The Office of Management and Budget’s sweeping proposal to reorganize the executive branch is not intended to cause undue changes to the number of federal employees, despite the plan’s inclusion of many mergers, reassignments and separations of agencies, according to OMB Deputy Director for Management Margaret Weichert.
“This really isn’t about big impacts to the federal workforce in terms of numbers,” said Weichert. “The objective of this exercise was to focus on aligning our resources to pursue what our federal employees want us to pursue, which is the mission first, service to the American people and fiscal stewardship.”
According to Weichert, the more likely scenario is that feds will have to go through training to fill much-needed positions within the government as their old positions are caught up in reorganization.
“I am not concerned about us having too many workers; I’m concerned that 60 percent of our workforce is eligible to retire in the next 10 years,” said Weichert.
“What my bigger concern about our workforce is [is that] we have willing, dedicated civil servants who still aren’t aligned with the jobs that we need today and can’t fill, whether it’s cybersecurity, data science, IT in general, even law enforcement. We’re as interested in retraining and re-skilling and redeploying as anything else.”
Weichert admitted, however, that identifying efficiencies within federal agencies may in fact dislocate employees, but those dislocations would be included in the budget process.
Federal employee unions, meanwhile, are less than trusting of administration promises that they are not out to target federal jobs.
“There’s little reason to believe this reorganization plan is anything more than a scheme to eliminate essential programs and public-service jobs, reward or punish political appointees depending on their allegiance to the White House, and privatize government programs to reward political donors,” said American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox Sr.
“Most of this so-called reorganization plan, as reported in the media, targets domestic programs that have long been unpopular with anti-government ideologues: merging the Education and Labor departments, removing the food stamp and school meal programs from USDA, and breaking up the personnel agency that administers federal employee background investigations, retirement claims and benefits, and employment policies. The proposal to dismantle the Office of Personnel Management, particularly the plan to allow the Executive Office of the President to take over federal personnel policy, is a straightforward attempt to politicize the civil service.”
Cox cited recent executive orders intended to cut down use of official time, make it easier to fire federal employees and that call for the renegotiation of union contracts with agencies as evidence of the administration’s intent.
OMB Director Mick Mulvaney even cited the executive orders as a part of the reorganization’s overall objective for government.
“Taken together with his directives targeting federal workers, the reorganization plans being pushed through by President Trump are an unprecedented power grab and have nothing to do with improving the efficiency or effectiveness of government,” said Cox.
Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.
