The Office of Personnel Management is, once again, being urged to walk back its plans to collect personal health data on up to 8 million federal employees, retirees and their family members.

Six Senate Democrats are doubling down on their concerns that the Trump administration’s unprecedented health data collection poses privacy and security risks for individuals, while also raising questions of legality and constitutionality.

“We support responsible efforts to protect the integrity of federal health-benefit programs,” a letter sent Wednesday to OPM Director Scott Kupor reads. “However, OPM’s proposals create an unnecessarily broad, decades-long, re-identifiable medical history of millions of workers, retirees, spouses, children and other family members.”

The letter, led by Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), called on OPM to suspend the data collection effort and instead use “genuinely de-identified or aggregated data.”

The pressure from lawmakers comes after OPM, in December 2025, outlined plans to begin requiring federal health insurance carriers to submit claims-level data on enrollees in the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs — without expressly restricting carriers from including personal health information.

OPM, at the time, said the data would be used for “oversight activities,” and to ensure carriers are providing “competitive, quality and affordable plans.”

But in their letter, Democrats contended that OPM’s explanation lacks detail. They pushed for more information on why OPM needs to collect personal health data at such a granular level.

“OPM has failed to provide any justification for the collection of person-level data, instead relying on broad references to program integrity, fraud prevention or cost evaluation,” they wrote.

In response to Federal News Network’s request for details on the purpose of the data collection and plans for securing the sensitive health information, OPM spokesperson Kiki Nyoh said, “OPM is focused on eliminating fraud, waste and abuse in federal benefits plans, while ensuring personally identifiable information is protected.”

In June, OPM issued a revised notice clarifying the measures the agency plans to take to secure federal employees’ health information under the data collection effort, “out of an abundance of caution, and in order to address privacy related concerns,” the notice states.

“Records in this system are protected from unauthorized access and misuse through layered administrative, technical and physical security measures,” OPM wrote.

OPM said it would pseudonymize federal employees’ health data by nullifying portions of medical records that contain personally identifiable information (PII) for beneficiaries — including their names, Social Security numbers, plan subscriber IDs and street addresses.

But lawmakers contended that those measures aren’t enough to fully protect sensitive health information from being exposed. According to OPM, the collected data would still include members’ birth year, sex, zip code, healthcare provider names, claim numbers, dates of service, health procedures, diagnoses, drug information and treatments.

“In combination, these features create an extraordinarily detailed longitudinal health history that remains linkable to a specific person,” Democrats wrote. “OPM itself maintains the mechanism needed to reconnect the pseudonymized history to the individual, negating any intended anonymization of data.”

OPM also noted its ability to “re-identify” federal employees’ personal health records when it’s “reasonably necessary to accomplish an authorized purpose.”

Various entities and personnel would be able to access the sensitive health information — including authorized OPM employees, contractors and “other personnel who have an official need for access in order to perform their duties,” OPM said.

Federal employees’ data could also be disclosed to “appropriate” law enforcement authorities if there’s indication of a legal violation by the enrollee, the notice states. The Department of Justice can access the data if OPM deems the information “relevant and necessary” to an ongoing lawsuit. And if OPM either “suspects or has confirmed” instances of fraud, waste or abuse connected to an enrollee’s information, other agencies across government could access the data.

“These overly broad allowances to share sensitive health information are extremely concerning, given this administration’s clearly stated goals of targeting vulnerable populations,” Democrats wrote.

The dispute over collecting personal health data comes as the military has been searching protected medical records to find transgender troops who have tried to continue serving amid the Trump administration’s ban on trans Americans in uniform, as Federal News Network exclusively reported earlier this month.

The lawmakers’ push on OPM this week builds on an initial letter sent in April, which pointed to potential legal violations and the possibility of targeting enrollees across the FEHB and PSHB programs. In part, lawmakers questioned whether the collected personal health information would be used to inform hiring decisions, suitability actions, reductions in force or reasonable accommodations requests.

“We have yet to receive a response to that letter,” Democrats said.

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