OPM has launched the annual Combined Federal Campaign, running October 1 through December 31, meanwhile hinting that this might be the last year the government conducts that charity drive after more than six decades.
In a memo to agencies at opm.gov/chcoc/latest-memos, OPM said it “believes strongly in charities and supports the generosity of federal employees in donating their time and money to charitable causes. OPM hopes that this year’s CFC campaign is successful. However, OPM is concerned about excessive administrative costs associated with the CFC, along with steadily declining participation, and it is evaluating changes to the CFC for 2026 (including whether to continue the program).”
Reading about the possible end of the Combined Federal Campaign brought back to me some not-so-fond memories of not only the CFC but the Navy Relief pitches I had to endure.
I enlisted in the Marines under delayed entry in December 1977 and went to Parris Island in August 1978. In addition to our financial planning pitch, they gave recruits a big one for Navy Relief, but it was at my training station in Millington, Tenn., in late 1978 that I got the full effect.
(Somehow, the Marine recruiter forgot to mention mess duty and Navy Relief when we were signing our enlistment papers.)
The commanding officer of the training operation, a Navy commander, got us Marines training in aviation all together and we thought we were to get a briefing on the world situation. Instead, he said the dreaded two words: “Navy Relief.”
We had to donate, it was implied, because we were fortunate to not be, well, unfortunate. Most of us gave a little, if only to get the officers off our backs.
In future military adventures, we got the pitches for the Combined Federal Campaign and United Way, too.
I do remember that when I was stationed at MCAS Yuma, Ariz., in the summer of 1982, just before my end of active service, the sergeant major of the base came back from leave and wrote a scorching editorial in the base newspaper trashing all of the enlisteds because we had not made a sufficient donation to Navy Relief.
Recent events caused me to think about the CFC because when President Trump announced the DOGE process, I wondered if the people who had taken jobs in the DOGE were themselves subjected to the CFC pitch.
I worked in the Postal Service from 1982 to 1994 and every year we got that pitch for the CFC and United Way, and were told that we were so lucky to have jobs for life with benefits that, in effect, we owed something back to the charities.
The final year of my postal employment had a CFC presentation by one of the postal admins that was so offensive, it wasn’t funny. She said that we were so lucky to have postal jobs and then broke down and cried about how she felt so fortunate to have such a job when other companies were laying off people.
Then I had to sit through an individual presentation by another mailhandler who was designated as the CFC rep, and when I told her that I had made numerous donations to another nonprofit and had even done some free work for it, all she had to say when I said I wasn’t giving any money through the CFC was that I was a “cheap f—k.”
Considering the abuse we got at the post office then, I thought the best way to protest the behavior of management was to simply not give to a charity through work, but to do it on one’s own, just to let them all know that we knew they were full of s—t.