EOIR: Employee Feedback

On August 26, 2025, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) issued Policy Memorandum 25-43, "Employee Feedback." The memorandum establishes EOIR's policy on employee feedback in the wake of the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) August 2025 cancellation of the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), the government-wide survey OPM administers to measure federal employees' assessments of their agencies and leadership. The memorandum states that EOIR "remains committed to implementing FEVS in accordance with OPM's directives" but will no longer treat it as the exclusive source of employee feedback. It argues that, for an agency engaged in what it describes as "high-salience and highly polarized work, like immigration," FEVS scores reflect whether employees agree with the agency's policy direction rather than objective measures of how well the agency is run or how its leadership is performing, contending that employees who support the agency's policies report favorable results while those who do not report negative ones. The memorandum further questions the validity of EOIR's recent FEVS results, stating that in 2023 and 2024 many employees felt pressured to complete the survey and "implicitly, to complete it a certain way favorable to leadership," and that employees had described being "bribed" to participate through the grant of up to 59 minutes of administrative leave or other inducements. In a footnote, the memorandum characterizes EOIR's prior leadership practices between 2021 and 2025 as a "Soviet-style management philosophy" that it says eroded the agency's integrity.