OPM Runs $70 Billion in Federal Health Benefits. It Just Cut a Third of Its Own Staff.

The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program is the largest employer-sponsored health plan in the country — 8.2 million federal employees, retirees, and family members, costing the government and enrollees together about $70 billion in fiscal 2024, up 19% in two years.▸ One office administers it: the Office of Personnel Management. Between December 2024 and January 2026, GAO's audited count shows OPM's own workforce fell 33.9%, from 3,037 employees to 2,006 — the third-steepest cut of the 22 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies GAO tracked, behind only the Department of Education (-45.6%) and the General Services Administration (-36.8%). Among the people who left, per GAO's July 2025 fraud-risk report, were the staff who ran FEHB's fraud reviews. Enrollees, meanwhile, are paying 12.3% more toward their premiums this year, the second straight double-digit jump.

FEHB's premium is split by formula: the government pays up to 75% of any given plan, capped program-wide at 72% of the weighted average across all plans; the enrollee pays the rest.▸ For 2026, on the most common family-coverage tier, that arithmetic runs $1,080.60 every two weeks — $778.03 from the government, $302.57 from the enrollee.

Both sides of that split have been rising fast.▸ The enrollee share climbed 7.7% for 2024, then 13.5% for 2025 — OPM's largest jump in over a decade, then 12.3% for 2026. OPM attributes the run-up to an aging enrollee pool — average age 47 among active employees, 60 once retirees are counted — and rising drug and specialty-care costs. None of that explains why the office that is supposed to be checking who's eligible for the coverage has been shedding the people who do the checking.

GAO's audited tracking puts OPM's own workforce at 3,037 employees in December 2024, 2,827 by June 2025, 2,310 by October 2025, and 2,006 by January 2026 — a 33.9% decline in thirteen months.▸ Of the 549 people who separated from OPM in the fourth quarter of FY2025 alone, 79.1% left through the Deferred Resignation Program and 10% through a formal reduction in force; in the first quarter of FY2026, 89.3% of departures were deferred resignations and none were RIFs — the voluntary program did what a RIF didn't have to.

In a report published July 17, 2025 — weeks before OPM's headcount fell from 2,827 to 2,310 that fall — GAO found that OPM had paused its enterprise risk-management work on FEHB, that the officials who had been running the program's fraud-risk assessments had left their jobs, and that OPM could not say who — if anyone — would lead that work going forward.▸ This is not GAO's first warning: in December 2022, GAO reported that OPM's own estimate put the cost of ineligible family members riding on FEHB coverage at up to roughly $1 billion a year — a single case in that report ran a federal employee fraudulently covering ineligible dependents for about 12 years, generating over $100,000 in improper claims before anyone caught it. GAO's July 2025 report made six recommendations to fix the gap; OPM concurred with all six. As of GAO's most recent public status check, two are closed and four remain open.

Set OPM's own account against its auditor's. OPM's public case for the staffing cuts is efficiency — fewer people running a leaner federal government.▸ GAO's public case is a program spending $70 billion a year that lost, mid-review, the specific staff assigned to find where a slice of that money is going to people who no longer qualify for it. Both things happened in the same twelve months, inside the same small agency, and OPM has not named a replacement lead for the fraud work GAO flagged as unowned. A premium increase lands on every enrollee's paycheck twice a month; an uncounted improper payment lands on no one's, until an audit years later puts a number on it.

Figures are drawn from GAO-25-106885, GAO-26-108583, and GAO-23-105222, and from OPM's own Federal Benefits Open Season Highlights for plan years 2024–2026. The $70 billion FY2024 figure is combined government and enrollee cost, per GAO; the $1 billion improper-payment figure is OPM's own prior estimate, cited by GAO, not a measured loss for any specific year.