May 6, 2008
A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.
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The Partnership Releases New Data on the Federal Government's Retirement Crisis
The Partnership for Public Service
Brain Drain 2008 Issue Brief
Our federal government today faces challenges of unprecedented complexity, from combating
terrorism, to competing in a global marketplace, to
fixing our nation's decaying physical
infrastructure, to dealing with an aging population at home. As federal agencies grapple with these
and
other critical issues, their most experienced workers are retiring — and the government is ill-prepared and ill-equipped to replace this
talent. By 2012, federal agencies will lose nearly 530,000
employees, many of whom hold leadership and critical skills positions. This challenge is
intensified
for the federal government because downsizing in the 1990s reduced the size of the federal
workforce by nearly 400,000 positions and
left agencies with critical skills gaps. Moreover, the war
for today’s talent is fierce, and the federal government is at a distinct hiring
disadvantage with its
often slow and antiquated hiring practices.
To read more, click here.
Swell in Contracting Officers May Not Keep Pace With Retirements
The Washington
Post
By Stephen Barr
The number of contracting officers in the government increased to 28,434 in 2007, up 6.8 percent since the Bush administration began, officials
said yesterday.
But how many contracting officers the government actually needs has not been determined, despite efforts by federal agencies, the Office of
Personnel Management and the OMB over the past two years to develop plans for hiring and training contracting officers and specialists.
"We are still working real hard with OPM and the departments to try to figure out what the right number is," said Paul A. Denett, an Office of
Management and Budget official in charge of government procurement policy.
For his part, Denett added, "I believe we need to increase the hiring even more."
Members of Congress have been concerned that the government has not done enough planning to get a handle on staffing and training needs of
employees.
Spending on contracts has surged since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to more than $400
billion a year.
As the numbers have increased, some agencies have found it difficult to manage their contracts to avert fraud and abuse.
For example, a 2007 independent commission on Army contracting, headed by acquisition expert Jacques S. Gansler, found that the Army's contracting
operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones were not properly staffed, supported and trained.
Other studies have pointed out that statistics about the acquisition workforce have not been collected in a consistent fashion, creating some
confusion about the status of the workforce. Experts have emphasized that personnel cuts, ordered by Congress in the 1990s, left many acquisition
employees overworked or without necessary training.
In recent years, Congress and the Bush administration have tried to learn more about federal acquisition, with officials paying more attention to
an annual demographic report on the acquisition workforce. The report is prepared by the Federal Acquisition Institute, which has published workforce
data since 1977.
Yesterday, the OMB and the institute released the 2007 report, showing an increase of about 500 contracting officers in the government last year
compared with the previous year. Most -- 19,119 -- worked for the Defense Department, with an additional 9,315 spread across the rest of the
government.
According to the report, the number of contracting officers has been rising steadily since 2002, primarily in civilian agencies, where numbers
increased from 7,995 in 2000 to the high of 9,315 last year.
But retirements are a concern, Denett said. The average age of contracting officers is 46, and about half of acquisition employees are eligible to
retire within the next 10 years. Actual retirements are at a lower rate now, allowing agencies to stay on top of their turnover. Only 18 percent of
contracting officers eligible for retirement are filing retirement claims, said Karen Pica, director of the institute.
The OMB is promoting an internship program to attract young people with business degrees into federal acquisition to help counter the loss of
contracting officers and ensure that experienced hands pass along their knowledge to interns.
The government also is trying to track the careers of acquisition professionals and learn why some leave their jobs and move to related fields,
such as general business and program management.
Preliminary data collected for the report showed that 444 contracting officers left their jobs in 2007 for other government
posts. An additional 1,083 are no longer in the government because of retirement, death and other reasons, such as taking a job in the private sector.
Rx for Security Clearance Delays
Federal Computer Week
By Richard W. Walker
A team of government agencies laid out a broad proposal last week for security clearance reforms in which technology would play a major role.
The Office of Management and Budget, part of the Joint Security and Suitability Reform Team, unveiled a plan to expedite hiring and security
clearances for federal employees and contractors. In February, President Bush ordered the security team to submit a governmentwide proposal for
streamlining the security clearance process by April 30.
The proposal represents a basic outline for modernizing the process and is intended to lay the foundation for more specific reforms in the next
administration, said Clay Johnson, OMB’s deputy director for management. "We have been making security clearance determinations the same way
for 50 years, and it's time to change the way we do that," he said.
The proposal calls for an automated system to speed the clearances process, reduce work done manually and integrate additional data sources.
One component of the plan is a Web-based application to speed the acquisition of biographical data required at the beginning of the clearance process.
A project plan for developing this application will be completed later this year, Johnson said.
Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a proponent of security clearance reform,
praised the plan. However, he said implementing the proposal would be a challenge.
"We can't afford to allow the paper-bound status quo to stumble along nibbling at festering backlogs any longer," Davis said. "The research,
validation and pilot programs called for in this report…should be accelerated and expanded. This process needs to be invested with a momentum
that makes reform inevitable and irreversible."
Industry officials said they generally liked the proposal.
"It's very short on details, but it includes all the major pieces that we've being advocating" since the National Intelligence Reform and
Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, said Trey Hodgkins, vice president of federal government programs at the Information Technology Association of
America.
"It's got end-to-end automation, it's got an improved application process that's going to capture the pieces electronically, and it's got enhanced
use of government and commercial databases to try and eliminate a lot of the legwork that's done," Hodgkins said. "This aligns very nicely with what
industry believed was the way to move this forward to make some real change," he added.
A central element in the proposal is creating an executive branch governance organization to guide the reform effort for the rest of the year and
ensure that it is under way before the next administration takes office in January. A governance structure will be formalized by June 30, Johnson
said.
"The next administration is going to be very focused and very busy standing up their administration," Johnson said. "We are best equipped to get
these reform efforts launched while we're here so that the focus is on the implementation of those reforms going forward, and no progress, impetus or
pace will be lost with the change in administrations."
In addition to OMB, the team included representatives from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Defense
Department, Office of Personnel Management, and Office of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
VA Official Says Veterans' Suicides Not Reflection of Agency Negligence
Government ExecutiveBy Bob Brewin
Suicides among veterans of wars overseas occur "just like cancer occurs," and are not an indication of negligence by Veterans Affairs Department
mental health care providers, a top VA official has argued in a lawsuit filed by two veterans groups. The official said he does not know how well VA
hospitals are complying with a directive to provide 24-hour referrals to veterans with mental health problems.
Last year, two groups, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, filed suit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charging that
VA had failed to make mental health services immediately and widely available to returning veterans. Testimony in the non-jury trial ended last week.
Documents filed in the case revealed that the Justice Department tried to have the lawsuit thrown out on the grounds that language in the
department's appropriations bills and prior case law "specifically and substantially limits VA's obligation to provide care ... [and] creates no such
expectation [that veterans are entitled to care] (emphasis and brackets added by Justice)."
Internal VA memos released at the trial in April disclosed that in February, the department knew it was facing 1,000 suicide attempts per month,
which the veterans groups argued could have been avoided if VA had adhered to its 2004 Veterans Health Administration Mental Health Strategic Plan,
which called for development of a "national, systemic program for suicide prevention."
A deposition by a VA medical center psychiatrist caring for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan backed up the veterans groups' assertion
that the department had not done enough to provide adequate mental health care for all veterans.
Dr. Marcus Nemuth, medical director of Psychiatry Emergency Service for VA's Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, which operates three
hospitals, said in his deposition on March 25 that he expected a high volume of post-traumatic stress disorder cases among veterans returning from
Afghanistan and Iraq. He said he was concerned with both with the quantity and quality of care provided to those veterans.
Nemuth said during the past year he had seen such a growth in the caseload of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans seeking psychiatric emergency help at
the Seattle VA hospital that he concluded the department faced a "tsunami of medical need."
But William Feeley, the Veterans Health Administration's deputy undersecretary for health for operations and management, said in an April 9
deposition that VA did not have a metric to track suicides or attempts. He added that he could not recall a time since he took office in February 2006
when VA had conducted a quarterly review of suicides or attempts among the department's 21 Veterans Integrated Services Networks.
When asked in the deposition if any regional health care network directors had been disciplined or demoted because of increased rates of suicides
or attempts, Feeley answered, "A suicide does not mean negligence on the part of a medical center director or a network director. Suicide occurs just
like cancer occurs."
Feeley said he did not know how many Afghanistan and Iraq veterans in VA's care had committed suicide since February 2006. "I would consider that
suicides go on with all war eras, and a particularly vulnerable population is a 55- to 65-year-old veteran as well, so I have not broken it out, or no
one, to the best of my knowledge, has broken it out related to war era."
To read the entire article, click here.
