employee actions. FEVS can give them a holistic picture of agency performance by looking at FEVS results along with budget, program metrics, strategic objectives, and other data. Teams use FEVS to revise and develop policy, guidance and legislation to improve government effectiveness and efficiency. (Ironically, this Administration's actions to get rid of poor performers and recognizing meaningful differences in performance relies on FEVS data.)
Opportunities Missed by Cancelling FEVS
5 CFR 250 Subpart C and the 2004 NDAA (section 1128) require agencies to conduct an annual survey with a core set of 16 questions. Administering the FEVS on these core questions, and cutting the others, does not appear burdensome. Actually, OPM and the Administration are adding to their burden (and that of the VA and NASA that administer their own surveys) by having to answer inquiries on why they are not adhering to the law.
In subreddits and news articles, federal workers reflect the disillusionment, cynicism, and even despair they have experienced after Administration actions to fire, relocate, or suspend them or their peers. FEVS would help federal leaders understand these reactions, how pervasive these attitudes are, and what they might do to restore loyalty and engagement. Perhaps federal leaders do not want to see or hear the feedback this year before their workforce transformations have taken hold. Perhaps. If the 2026 survey is eliminated, delayed, or changed such that longitudinal data cannot be compared, we will have our answers.
Conducting a 2025 FEVS would help the Administration find out if their new and revised workforce policies are working. Is the federal government more successful in moving out poor performers? Are meaningful differences in performance recognized? Does the workforce understand and do they believe they can act on agency goals? FEVS would help them know if they are making progress in these areas.
Finally, recent modernization efforts – agency-specific FEVS dashboards, unique government organization identifiers (data tags to accelerate survey distribution and analysis), and experiments with rapid-cycle pulse surveys – provide the opportunity for continuous improvement.
Though there is opportunity to make FEVS better, the reasons for cancellation fall short of the benefits FEVS provides.
A key axiom on feedback loops is the more immediate and timely the feedback, the more actionable, the easier to prevent little problems from turning into big ones, and the faster to take advantage of opportunities. As mentioned earlier, FEVS isn’t perfect. One challenge with the annual FEVS can be the delays in distributing the data. We will cover this challenge and others as well as potential solutions in the second blog post. In the meantime, we hope through feedback on this decision that the Administration will realize the consequences associated with eliminating such a useful tool.
For monitoring of FEVS, check out the data collection on dataindex.us.
Peter Bonner is a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists