This OPM data scientist was making government more efficient. Trump is firing people like him.

Ben Jaques-Leslie (courtesy photo)

Ben Jaques-Leslie is a data scientist with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management based in St. Paul who worked on internal programs to make the agency more efficient and transparent. He took the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer after officials directed the agency to cut 70% of its workforce and end remote work options, and is now looking for other jobs in public service.

OPM is the federal government’s HR division, which means Jaques-Leslie’s work often touched on other areas of the government as they sought improvements. 

Despite OPM’s vast brief, it’s worth noting that unlike many employers — whose main expense is typically labor — federal employees don’t comprise the bulk of the federal budget. As the Washington Post reported last year, the 2.3 million federal workers were paid $293 billion last year, 4.3% of the nation’s $6.8 trillion budget. 

Jaques-Leslie recently spoke with the Reformer about the work he did and what the government is losing as a result of the administration’s indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts to the federal workforce.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and links have been added for context.

What did you do for the federal government?

We were the Office of Strategy and Innovation. I don’t know if we still exist, lots of things have been changing. I was in a team of evaluators. The Evidence Act requires agencies to have an evaluation officer and produce learning agendas — evidence to support policymaking — and capacity assessments. I worked on the team that produced the learning agenda and did evaluations of programs and data from OPM. 

So you were looking for ways to improve things within OPM?

Yeah. My main evaluation was on the effects of remote work on applications and candidates for federal jobs. We were looking at an evaluation of the pay increase of TSA officials. We were doing evaluations of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs. We did evaluations of the Presidential Management Fellows program which, you know, are a little bit academic now. And we were working on a big evaluation of the Postal Service Health Benefits Program.

Would you say you were looking for ways to make the government run better or more efficiently?

It’s ironic, right? There’s a great deal of irony in the idea that for “efficiency” you cut the group that was meant to help understand government programs to make them work more efficiently. But that’s exactly what’s happened.

How did things in your office change after Jan. 20?

There was no work to do. It just became very clear early on that there was no interest in any of the work we were doing. As the stuff rolled through the system we stopped doing more and more work because we’re dependent on what the leadership is telling us for this big strategic planning. But there was no information and no communication, and everything quickly turned to “how do we get rid of as much staff as possible?” And at that point it’s kind of hard to do any work. Like I don’t know what you want me to do.

I was actually excited to start working on this Postal Service health benefits program. I was going to do some data science work on that, and I learned that the leadership who had stepped in weren’t even aware of this program. 

I feel like our work is non-political. We can ask questions that are valuable to whatever outcomes you want to get. Maybe I disagree with that outcome, but as a researcher or somebody who likes to answer questions I’m happy to explore them. I’m also happy to be like “that program doesn’t work, we should do something better.” But there appears to be no interest in actually asking questions or learning.

If you could say anything to the people running the federal government right now, what would you say to them?

Their model of how they think about federal workers is just wrong. Every federal worker that I know, our objectives are to follow the statutes, and listen to leadership and directions from the executive. It’s not that we are opposed to any particular leadership, we just are trying to follow the laws. 

In another world you would use the federal workforce to pursue your aims. It seems like a huge wasted opportunity to spend the energy of dismantling it or attacking it, instead of using it to pursue other kinds of goals.

Also, the people who are taking the deferment are not necessarily going to be the least efficient. All of the information technology people at OPM left because they have outside options. They can get jobs relatively easily in the private sector. The idea that it’s just gonna be more efficient to cut people – it doesn’t seem like that’s likely. 

Our work was about trying to learn how to make government work better and more efficiently. I would have been very open to investigate the questions they had, but I didn’t have an opportunity to.

What would you say to people in Minnesota about how the cuts might affect them?

I think it’ll become obvious that the government is not working well pretty quickly. Or maybe not even quickly, but in the medium term. It’ll be pretty obvious that some services are not operating as well. It’s hard for me to imagine any part of the federal government working well in the near term. 

I really was proud of serving the government and doing my work, and I was hopeful and excited to continue to serve the people, and I hope to continue in public service. I think there’s just a lot of things that are hidden: The things government does that people don’t perceive until it is taken away.