Agency Information Request: FEHB & PHSBP Programs Service Use & Cost Data

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced on December 12, 2025 that it would be collecting personal medical information about federal employees, their spouses, and their minor children who are enrolled in either the Federal Employee Health Benefits (FEHB) or the postal workers health benefits program. The notice, which was required for new information collections, solicited comments on the proposal. OPM's proposed collection of this information alarmed critics because it seemingly would give the Trump administration intimate details about individual's health and physical conditions. In a comment opposing the proposal, Civil Service Strong wrote: "The [proposed information collection notice] indicates OPM’s intent to begin collecting 'service use and cost data' on enrollees from FEHB health insurance carriers. According to the [notice], this data will include 'medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data.' This is highly sensitive data—yet OPM’s [notice] provides virtually no information, let alone any meaningful explanation, for what OPM plans to do with this data. Instead, the ICR provides only a limited, generic justification that it plans to use the data for 'oversight' purposes[.]"

On June 23, 2026, OPM issued a final Systems of Records Notice (SORN) for an existing records system that it was repurposing to manage the personal medical information it planned to collect. The SORN was a related but separate action from OPM's planned information collection. While the December 2025 proposal addressed what information OPM would collect, the June 2026 notice addressed how OPM would store that information and the purposes for which OPM could use it. OPM indicated that it would anonymize subsets of the information collected, but it reserved the right and ability to de-anonymize the information whenever it suspects fraud or a violation of a law or regulation. The SORN indicated that, in addition to monitoring the usage of federal healthcare benefits, OPM would be looking for indications of possible fraud and referring records to the Department of Treasury for investigation. The same notice indicated that OPM was changing all references to "gender" in the SORN to "sex.”