By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
February 24, 2026

Many moons ago, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) developed Administrative Careers for America (ACWA). If you’ve been reading all of my blog posts, you’ll recall our friend Luevano and the consent decree the government entered into in 1981 that outlawed the use of the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) owing to concerns around disparate impact.

ACWA is the offspring of PACE; DOB September 1990. It was written test (augmented over the years, as explained below) designed to evaluate applicants on their qualifications for a government role without running afoul of the PACE discriminatory concerns. But, rather than being a cute newborn birthed by PACE, ACWA became its bastard stepchild.

Why was that?

Well, it was a number of things, but most importantly ACWA was a watered-down PACE that elevated standardization over customization and failed to accurately assess candidates’ skills and aptitudes for the roles they were seeking. Hiring managers found that the ACWA written test did not lead to high-quality candidates being referred for hire. So OPM retooled the test, and ACWA devolved into a candidate’s self-assessment of their skills versus a true skills-based test of aptitude and fitness for a particular role. But the ACWA self-rating schedule had even less correlation with candidate quality than the written exam. Further, the Luevano plaintiffs could not agree on whether the new tests actually satisfied the court’s decree. As a result, utilization of ACWA in federal hiring never took off.

The failure of ACWA dealt a fundamental blow to the Federal merit system. No longer was Federal hiring backstopped by clear entrance examination to ensure hiring of only the highest quality applicants. In the absence of strong testing, candidates were too often hired into Federal jobs based on connections, educational attainment, or their own self-reported evaluations of their abilities.

Last year, President Trump set out to reform federal hiring through his executive order Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service. Among other things, the fundamental principal of the EO was to ensure that federal employees were hired based on demonstrated expertise as evidenced by rigorous assessments. Last summer, the Department of Justice and OPM worked with the original Luevano plaintiffs to terminate the 1981 consent decree that prohibited the use of skills-based assessments.

As a result, gone are the days where a candidate’s self-articulation of one’s capabilities trump (no pun intended) demonstrated evidence of a job’s required skills. This promotes fairness and efficiency in the hiring process – candidates are evaluated for the skills they possess, rather than for the logo on their framed sheepskin or their self-attestation of their qualifications.

And now, after 36 years – to officially mark the occasion in celebration of merit – OPM officially sunsets ACWA. May its memory be a blessing.