The Office of Personnel Management asked insurers in December to turn over monthly service use and cost data on millions of federal health plan members, a move that has alarmed privacy experts and a union critic who says the government has offered too little explanation for what it plans to do with the information. The notice covers carriers in the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs and, by the agency’s own count, would pull in 65 insurance companies covering more than 8 million Americans.
The request goes beyond broad totals. OPM asked for medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data and provider data, and the notice does not tell insurers to strip out identifying information. It also says insurers are legally allowed to disclose protected health information to OPM. Several experts read that language as a sign the Trump administration was seeking identifiable data, not just anonymized summaries.
Sharona Hoffman, a health law expert, said the government would be getting “very, very detailed and granular data about everything that happens,” and warned that “the concern here is the more information they have, they could use it to discipline or target people who are not cooperating politically.”
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The people affected include federal workers, retired members of Congress, mail carriers and their immediate family members, which gives the request an unusually broad reach across the federal workforce and retiree population. Michael Martinez filed a public comment in February opposing OPM’s proposal, saying, “You can anticipate a scenario where this information on 8 million Americans is now in the hands of OPM and there's a real concern of how they use it,” and adding that, “They've given no information about how they would treat that information once they have it,”
The notice lands against the backdrop of a Trump administration defined by haphazard mass layoffs and firings of thousands of federal workers, and by repeated tests of the legal limits around sharing sensitive tax or health information across government agencies. That context has sharpened the reaction to OPM’s request, which was posted and sent in December but drew fresh attention after public comments like Martinez’s surfaced in February.
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The central question now is not whether OPM can ask for the data; the notice says insurers are legally permitted to share it. It is whether a federal agency that has not explained how it will store, use or safeguard the records will end up holding one of the most detailed health datasets ever assembled on the people it oversees.
