Biden's OPM nominee appears headed for confirmation

President Joe Biden's nominee for director of the Office of Personnel Management, Kiran Ahuja, is headed for confirmation via unanimous consent, according to the updated Senate calendar. A vote is likely before the Senate goes into recess at the end of next week.

Ahuja's nomination was reported out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on a party-line vote in late April. However a vote on the nomination was stalled because of a hold placed by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the Washington Post reported, because of what a spokesperson for the lawmaker characterized as Ahuja's "history [of] promoting radical critical race theorists."

Under the Trump administration, OPM was at the center of a controversial executive order banning the teaching of certain concepts in diversity training – an order which focused on purging tenets of critical race theory from agency and contractor training curricula. That order was revoked by Biden on the first day of his administration.

Ahuja, who served as chief of staff at OPM during the Obama administration, said at her confirmation hearing she would focus on employee morale, as well as improvement to the federal retirement system and improving OPM's own IT systems.